Who Killed Kennedy

Newspaperman turned investigative journalist James Stevens has been covering the news in the UK for a while now but he has started spotting something odd. There have been some strange goings on around London, starting with a tip off about a man who doesn't have human blood, to a strange deadly plague outbreak, a crisis at the space centre and a cover up at a government funded experimental drilling installation. Through it all Stevens had noticed the presence of a covert paramilitary organization called UNIT - a presence no-one will confirm but will repeatedly warn him away from. In his quest to blow the whole affair wide open and expose what he thinks is the cover-up of a lifetime Stevens begins to notice another common link to events: where there is UNIT, there is usually an operative known as "the Doctor"...

When this was first published in 1996 I was not immediately interested in it. I can't remember exactly what it was that turned me off but it may just have been the fact that it was a first person account of something not exactly a Doctor Who story - one of the first Doctor-lite tales out there but I gave it a miss anyway and carried on with the other novels which were on offer. Paul McGann had just appeared on TV as the Doctor and word was the whole Virgin Publishing line was about to end so as far as this appeared it was not even a Doctor Who novel. I walked past it a few times at Coles and never thought much about it until a couple years ago when I got a copy from eBay for $7.

Who Killed Kennedy is what I can only describe as a continuity bomb, although some might say it's just a big old fan wank. I will just say it was an ambitious idea to have someone outside the action spotting what was going on and trying to make sense of it as he follows the first two years of the Earthbound adventures of the Doctor. The question is always asked why no-one notices any of these alien invasions and how they can possibly be covered up; in a future adventure companion Ace will ask the very same question about a Dalek incursion in 1963 - Stevens knows something is going on but the truth is well hidden from the public, buried under D-notices and in some cases intimidation by thugs. Stevens does, actually, get the truth when he goes digging for it but ironically dismisses a lot of the alien invasion stories as nonsense as he believes that UNIT are some sinister force with their own world dominating agenda. Objectivity right out the window there.

The cameos come fast and furious as the pages turn, most of them coming from the stories of the first two Pertwee series including Greg Sutton and Petra Williams from Inferno, the Brigadier, Liz Shaw and even the Doctor himself. And there are some clever moments where Stevens is worked into the background of some sequences from television, including The Mind of Evil so note to self to go back to that one and actually see him.Of course it's fun to see Liz back but there is still one more past companion who gets a comeback which is far more interesting: Dodo.

The last time we saw Dodo was when the Doctor was putting her under to counteract the influence of the supercomputer WOTAN in The War Machines and then she just never came back, having decided off screen to stay in London. The abruptness of her departure irked the Doctor and seemed unrealistic at the time (as did her sudden joining of the TARDIS crew) but the retconners of the expanded universe had since revisited Dodo in Salvation, Bunker Soldiers and The Man in the Velvet Mask to redraw her as a confused, scared and tremendously insecure girl who was always putting on a facade for everyone due to her upbringing by her Aunt. That facade turned out to not be enough to shield her from the horrors she witnessed with the Doctor and when she was out of his sight she was slowly sinking into a depressed funk, so the chance to escape when it came was one she could ill afford to pass up. Flash forward to Who Killed Kennedy and Dodo is a broken woman suffering from PTSD, lonely and scared with no friends, no money and no real memories about her past except for flashes of monsters. The question I still have is whether she would have ended up this way after all or if this mental breakdown is due to WOTAN's influence or the Doctor's attempt to counter it, or maybe both.

And then came the moment I dreaded; the whole thing fell apart in a jumbled mess of predictability and science fiction cliche. You can see it coming, really, there is one line at the end of a chapter to just make you sigh "Oh no..." and then read on to another of "those" science fiction endings when it could have done so much more. The brightest side I can think of is that the ending of the story gives a better reason for the ninth Doctor to be present at the assassination of John F Kennedy than just some stunt to prove he can travel in time. I also discovered that I read it a bit too soon as well; this should be left until after Day of the Daleks to make it work right.

I wouldn't say this was a total lost opportunity for something great but really, it could have been so much more than a clever fan wank.

