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

The Liz Shaw Chronicles

The Big Finish Companion Chronicles range has often been praised for delving further into the perspective of the Doctor’s companions than the series itself would allow; by telling stories from their viewpoints we got to see how they felt about their mysterious time traveller friend and the dangers that would follow them both as they explored time and space. The most intriguing tales hands down came from the Hartnell and Troughton eras as so many of their televised episodes were missing fresh material was welcome, but when it came to the Pertwee years there was just as much demand as the actor himself had passed away and would not be providing any further performances. Actresses Caroline John and Katy Manning dutifully stepped up and reprised their roles from that time as Liz Shaw and Jo Grant respectively, but unfortunately Caroline John herself passed away in 2012. Before passing, though, she returned to the role of Liz Shaw twice on screen at anniversary episodes, once in a spin off video, and five times with Big Finish. It is those five Companion Chronicles I want to look at next as a group.

Released first was The Blue Tooth, a story which saw Liz looking back at her time with the Doctor from some years after they parted ways. She remembers a time when she returned to Cambridge to visit a friend during her time at UNIT – an attempt to return to some semblance of a normal life or at least remind herself of one – only to find that her friend and colleagues of hers have vanished and some strange bits of metal have been found at the scenes of the disappearances. When the Doctor arrives to help her investigate he recognizes some small metallic insects as upgraded versions of Cybermats, and realizes that there are elements of Cyber technology at work left over from their previous invasion attempt.

As it was still early days for the range The Blue Tooth only has Caroline John as a storyteller with Nick Briggs providing Cyber voices, and the feel of it is pretty bare bones compared to later episodes as Big Finish honed their craft more. But it’s an important one to note as the third Doctor never met the Cybermen on screen during his original run, and here we get to hear it happen at last. Caroline John narrates but does drop into impressions of Jon Pertwee from time to time but not every actor is going to be able to ape “their” Doctor to the same level that Fraser Hines does for the second Doctor and this is one example of just that. Personally I feel it would have been better if she had not tried doing it at all. But however it is presented it is still Liz looking back, but not going so far as to be another exit scene replayed; she reflects on when she realized she was going to leave the Doctor but leaves it at that, which is a relief as we don’t need a third version of her departure laying around.

Shadow of the Past was the second release, with Liz returning to UNIT’s top secret Vault after decades of being away. There is something inside the Vault which only Liz is going to be able to deal with as everyone else – the Doctor, the Brigadier, Benton, Yates – are all gone. She encounters a UNIT solider already on the inside and tells him of what she remembers, of a monster from outer space which managed to assume the form of the Doctor and open the planet up for invasion and the bloody battle which followed, and what may still be lurking in the Vault.

Shadow is partly a flashback piece with Liz dropping into storytelling mode when she speaks with Corporal Marshall inside the Vault. A lot of time has passed and Liz knows that there have been several other Doctors by now, all with different faces, but none of them are around this time to help out. In her narrative Liz mentions Captain Mike Yates which would place her flashback moments as somewhere between The Scales of Injustice and Devil Goblins From Neptune (if one takes the latter as the real departure story for Liz). This time it’s Caroline John but with a second actor to take some of the dialogue on as well and loan an additional layer to the story as it unfolds. Both the flashback and the “present” stories move at the same pacing and both resolutions are reached at about the same time. It’s been done before and it’s effective, and it’s just very engaging to hear Liz returning to UNIT so far in the future; her affiliation obviously doesn’t just go away despite not really wanting to be there in the first place, and this would coincide with a reference to her being on UNIT payroll again, specifically on their Moonbase, in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Exactly what would bring Liz back is not entirely revealed; it may be a grudging sense of duty, it may be that her work finally intersected with UNIT’s agenda at a level of her liking, or it may just be the chance to work without being in the shadow of the Doctor.

Sometime before she rejoins UNIT, though, Liz has a colleague who is working on a time travel device in The Sentinels of the New Dawn, the third release. Liz has not been away from UNIT very long at this point and she feels reluctant to contact the Doctor after she has left him, but she needs his help to determine what is going on. The time experiments are more advanced than expected and they are both flung forward in time from the 70s to 2014 where a radical political movement called New Dawn is attempting to use time travel technology to alter the past and capitalize on the future. New Dawn’s forays into science have not only taken them into the realm of time travel but also into genetics, and they have spawned a hideous winged beast as their guard dog in their future.

