Today’s the anniversary day! A fine Wholiday for us all! Not long now until an all new age begins...
We still have sixteen years to cover before we’re done, so let’s jump right into things; firstly, I am going to be taking one more little peak at the comic strip, followed by another range from Big Finish…
Year 45: 2007 to 2008 - Death to the Doctor!
I should mention that one of the criteria I have for this little selection is to make sure I highlight the works of certain authors, certain creators during this month too, so this one is on here because I really wanted to make sure I got something written by Jonathan Morris. This is a one off comic strip in DWM, drawn by the wonderful Roger Langridge, where a cabal of some of the Doctor’s greatest foes comes together… and things go very, very wrong for them. Well OK, maybe “greatest” is overstating things a bit; it’s clear that this lot really are a bunch of losers at villainy, where not even the Doctor really remembers them. But it does lead to a very fun dark comedy of a story. It was in one of Paul Cornell’s New Adventures novels (man, I really wish I had found somewhere to talk about his work earlier! Oh well.) where we first got the idea of The Doctor being the thing that the monsters are scared of. Well this one takes that concept and runs with it, playing it for laughs, as these squabbling villains become convinced that the Doctor is hiding amongst them, picking them off one by one… demonstrating how little they really understand about him.
This story is a delight; each of the villains only gets this one story, but the combination of Morris’ writing and Langridge’s art gives each of them so much personality, including little details like how one of them looks like a not-very-convincing costume with a bloke inside. Also, we get little flashbacks to how each of them know the Doctor, leading to mini cameos to older Doctors and companions; my favourite is the character Questor, who is completely monochrome… because he’s a First Doctor villain, back when it was all in black and white! (The fact that we just had the recolourised version of The Daleks tonight makes this gag even funnier). As things go from bad to worse, the final page is quite a change in tone, revealing the real cost of all that happened, and a proper reflection of why these guys failed to beat the Doctor before, and wouldn’t beat him this time; they just don’t get him. It’s a real gem of a story, you can find it in either an old copy of DWM issue 390 or the collection The Widow’s Curse; I really recommend that trade paperback, as it has several other fun stories in there, including another one by Morris, though with a very different tone to this, The Time of My Life, which I really recommend, and might be somewhat timely now…
Year 46: 2008 to 2009 - Ringpullworld
Some of Big Finish’s best stories can be found not in their main Doctor Who range, or in their boxsets, but in the odd spin-off The Companion Chronicles. These are less audio dramas, more spoken word pieces, which often take the form of one of the Doctor’s companions telling a story. They are usually two handers, with just the companion and a second actor playing other parts (with the odd exception). Now from that simple format, many writers have been able to play around with it, find fascinating ways of telling stories even with those restrictions, even turning them into plus points. It also gives the opportunity to allow for a bit more characterisation for some of the companions that might not have gotten the chance on TV, by allowing us to see from their point of view, get inside their head more. Now there are a lot of great stories in this range; when I finish Whovember, I am planning a quick “bonus round” post, a rapid look at the things I didn’t have the room for this month, so I will probably go through a bunch of my favourites there. But I am going to highlight this one in particular today, starring Mark Strickson as Turlough.
This is written by Paul Magrs, an author I always have time for; he is someone who firmly grasps both how silly and somewhat camp Doctor Who can be, but also how weird and wondrous it can be. His most lasting contribution to Who is the character of Iris Wildthyme, who I can basically sum up as “what if your Northern, boozy aunt tried to be the Doctor… and also get in the Doctor’s pants”. This story has a decidedly “Paul Magrs” concept; the story is mostly told from Turlough’s perspective, but along with him is Huxley, one of a race of beings who latch on to other lifeforms to narrate and novelise their lives, so he literally has a living narrator with him. This not only leads to some good character moments (as Turlough notes that Huxley’s prose style really gets on his nerves), but a whole dose of meta storytelling, especially in the ending of this one; the final gambit of this story is something truly unique, and incredibly well done. This is another one that Big Finish has slashed the price of, and is a good place to start with both the Companion Chronicles and Magrs’ writing, with the bonus of giving Turlough, a character rather poorly served outside his initial introductory trilogy, a bit more to his personality.
Next time, we’ll turn our attention to a favourite episode of one of the TV spin-offs, and then to an episode written by a high profile fan…
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