NEXT EPISODE: HARVEST OF TIME

The Daemons

An archaeological dig outside the small village of Devil's End promises to reveal a bronze age treasure trove, and it's all going to happen live on BBC3 for the whole country to see. A local White Witch believes that this dig will unleash supernatural chaos - literally Hell on Earth - and the Doctor agrees and rushes to stop it. He is too late and as a result he, along with Jo, Captain Yates and Sergeant Benton and the entire village is trapped inside a heat barrier, and with them is the Master and his gargoyle servant, Bok. The Master is not there by accident; the opening of the barrow has stirred up a being named Azal, the last of the Daemons, and the Master wants to inherit Azal's powers and rule over the Earth.

Life continues on Earth for the Doctor, and as there is no referencing the Master's exploits on Exarius it's probable that a bit of time has gone by since Colony in Space. The Doctor isn't obsessing over the state of the TARDIS for the first time in a while, this time he is working on his car, Bessie, perhaps making the most of what travel he can do. There's a sense of relaxation among the regulars in this one, like they have all developed into a proper team together like Jo hanging around the garage while the Doctor tinkers, Benton and Yates watching a football match together, the Brigadier off for the night in his mess uniform like a parent leaving the kids home alone for an evening. In the DVD extras the cast attribute this to the script being written by an insider - producer Barry Letts himself - but it just adds to the feeling that time has gone by on Earth for the Doctor, not just a few months so far. The UNIT family has grown a bit more as well, bringing Corporal Jenkins into the mix along with Sergeant Osgoode who was retconned in The Eye of the Giant but is now here in the role that spawned the buffoonish other Osgoode in the new series on TV.

This story has a marked difference from some of the others, being that it flirts with the notion of the occult and satanic rituals and lets itself get away with it only because there is a scientific explanation for it all. There's that old saying in literature about higher forms of science being indistinguishable from magic, and here it's really the m.o. of the story; black magic incantations and such serving as ways of whipping up and focusing specific psychic energy bursts to be harnessed like electricity. But the Master is the picture of a Satan worshiper (ornate red robes and some need to put Jo Grant in a white dress to offer her as sacrifice) and Azal himself is modeled after the Devil with horns and hooves and... sagging stockings... and... well, some pretty inconvenient extra body hair (if you're into that). And as for Bok, the stone gargoyle brought to life, he's a nasty little customer chasing people down and blowing them away with fireballs instead of this big giant menace that is Azal. The last of the Daemons is not a big raging monster but he's not of a good disposition either; humans are just another experiment to the Daemons after all - they gave knowledge to humanity over the centuries - but the experiment has not borne the fruit they had hoped. The choice is now clear: pass on the power of the Daemons to a custodian, or destroy the experiment.

This one has an interesting length as well: it's done over five episodes which has not been seen since The Mind Robber. In fact except for The Dominators there are no other five part stories anywhere in the series; in the Troughton era they are there back to back because one was under length and needed stuff added and the other was too long and was cut down from six, but The Daemons has no such story to go with it's length, it simply just ran five episodes in a twenty-five episode season. At least that's the story so far; someone might know something different. But this was the finale episode for the season as well and it was craftily done, even bringing the Master to justice and leaving the series regulars to literally dance their way into the credits (except for Yates and the Brig who went drinking).

The next season would bring the Master back, but before that there is, as always, a bit of expanded universe fun to be had...

NEXT EPISODE: WHO KILLED KENNEDY

Colony in Space

The Time Lords reactivate the TARDIS and send the Doctor along with Jo Grant to the planet Exarius in 2472. There they find a group of struggling colonists trying to make a go of the planet, but their efforts are being hampered by withering crops and sightings of giant monsters, and then a pair of colonists are killed. Exarius has a small population of primitives but they are not known to be violent unless provoked. Not knowing why he has been sent here the Doctor investigates and discovers that IMC have arrived on the planet as well, convinced that they have full rights to set up an operation to strip the planet of resources, and they are behind the monster sightings. An Adjudicator is contacted and asked to decide the fate of the planet, but when he arrives he is revealed to be the Master on his own mission to Exarius: to find an ancient doomsday weapon and use it for his own schemes.