Liz hasn’t been away from the Doctor very long at this point and has reservations about asking for his help given that she walked out on him, but her relief at his agreement is palpable. The Doctor has a new assistant at this time who is taking a bit of getting used to as she is not a scientist, and in UNIT affairs the Brigadier is working on security arrangements for the world peace conference which actually places this story between Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil. There is no animosity between them at all as they deal with New Dawn as a team once more and the adventure works to provide them with a bit of closure which not every companion gets depending on the nature of their departure. It’s good for Liz, allowing her to move on properly without regrets, and the Doctor returns to his life at UNIT with more purpose in getting the TARDIS fixed; if the humans can create time travel devices he should be able to repair his.

Binary was released next, and takes place before Liz leaves UNIT. She’s thinking about leaving, though; she’s stressed and doesn’t feel like she is living up to her full potential. But there is a problem to work on first; there is a supercomputer in UNIT’s possession which requires investigation. The computer is surrounded by a force field though and when Liz gets too close she is miniaturized and pulled inside the computer along with two UNIT soldiers who also got too close. The computer is capable of communicating with Liz and is sending her messages to help her repair its failing systems, but there are other forces at work urging her to destroy the computer from the inside. The Doctor is on the outside talking her through the experience, but Liz is effectively alone and cut off and must solve this mystery by herself.

Liz on her own is something we never really go to see a lot; even when the Doctor was stranded away from her in Inferno we didn’t get much sense of her being able to do things without him around, scientist or no. Here Liz is resourceful and intuitive and at the start of the story she is pretty bitter about her role at UNIT passing test tube to the Doctor and telling him how brilliant he is. One gets the sense that this is somewhere after Inferno and before Eye of the Giant with Liz saying she is going to leave the Doctor, but as she works on her own and sorts out the computer herself she has some second thoughts.

The final Liz Shaw adventure produced is ironically The Last Post, wherein Liz seeks help from her mother to look into some mysterious deaths. Behind the goings on of the Auton Invasion, the Silurian discovery and the drama of Mars Probe 7 Liz has noticed that prominent people who have died were sent letters accurately telling them the exact time of their death. Everyone who has died was on a committee that Liz’s mother heads but her mother isn’t quick to offer any explanations. The Doctor doesn’t seem particularly engaged either but once a letter arrives for Liz’s mum things make a dramatic switch.

Placement first: this would go before Inferno as there are numerous references to the first three stories of Pertwee’s debut series but only vague forebodings about Inferno . Liz isn’t harbouring any of the resentment of Binary yet as she is still getting to know the Doctor and is constantly impressed by what he can do. This would suggest that it takes some time before Liz really starts to resent her secondary role at UNIT although Giant and Scales try to make a point to saying Liz was only a companion of 8 months before she left. The past of the Last Post does make the first season seem as if everything comes at UNIT fast and furious which makes for a bit of a fan-wank really.

At the conclusion of The Scales of Injustice the Doctor remarks that he never really go to know Liz very well, and I think that is true of the fans as well. Liz was just not there long enough to make enough of an impression to make her a household name in fandom. Big Finish have a way of bringing new life to companions we thought we knew, so their Liz adventures have certainly done that along with the three novels; we’ve gotten to see more of her with the Doctor and more importantly more of her without him so we can get to know her ourselves. Knowing that Caroline John isn’t with us anymore to bring Liz back to life is just plain sad and with the BBC Books range not having much in line for past Doctors these days its hard to say if we will see her in any capacity for a while.

One day, though.

NEXT EPISODE: TERROR OF THE AUTONS

The Devil Goblins From Neptune

It's all go for UNIT right now. A mysterious object breaks up as it enters Earth's atmosphere and is immediately followed by a rash of sudden deaths. The Doctor is targeted for abduction by not one but two forces outside of UNIT. Bolstered by the relative success of the Mars Probe missions the British Rocket Group is sending probes to Neptune. The Brigadier suspects infiltration at the highest levels of UNIT command in Geneva. And there are winged devil goblins flying in the skies overhead.

I'll admit I really had a hard time with the title of this one. It's not like Doctor Who hasn't had its fair share of boner titles like The Happiness Patrol and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy but this one just sounded a bit of a joke when it was announced. To put it into perspective, this was the very first novel to feature a past Doctor published in the BBC Books range in 1997, and those of us who had been reading the Virgin Publishing ranges up to this point were a bit worried that the BBC taking the line back in-house might mean a drop in quality. So when the first title of the new range was announced to be The Devil Goblins From Neptune there was a collective "Oh crap!" as if our worst fears were coming true.

