Doctor Who: The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage

The Tenth Doctor gets a story from the pen of Derek Landy, prolific scribe of the Skulduggery Pleasant series.

The Doctor and Martha materialise in a white void, but stepping from the TARDIS find themselves in the English countryside. Where are they really? Who are those precocious children? What are the strange lights in the trees? And what are the smugglers up to in the caves under the woods? More importantly, is anything what it seems to be?

Landy makes a fine fist of writing the Tenth Doctor at his best; slightly lost, racing through the landscape with a machine gun stutter of words and theories instead of striding like a lonely god, and captures both the spark and the tragedy of the relationship with Martha (which, it occurs to me, has some rather striking parallels with the relationship between the Joker and Harley Quinn; there's a sobering thought). The weird fictional world is incomplete, but fantastically realised in its incompleteness.

So, yeah; I like this one.

Sometime at the start of next week, I shall finish this series of reviews with relative veteran Neil Gaiman's Nothing O'Clock.

Doctor Who: The Beast of Babylon

Charlie Higson, author of the Young James Bond novels and veteran of The Fast Show, takes up the reins for the Ninth Doctor.

Technically set at the very end of Rose, between the TARDIS vanishing and returning seconds later to take Rose Tyler away, we find the Doctor chasing Starmen; godlike beings which feed on stars. Can he neutralise them before they destroy another world, and will his new companion, Ali, help or hinder.

Higson writes the Ninth Doctor well, but there is a hiccup in the simple story here. Ali is, although concealed at first via the medium and reader expectations, a giant scorpion-creature with poisonous stingers and deadly, scything claws. She is obnoxiously bright, but also possessed of an instinctive defensive rage, and kills several people in her efforts to protect the Doctor. Regardless of species predisposition, it is hard to accept that the Doctor would be as okay with this as presented here.

This is a shame, because the book is otherwise well-written and the adventure rattles along nicely. The idea of exploring the Doctor's singular preference for human companions is an interesting one, but not quite explored enough, especially given the amount of treatment that the more vexed question of companions who kill have received through Leela and her spiritual successors.

Doctor Who: Spore

Spore is the Eighth Doctor short story, written by Alex Scarrow of Timeriders fame. Again, I'm not especially familiar with his work, but I know the name.

The Eighth Doctor is a bit of a challenge, of course. He has two definitively canonical appearances, and one of those post-dates this book, and yet there is a wealth of deuterocanonical novels, comic strips and audio plays to muddy the waters. Scarrow opts to keep it simple, and the Doctor thus appears without a companion on this occasion.

A mysterious object has landed in Nevada, and now the entire area is going out of contact. The Doctor has a nasty suspicion that he knows what is going on, and there's an easy way to stop it. Unfortunately, the Planet Earth won't have that knowledge for about fifty years, and if he's right then it certainly doesn't have fifty years in which to find it.

Spore is a disaster movie with the Doctor in it, more than an invasion story, but Scarrow's limited hard science is actually better than in most such tales, covering aspects of quantum theory as well as the nature of von Neumman machines. The Doctor is pretty solidly portrayed, and has an good foil in the form of a plucky Army scientist, which is important.

Doctor Who: The Ripple Effect

Lucky Number Seven has his story penned by Malorie Blackman, author of the Noughts and Crosses series, so it should be no surprise that it tackles the subject of race and racism.

Escaping from a natural time hazard, the TARDIS is thrown down on a world called Skaro; home to the Daleks, the most civilised and peaceful race in the galaxy. Has something happened to change the nature of the Doctor's oldest enemies, or is this some nefarious scheme? And if something has changed, can the Doctor accept it?

Blackman chooses to play with alternate timelines in order to touch on the question of whether the Daleks are irredeemably evil, and if not, what that says about the Doctor, who can never believe in their redemption. The Seventh Doctor - mysterious, secretive, and himself somewhat sinister, yet at heart mired in the same self-doubt that kept the Fourth from wiping out the Daleks in their cradle - is a perfect foil for this.

The narrative is simple enough, and driven - as all the best Seventh Doctor stories are - by the dynamic of the relationship between the Doctor and Ace. Like a dark version of Troughton's cosmic clown, the Seventh Doctor's light exterior hides a dark and weary heart. More than any other companion the Doctor's protege, Ace's more open and trusting nature is a mirror for his suspicions and resignation.

Doctor Who: Something Borrowed

And so to the Sixth Doctor, and Richelle Mead, another writer unknown to me.

The Doctor is taking Peri to a society wedding on Koturia, a planet given over to a highly romanticised recreation of Vegas at its height, but swarms of prehistoric reptiles and a mysterious bride could spell trouble. The Koturians have a rather unique addition to the wedding festivities, and an odl enemy seems keen to know all about it.

The Sixth Doctor is perhaps the most problematic for this project. Colin Baker's TV era was brief and inglorious, and there is a question over how much of the expanded material should be honoured. Richelle Mead does a good job with it, all things considered.

Old Sixy's mercurial - nay, ill-defined - temperament is largely managed by making Peri the narrator and thus excluding any of the Doctor's unspoken thoughts from the text; what Peri sees is what we get. This falls down a little, as Peri's inability to recognise an enemy she must presumably have seen rather recently leaves her seeming a little dim, but overall it is a good story with a very Whovian Macguffin at the heart of it.

If there is a criticism, and this applies to all of these stories, it is that the length feels more suited to a nuWho story than the more sedate pace of the classic series, but this is hardly of concern given that the audience must primarily be nuWho viewers (given the use of primarily children's authors).

Doctor Who: Tip of the Tongue

The Fifth Doctor story goes to Patrick Ness, an author whose work is not known to me.

In WWII Maine a strange fad grips a village; a strange fashion for 'Truth-Tellers', which say what you really mean even if you wouldn't have had the courage. The resulting rash of honesty is tearing the town apart, and that is when the blue box arrives.

Ness takes an interesting tack, focusing his story on two of the local children - a mixed-race girl and a German Jewish boy in 1940s Maine, who are thus set up to be semi-outsiders in their own world - while the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa appear only intermittently throughout the narrative. The result is largely successful, in part because the Fifth Doctor's role was, more than any other, to be a man in the background, perhaps in response to Tom Baker's larger-than-life presence.

As with Spear of Destiny, Tip of the Tongue is a pseudo-historical, which helps with the social commentary side of the story, concerned as it is with intolerance and the false virtue of universal honesty.

Tip of the Tongue is a good little story, and if it's a little short on Doctor, its no less a Doctor Who story for that.

Doctor Who: The Roots of Evil

The Fourth Doctor's entry in this series is penned by Philip Reeve, whose Mortal Engines and Larklight series hold a special place in my heart.

The Heligan Structure is a marvel, a gigantic, space-borne tree housing an entire civilisation in its branches. Yet at the heart of the Heligan Structure's root bole is a dark and brooding malice; a long-nurtured hatred, waiting to exact a long-delayed vengeance against an ancient enemy.

Once again, Reeve shows a good grasp of his assigned Doctor's character and style, incorporating jelly babies and a scarf rescue. The Companion is not forgotten either. Leela can become a two-note character, misunderstanding words and then hitting something, but Reeve also captures her intuition, the instinctive sense of danger and wrongness which the Doctor so often dismissed, but which was rarely wrong.

The Roots of Evil successfully integrates many of the elements of the series, combining weird science with mild social commentary, and action and peril with humour to create a convincingly Whovian cocktail. It's not an easy act to accomplish, especially in the limited space provided, but this is another good entry in the series.