So things have changed for the Doctor now; instead of being left in exile to stew he has now been put on a short leash to do Time Lord work for them. The Doctor is excited to be free of Earth and on another planet again but the realization that it was only allowed as a one-off by the Time Lords sours the whole experience for him; it will be back to work on the TARDIS again once this little jaunt is over. The Master loves it, though; it's humiliation enough to see the Doctor grounded but to be see him made into a patsy is even better. The Master himself seems able to come and go on the Time Lord's home planet as well, slipping in and stealing information and then running off with it to raise hell across the universe.

As far as other continuity goes here there's the interesting Interplanetary Mining Corporation, or IMC, which was referenced in The Wheel of Ice as having grown out of the Issigri Mining Corporation seen in The Space Pirates. It's not longer a mom and pop kind of organization now, though; it's grown into a vast capitalist machine with a tendency to strip planets bare and move on without the slightest bit of consequence to itself. The arrogance of the company itself can be seen in how its top men operate, with Captain Dent being tremendously matter-of-fact about things even though he is a muderer. It's not hard to sere that we're dealing with one of those moments where the script is making a social statement, this time about capitalism at the expense of the people.

What is that thing?

And this is Jo Grant's first time inside the TARDIS. When she does see what's inside the police box she is astonished and says that all the tales of time and space must be true... so was she just humouring the Doctor all this time? She saw the TARDIS materialize in front of her at the end of The Claws of Axos so it should have been a clue, but now here she is inside. The console room was seen in the previous story as well and it's a much smaller version of what it was in the Hartnell era. And less cluttered, save for a large.... metal.... barrel? And the walls have been altered as well, with one still an obvious photographic blow up. Maybe it's wallpaper. The console is the original but the column as in Axos has been switched up.

When it came to Target books publishing the story as a novel it benefited from having Malcolm Hulke write it himself; he's not the best novelist himself but his prose style adds a bit more description to it than his buddy Terrance Dicks. He certainly did add a bit more meat to the details though, in particular the colonists' accounts of Earth when they left it as being overcrowded and people with blue hair living there.  The title must have sounded too blase for the folks at Target, though, and like a few others it was changed into something more... interesting, more dynamic, more sensational... it became Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon. At the time it was published as well there was no indication that all the novels of the series would be published so the book has an intro for Jo Grant as if this is her first time meeting the Doctor instead of just her first time inside the TARDIS. There is also an intro to the Master worked in as Terror of the Autons had not been published as a novel yet, and a bit of a re-telling of the Doctor's adventures and trial.

Seeing as it's a one-off to go into space again, the Doctor is returned to Earth to keep trying to escape. The Master, however, is still out there doing what he wants. And he will be back.

NEXT EPISODE: THE DAEMONS

The Claws of Axos

Out of the darkness of space comes a strange object; it’s not a comet, it’s not a meteor, it’s almost a space ship but it has a name: it is called Axos. Axos is not a conventional space ship – it was grown and is a living thing and its power reserves have fallen dangerously low. Axos and the Axons who live inside have come to Earth to beg for help, to ask to let the ship replenish its energy reserves as it continues its journey. The Axons offer a gift, a substance called Axonite, which can solve all of Earth’s energy problems. The Doctor is not sure about this – something that sounds too good to be true usually is in the end. But as the governments of the planet scream for their share of the miracle that is Axonite, the Doctor discovers two terrible secrets: the true nature of Axos, and the Master travelling with the aliens.

It’s a good old fashioned vampire tale, this, and it’s loaded with classic elements of the series from this era. It’s a full on UNIT adventure for starters, and the Brigadier has his hands full with an inquiry from the Ministry of Defence lead by a bloated self-important underling named Chin. Despite being a separate entity from the MOD, UNIT is still subject to their prying eyes, and the fact that the Doctor doesn’t seem to have any official existence has got Chin right riled. UNIT’s battles with bureaucracy are never ending, with the script writers painting the civil servants as meddlers, untrustworthy and ultimately as fools who get in over their heads, and the theme will return several times over the course of Perwee’s era on the show.