But it's not really bad. It's an interesting place for the range to start, joining the Doctor in the early day of his Earth exile and adding a third story to the season "7b" that followed Inferno. The problem with doing that is there are already two previous entries which were planned to work together - Eye of the Giant and The Scales of Injustice - to commit the most serious offence there is in Doctor Who; the sin that is retcon. As I have said before there is a certain arrogance that comes with this practice, and with the previous two tales under the Virgin banner there was the minor league deal of Yates being introduced before his televised debut, and then the bigger one of writing Liz Shaw out as she never got a farewell scene. I've ranted enough about that already, but here we are with Devil Goblins and Mike Yates has been promoted to Captain now, and Liz is still around after all. The BBC Books editors were under no obligation to honour whatever continuity Virgin created but seeing as a lot of the authors were writing for both lines or were at the very least aware of them they might have worked with what was already there instead of ignoring it. Because lo, Keith Topping and Martin Day pretty much decided they were going to write Liz out too. Here's where one's adherence to continuity requires a little bit of flexibility, and if one really wanted to push it, one would be required to believe that the entire story here in Devil Goblins takes place before Liz's exit scene in Scales. As do some of the next entries to come in the form of Big Finish audios. And not to be satisfied with this folly, the author duo also toss in a couple more continuity carrots: a reference to Professor Rachel Jansen from 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks and a mention of Ian Chesterton which kind of shorts out some of an upcoming novel titled The Face of the Enemy, although the blame for the latter would fall more on the writer of that novel as it was published later.

Devil Goblins does a fair share of globe-trotting with the Doctor and Liz taking up with the UNIT USSR and going to Siberia while the Brigadier goes to Geneva, and everyone ends of at Area 51 itself in Nevada, USA where there's a second batch of aliens being held since the 1950s. It's an established notion that in any drama you can tell a story effectively by splitting the action between several characters, but by the time they were done here Topping and Day had their main cast scattered across the planet trying to solve the mystery of winged aliens called the Waro, who somehow had convinced people in authority to undermine UNIT to ensure a successful invasion. But there's a group of Americans at work here as well - there's UNIT USA and there's also the CIA itself which doesn't like to give any authority away especially to foreigners. The Americans are by and large just put across as blustering arrogant types who look down on everyone else around them, while the Russians are painted as haughty and saddled with a superiority complex like no other. Given that the era this is set in was not exactly one of peace and trust these are not too far off the mark for the opposing superpowers at the time, but even still it gets a bit tedious to read without hoping that someone is going to slap one of the offending parties in the face.

I wouldn't say this was a confusing read but a lot of it just seemed like a bit too much at times, especially when the main aliens, the Waro, are not really developed beyond being beasts and then suddenly there is an entire new species - one which is a natural enemy to them - thrown into the mix for the writers to play with. I found myself wondering when it was going to end more than once.

So Liz has been given departure material twice now and her stay at UNIT still seems short. Big Finish is here to the rescue with a few more Liz tales to enjoy and add to the extended season 7 (or 7b as the case may be) material...

NEXT: THE LIZ SHAW CHRONICLES

The Scales of Injustice

A little boy goes missing. A policewoman starts drawing cave paintings on walls. The Doctor is immediately suspicious and believes that the Silurians have re-emerged. His friends are all tangled up in their own pursuits to assist him this time, with Liz receiving mysterious messages which lead her on a hunt for an organization that doesn't officially exist, and the Brigadier struggling to keep UNIT funded while his marriage falls apart around him. And somewhere else behind it all, there is a sinister presence which is undermining UNIT and reaching deep into the government agencies that support it.

There’s certainly a lot going on in The Scales of Injustice. A lot of it is continuity crap retcon, unfortunately. I don’t believe for one second that Gary Russell woke up and realized he had this story bubbling away inside him screaming to be put on paper for all to read – this reeks of being born of a desire to play around with continuity. Still, Russell is a fan himself and fans love nothing more than playing around with the what-ifs of situations never actually documented; look at social media today and you will see evidence of that all around in the form of “fan theory” in headlines. I still maintain, though, that it takes a certain amount of arrogance to actually decide to be the voice who gets to be heard because you’re one of the inner circle of fandom who happen to be producing the material at the time (this would have been 1996).

