Today we’re covering an interesting time in fandom, as these years include the TV Movie being broadcast. I won’t be covering it in here, but I will be talking about plenty of Eighth Doctor stuff later on. I’ll just say that the TV Movie’s biggest mistake was trying to have so much of the show’s “lore” in the plot, as Who has never been about that, and it makes the film a terrible place for a new viewer to start, something that should have been the main goal. Still, there is a lot to like in there, and it did lead to an interesting new age of Who spin-off fiction; speaking of…
Year 33: 1995 to 1996 - The Sands of Time
Now this is something of a last minute addition; I originally had in here my first ever issue of Doctor Who magazine, 245, however given a few things I wanted to discuss later on, I didn’t want to repeat myself too much. As luck would have it, a few people on social media chose this book, bringing back good memories for me, so I grabbed a copy and yep, agreed, this is a good ‘un, well worth talking about. Besides, I’ve had a few from the New Adventures line, so let’s have one from the Missing Adventures line to balance things out.
The Missing Adventures line was the companion piece to the New Adventures, focusing on stories for the past Doctors; this one stars the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa, and as you can probably guess from that cover image, it's a sequel to Pyramids of Mars. Now Sutekh the Destroyer himself isn't in this one, but here we have the threat of another Osiran potentially rising to deal with. Writer Justin Richards later mentioned that with Pyramids of Mars, though it's often said to be a pastiche of, say, the Universal Mummy movies, it doesn't really have that much of them in its plot. To be a proper Universal tribute, there would have to have been some plot point like Sarah Jane being the image of Sutekh’s long lost love, or something like that. Well, for this one Richards is doing a proper pastiche, this time one for Bram Stoker's tale The Jewel of Seven Stars (or perhaps more accurately the Hammer film version Blood from the Mummy's Tomb). It's one that actually works really well in the format of a Doctor Who story, with the concepts of reincarnation etc given a fun sci-fi update.
What's more, if you think that Who only got “Timey-Wimey” in Moffat’s stories, you are very wrong, as we get a truly mindbending chain of events that crosses backwards and forwards in time, from the British Museum in Victorian times, to the height of Ancient Egypt, and then to 1996 London… with A LOT of extra twists and turns along the way. It all hangs together marvellously, and has some great set pieces, many of which could potentially have been pulled off on the TV series in the Davison era, such as any times the robot mummies turn up. The story even takes something that was set up in a TV story that never got used to full effect, but makes fantastic use of here. It's a great page turner of a read that got a reprint a few years ago, so you might have better luck tracking this one down than a few of the other books I have mentioned.
Hmm, the fifth Doctor faced Mummies here, vampires in the first Missing Adventure, Goth Opera, and werewolves in the audio Loups Garoux. BRB, need to draft out a Frankenstein story and a good Sea Devil tale for him too, get the full Monster Squad set together.
Year 34: 1996 to 1997 - The Dying Days
The last of the Virgin New Adventures… well sort of, they’d actually continue with stories following the adventures of Professor Bernice Summerfield, the break out companion character of the range, for a bit. But this was the end of the official Doctor Who ones before BBC books picked up the range. It's a big blow out of a story to end on, and notably the only one to feature the Eighth Doctor, in a story alongside Bernice, UNIT, and the Ice Warriors. Consciously paying tribute to everything from War of the Worlds through Quatermass and even with a bit of needling Independence Day in there, it's a really fun ride, with a very cheeky sense of humour at points.
This book is also notable for a bit of trolling at the expense of the TV movie; see, there was an interview with producer Philip Segal, he was asked why they didn’t do a more simple traditional alien invasion style story for it. He gave an answer along the lines of such a thing being too expensive requiring lots of alien costumes, props etc, citing other big budget SF. So to prove a point, Lance Parkin wrote this in such a way where, if you read carefully you’ll notice that at no point in the entire book are there ever more than two Ice Warriors around at any one time. If this story was filmed, you would only need the two costumes. It highlights the fact that back in the day TV Who did that sort of thing all the time and got away with it; you can achieve a lot, with a little, if you just use your imagination a bit. Mind the sheer cheek of the story doesn’t end there; fans were up in arms about the Doctor sharing a kiss with Grace in the TV movie; this ends by implying… a lot, let’s put it like that. Now this one, being the end of the line of the books is a bit rare, going for stupid money on eBay these days, and the BBC website that hosted the book went down a while ago, so this is one of the harder things to find on here, but if you can, it’s well worth tracking down, if only to see a stealth cameo from a character from Thunderbirds in here…
Next time, we take a look at the Doctor Who magazine comic strip pulling off something that could only have been done in that format, followed by some TV Who for Red Nose Day…
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