Check out the wacky design of Axos. Even from the outside it is a bit ivky looking with gills and moist yellow flesh and an airlock which looks a lot like a lamprey’s mouth. Inside is no better; fleshy walls and floors, ganglia hanging off the walls, and all nature of organic stylings to reinforce that Axos is alive and to walk inside is to be literally in the belly of the beast. By contrast, the Axon family who greet the Doctor and company are statuesque golden creatures, very slim and fit looking… so why they are living inside this flying lung is anyone’s guess. I mean – every time I watch this one I feel like the smell inside Axos would make me gag. But there are also the “other” Axons to contend with – the blobby “depersonalized” tendrilled monsters whose touch can kill. Of course the perfect golden Axons are the ones everyone gets to meet and to see; they prefer it if you don’t see their true form. Unless you are about to be killed, then they are fine with it.

The Master is along for the ride again having pointed Axos towards Earth and promising it a good time there. The Axons are holding his TARDIS as insurance that he co-operates with them, but whose side is he really on this time? Destroying Earth and humiliating the Doctor would suit him fine but on his terms; to be forced to follow someone else’s design is a bit of a comedown and as soon as he gets a chance he starts playing both sides. His swaying allegiances do tend to annoy after a while but as it happens we are just at our third Master story so it's not become a visible habit yet.

Claws goes into an interesting place where the Doctor's exile is concerned; yes he's stuck on Earth for his crimes but the extent of the Time Lords' sentence is a bit more pronounced with him having no access to his memories about time travel. Axos can see that there are blocks in his mind but the Doctor can't overcome them on his own. It's obvious that he has been trying to get the TARDIS working through guesswork as the console is a mess of wires and parts when we see it, although the central column has finally been replaced with something newer. His desperation to escape and be free is evident, and his occasional outbursts at people he is stuck with only illustrate that fact more, although I think that yelling at Chin and people like him is perfectly acceptable.

The Doctor's exile continues, although with a bit more control of the TARDIS by the time the menace has been dealt with. And a bit more mobility will come in handy in the near future.

NEXT EPISODE: COLONY IN SPACE

Deadly Reunion

Somewhere after the end of the Second World War, Lieutenant Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart is on a recce in Greece. Separated from his division he meets a family of three living in isolation in the countryside and is drawn towards the eldest daughter, Sephie. Before he knows it, he is in love, and finds himself drawn into the family's secret: they are the last of the Greek gods and Hades, lord of the underworld, is making a push for power once again. Flash forward to the UNIT days and Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart has his hands full with a massive pop concert which he knows is just a big drug deal in disguise. But the supplier, a Mr Hadley, has much bigger plans than simply recreating Woodstock. The Doctor has suspicions that an affluent family watching from the sidelines can help. And the Brigadier thinks he knows the girl.

This one was really hard for me to read. Hard because it was not enjoyable. Penned by the duo of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks - the elder statesmen of the Pertwee era - I thought this was going to be a defining piece of literature, something we fans of the classic era would devour and scream to the heavens why oh why was THIS not made on television. The answer is because it's not very good. Oh sure it's got everything it needs to be good, it's got the UNIT crew together and it's got the architects of the whole UNIT putting the words together, only they really aren't good prose writers. I realize this sort of statement doesn't sit well with a lot of fans of this duo and it is not meant to be a major slag-off - without them the series would probably have died in the early 70s but their skills were not in writing the scripts but in taking them and imagining them for the screen.

Part one of the book is set in the Brig's pre-UNIT days and he's a lot more optimistic in his youth. He falls for Sephie pretty hard, and she in turn for him, and literally goes through Hell for her with the assistance of her brother, Hermy. The entire first half of this story is like this, which would have been fine as a story of its own instead of cut down to serve as a really long prologue to a Doctor Who story. It's set far enough back to not really collide with the recent Lethbridge Stewart series which ran mostly parallel to the final season with Troughton in the role, and it does pay homage to the New Adventures continuity of the Brig's relationship with his eventual wife (then ex-wife in Scales of Injustice) Fiona. It just feels so... slow. This was the part of the book that really took me the longest amount of time, and it's not because the Brigadier's early years are not interesting by any stretch, it's just not written with any real style.