First up is the inclusion of the Silurians. Hurrah, great, one of the best monsters of the Pertwee era gets another story. But there’s nothing new here; there is no new take of the Silurians as a species and there are a few spoiler lines dropped about their undersea kin, the Sea Devils, who will appear later on in the series. No, the Silurians here are not even plot devices, they are only being used so Russell can offer up a reason why they look different on screen when they return in 1984’s Warriors of the Deep. The truth of why they look different is when the costumes were made for that serial they were updated with little regard for their original design, but for some reason this needs to be explained as a genetic hiccup in Silurian evolution. This is all tossed out the window anyways as the BBC in their infinite wisdom decided to reissue the novel by using one of the modern series Silurians on the cover in an attempt to draw the fickle masses of newbies into past episodes. They still call humans “apes” and by and large they want us all wiped out so they can take back their planet, except for some more reasonable voices looking to co-exist. And then there’s this bit where they become a mindless invasion mob which…. Yeah nevermind.

There’s another organization out there even more secret than UNIT it seems. They pick up the mess UNIT leaves behind; psychologically damaged soldiers get sent off to the Glasshouse to be rehabilitated and the other stuff goes into the Vault. And this nameless organization is run by some creepy pale young guy with a Cyberman body as they take the spoils of invasions and find ways to adapt them for their own uses. Sounds a lot like something called Torchwood but just years before its time. How many secret organizations can there be out there doing the same job?

The Brigadier has a life outside UNIT it seems: he is married to a woman named Fiona and has a daughter named Kate, and the marriage is not going to survive with him mysteriously away all the time. Fiona doesn’t know what he does, which I find really unlikely given the Brigadier comes from a military family, so she thinks he just works in some office and stays late a lot, which just plain makes her suspicious. Kate, is, of course a retcon piece here but at the time she was not headed to lead UNIT in the new millennium as she is in the new series; she was introduced in a spin off called Downtime as a woman living on her own with no connection to her father, the Brigadier, so of course she needs to be written into the story somewhere. Of course, none of this marriage deal with Fiona matches with the continuity recently created in the Lethbridge Stewart series which ran parallel to season six and gave a detailed account of the Brig’s rise from the ranks. I usually say that the original tales should be minded as far as continuity goes so the Lethbridge Stewart stories by my usual policy should be overlooked, but this time I change my mind. The reason is coming up.

Mike Yates gets promoted to Captain over Benton. That’s not the reason though, it just happens in this one because apparently it needed to. Benton. Mind you, gets a moment where he is faced with the reality that he is going to be overlooked for promotion but he realizes he is not officer material anyways, which is an oddly introspective moment for him. It’s almost like someone was doing John Levene a favour here as he always said it seemed like Benton was just a grunt with no brains when he was playing him.

The biggie of the tale, though, is Liz Shaw’s departure. As it has been said already she did get not get a farewell scene and when you are writing a retcon piece this is just too much to resist. At the time it was pretty much a given that Virgin Publishing’s run of titles for this series was coming to an end so the authors were taking liberties all over the place either out of the aforementioned arrogance or maybe just spite that the BBC Novels might ignore all the work done to keep Doctor Who going between Sylvester McCoy’s finale in 1989 and Paul McGann’s televised debut in 1996. Either way, Liz got a departure here which was not entirely unbelievable; she got tired of being an assistant when she had her own work to do. And then along comes the BBC Books series (we’re going there next) and the first thing they publish is a third Doctor and Liz story with – surprise! – a departure scene for Liz which doesn’t match. Okay so normally I would say Scales is the truth and Gary Russell was right – BUT Gary Russell went on to head up Big Finish for several years and when Liz Shaw got some of her own tales to tell in their Companion Chronicles range they are at odds with Russell’s own continuity here. And if the man can’t respect his own work, should it be accepted as the canon departure tale?

So. My own enjoyment of the novel here is to actually stop reading it at page 257 before the departure scene. Sure that still leaves a lot of drivel but it’s still an episode of Doctor Who to read and add to the series tapestry. But really, Gary, really. 

Incidentally, author Gary Russell opens the novel with a jab at the online Doctor Who fan community of its time (1996), the rec.arts.doctorwho group where the authors of the novels made the folly of getting friendly with the fans and a kind of inner circle mentality developed. Russell had published other novels in this series before this one but someone took exception to the accuracy of the science in one and Russell in turn used his first few pages of Scales to pretty much rub it in everyone's face that he was one of the elite series writers so he could use whatever science he wanted to tell his story. No-one really stopped to realize that the whole premise of Doctor Who is probably scientifically unfounded in the first place so debating any of the science in it at all is pretty useless, but fans do love to argue. Still, it's a bit distressing that an author and then a range editor couldn't just leave it alone and move on like a professional.

NEXT EPISODE: THE DEVIL GOBLINS FROM NEPTUNE