When we get to the second part where the Doctor is present, there's a jump in the quality of the writing and although the descriptive narrative is a bit thin, the characterizations are spot on - so good one can almost hear the voices of the actors and "see" them interacting. There's not a lot of detail added to the characters though, mostly because Dicks (I'm sure this was the part he wrote) assumes we already know them inside and out (and maybe we do, this was actually published in 1993 as a bit of a 40th anniversary special) so why take them anywhere new. There's continuity to be observed of course, but a lot can still be done within its bounds. Of course no celebration of the show (or at least this era of it) is complete without the Master, and when he does make his appearance it's actually not that impressive or necessary. He is actually pretty inconsequential to the story and his presence is just a waste of him - I can see he was tossed in as an ingredient to a UNIT era story but he deserved better than to just be a bit player.

Man that was rough to read though. The lesson here should be just because you feel you should be nostalgic doesn't mean you just just go ahead and do it for its own sake. A 40th anniversary special should have had more meat to it, and really either half of Deadly Reunion would have served well if it had been fully developed instead of just being squished together under the anniversary banner. Anniversary stories run this risk of turning into nonsense as it is, one only has to look at what was served up in 2013 for the 50th for proof of that.

Oh well. Back to the DVDs...

NEXT EPISODE: CLAWS OF AXOS

The Mind of Evil

A new breakthrough in medical science – the Keller machine - promises to cure the most hardened of criminals of their monstrous ways by extracting all the evil impulses in their minds and making them safe to walk among us. The Doctor is interested and concerned about this development and takes Jo with him to Stangmoor prison to see the device for himself. Meanwhile the Brigadier and UNIT are providing security for a world peace conference in London and trying to keep the volatile situation from escalating to conflict, yet at the same time they are discreetly disposing of a nerve gas missile. And lurking in the background is the Master, with a plan to steal that missile and attack the peace conference and plunge Earth into chaos. And to do it he will use the evil being at the heart of the Keller machine, the mind of evil…

I couldn’t help but notice I felt a sense of frustration in this one, and it was not with the material, but with the way that the Master pretty much had it all under control and was inches from winning this one. I suppose that’s me sympathizing with the beleaguered UNIT guys as they are routinely outsmarted by the Master, beat up by his thugs and generally punked out while the world’s delegates are watching. And it’s not just the uniformed troops getting the bad ride, Jo is caught up in two prison riots and taken hostage and gets relegated to looking after the first man to be processed by the machine, who has effectively been turned from a murderer into a child with all his negative emotions sucked out. A very big child.

The mind parasite inside the machine kills people by using their worst fears against them, resulting in a drowning death in a dry room, a man scared to death of rats being covered in bites and scratches and when the Doctor gets too close it attacks him with a flashback reel of his worst enemy monsters and visions of the world going up in flames which he saw at the Inferno project. Imagine what a meal it would make of the Master if it got hold of him. At one point it does make an attempt, and his greatest fear turns out to be a projection of the Doctor laughing at him. This is until the whole thing becomes too lengthy a scene and it just starts to fry people.

It’s hard to gauge how much time has passed since Terror of the Autons; the Doctor seems to have take to Jo despite her goofing up the first time they met and it’s iffy to think that the Master was able to put his scheme together within the space of one week. The inclusion of the Liz Shaw audio Sentinels of the New Dawn loans a feeling of passing time between the two for sure. And despite the fact that he is without a functioning TARDIS (the Doctor stole his dematerialization circuit) the Master is doing quite well for resources with a limo and a driver to take him anywhere he wants to go. The driver looks like he is actually quite aware of what the Master is up to and might actually be his own version of a companion rather than another hypnotized victim.

I really wish they had gotten the Master right on the DVD cover. He looks a bit too pleasant, even if

at times he can be. He calls Jo "Miss Grant" when he sees her, which is just plain fun to have a gentleman villain. But I think they got him right on the cover of the novelization if you ask me. I actually read it before I saw it and I was well pleased with what I read for once considering that Terrance Dicks penned it with an absolute minimal amount of detail; it's almost like he was paid by the word and he was dared to make a loss on most of his novelizations, but every now ang again he puts out a good one like this, or Inferno and makes for a pleasant read.

UNIT still hasn’t seen the last of the Master, though, as he was slated to return in the next episode, but before then, there’s a novel to read…

NEXT EPISODE: DEADLY REUNION

Terror of the Autons

The Doctor’s exile on Earth enters its second year with the Doctor still co-operating with the UNIT forces in exchange for shelter and facilities to attempt to repair the TARDIS. Liz Shaw has left and the Doctor is assigned a new assistant in the form of field agent Josephine (Jo) Grant although she is not the scientific help the Doctor was hoping for. An act of what appears to be sabotage draws UNIT and the Doctor to a radio telescope where the Doctor learns that a rival Time Lord known as the Master has arrived on Earth with the aim of destroying the planet and the Doctor along with it. And to achieve this, the Master has reactivated a dormant Nestene energy unit and brought the menace of the Autons back to Earth…

Here starts the longest running feud in the series, with the Doctor and the Master pitted against each other like a time travelling Holmes and Moriarty. The Master’s obsession with killing the Doctor will lead to millions of deaths throughout the series, and he will pull every dirty trick he knows to get the job done. The fun part about the Master is that he is so unerringly polite to people while he plans their doom, but he is coldly efficient and makes few mistakes. One might be trusting the Nestenes, though. The narrative of the episode indicates that the Doctor knows the Master of old and things between them have never been good, but this is the first any of us watching the series have heard about it over seven years. But wait a sec – the Master has had a retcon debut story, The Dark Path, where he met the second Doctor and hypnotized Victoria. Jo gets a taste of that power herself in this story, which is pretty nerve wracking for her first day on the job.

Jo Grant will by the time she leaves be established as the favourite companion of the Pertwee years, serving three of the five at the Doctor’s side sometimes saving the day, other times making dreadful mistakes and gaffes, but always being someone the Doctor can depend on. Despite making a mess of the Doctor’s lab on her first day Jo does earn his trust quickly. Unlike Liz, Jo isn’t a scientist but a fully trained field agent who has been put on the Brigadier by forces over his head (Jo’s uncle is a man in a high ranking government position) and the Brigadier in turn puts her onto the Doctor and dusts his hands. Jo doesn’t actually have any rank within UNIT but the Brigadier is her commanding officer, she just doesn’t have to report to any of the other officers in the chain of command.

And here’s our third series debut: Captain Mike Yates. He just arrives on screen as if he has always been there, and even professes to remember the first Auton invasion although he was not there on screen. At the time the character was introduced it was all accepted as canon and Yates continued on as part of the UNIT family for the duration of the Pertwee years, but since then he has been retconned as well through the previously mentioned novels Eye of the Giant, The Scales of Injustice and Devil Goblins From Neptune so his backstory is a bit more solid. It’s not like ne needed that much of an intro really but he will in future episodes be changed by his experiences with UNIT so there’s a lot of development ahead for this character.

The Autons themselves are bit different here; they made their debut in Spearhead from Space as shop window dummies but now with a bit of creative flair from the Master are able to channel their essence into almost anything made of plastic including plastic flowers, dolls, plastic cables, even plastic furniture. I imagine that their return at the time would have been likened to the return of the femmebots in Bionic Woman as both are a deadly menace more or less hiding in plain sight and seem to be unstoppable. They can speak this time as well, although they sound a bit like the Cybermen. The mission has not changed though: conquer Earth. Kill everyone. Everyone. As with Spearhead from Space we do not get a really good look at a Nestene properly and its true form is still left to our imaginations, although the artists creating covers for the novelizations back in the day had a pretty good crack at it and produced a truly terrifying vision of one which would be impossible to create on a BBC budget in the 1970s.

The Master’s presence will dominate the entire run of the season with him appearing in every story, something which no other enemy of the Doctor has managed yet. It’s debatable that if Roger Delgado had not made such a compelling go of the role there may not have been a Master anywhere else but in the Pertwee years, but the character would endure and continue to return in regenerated forms right to the final episode of the classic series in 1989. The Master would make a return to the new series as well in 2007 but then be the victim of some of the worst revisionist crap the series attempted when in 2014 the character would regenerate again and return as a female version with all the dignity and menace of the original wiped out.

But that rant is yet to come, politically incorrect as it might be.

NEXT EPISODE: THE MIND OF EVIL