Doctor Who: Scratchman by Tom Baker (and James Goss)

I first heard of Doctor Who Meets Scratchman in 2008 - when the revival of the BBC TV series was truly at the peak of its trendiness and David Tennant was a few months away from passing the key to the Tardis over to Matt Smith. The show was so popular that there was talk of doing a spin-off movie, though whether it would star Tennant, Smith or a stunt-casted Robert Downey Jr or Johnny Depp was up in the air...well, that's what interested the people at Doctor Who Magazine, because they knew attempts at a film featuring the cast of the TV series had been tried before..

In the 1960's, there were 2 Doctor Who movies starring Peter Cushing as "Dr. Who", but he was playing a different version of the First Doctor, played by William Hartnell on television. In the 1970's, Tom Baker had become the 4th actor to play the Doctor on television and fancied starring in a spin-off film that would've starred himself and TV co-stars Elisabeth Sladen & Ian Marter, who played Sarah Jane Smith & Harry Sullivan, respectively.

This is what the lineup looked like:

    They liked working together. 

Baker collaborated with Marter on a film script that would've been in the style of the stories told at the time, which resembled pastiches of British gothic horror movies, usually the ones featuring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, but also Roger Corman movies featuring Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone & Peter Lorre. I personally prefer the era where Baker is hanging out with Mary Tamm or his future ex-wife Lalla Ward offering gummy bears to megalomaniacs while tinkering with upgrades for his robot dog/valet, K9.

K9, meet K9...Now THAT'S a crossover!

 That being said, there are a lot of great moments featuring this team and the banter between them sparkles in ways that make other Tardis teams look like an assembly of actors.

The film's plot was the 4th Doctor vs The Devil, possibly the biggest representative of evil the character could've faced. Longtime foes the Cybermen and the Daleks would've served as guest-villains. The Devil, going under the name "Scratchman" stages elaborate scenarios to get the Doctor's attention, including an army of scarecrows terrorizing a village...

           Cool, but not quite what we got...

   Uh..kinda yes and no..happens later, but this is going to be a spoiler-free review, because it's good enough to recommend.   

That's more like it! 

Those scarecrows are the main original monsters in this adventure. Scratchman would've been played by Vincent Price:

Artist's conception. Of course 

The final showdown between Scratchman, the Doctor, after many twists and turns, would've taken place inside a giant pinball machine in place of a labyrinth:

Certainly larger than that, but you get the idea.

Having outwitted Scratchman, the Doctor and his friends return to the Tardis and party down to the tune of "Yes, We Have No Bananas."

I'm reminded of Marvin Suggs & His All-Food Glee Club rendition of that old chestnut..

And that was all that was known of the film, according to the only surviving copy of the 1st draft of the screenplay, found among papers belonging to departed 1980's Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner. Proper financing for the film couldn't be found, plus the effort seemed awfully humble in the wake of Star Wars and Star Trek movies either in-development or already released. It was condemned to "development hell" and talk of even adapting the script into a novelization at least began when the scripts authored by Douglas Adams for "Shada", "The Pirate Planet" and "Doctor Who And The Krikkitmen" were being novelised. Up until then, fans had to settle for a vaguely detailed synopsis with a speculative mock-up of a movie "poster" published the TV series official tie-in magazine to indulge our imagination...

Baker collaborated with writer James Goss on a reimagined version of this story, with the end result being a novel written & published in 2019, so it will have a cameo by Doctors 10, 11, 12 & 13, plus a feeling of a "last hurrah" proper for Tom Baker in his own words, particularly as he approaches his ninth decade. Goss cleans up the narrative to feel less cinematic and more like an extra-long adventure from the original series, so it's familiarity may make it seem more cozy than groundbreaking; but that's usually the highest compliment a tie-in novel can recieve. Considering how there aren't too many novels featuring the 4th Doctor because writers found him tricky to convincingly transition to plain prose, the fact that his portrayer on television succeeds while the seasoned journeymen didn't makes this adventure worth your time.

One thing that bothered me: it appears they couldn't get permission to use the Daleks as they appeared in the screenplay, so they were substituted with giant Chess pieces...it's okay, but they're no Daleks.

Not quite as it appears in the book, yet it has the right ring to it..I actually think Goss & Baker should've realized the Chess pieces this way, rather than as golf carts. Spoilers.

Lead On, McDuck.

Was Ducktor Who foreseen? Nah, but I want to play along and assume it was.

In 2008, BBC Books published a Doctor Who tie-in novel by Lance Parkin called The Eyeless. It's a grim story set during the waning years of The 10th Doctor's tenure as "The Doctor" as he wanders through an urban dystopian landscape, seeking out an unusual power source sought after by a race of eyeless, ethereal, transparent aliens. It's a gloomy affair, but he gets the job done. It's certainly readable - I recommend you check it out; I recall it's available to download in E-book format, or just hunt for a carbon copy to buy online.

What's this got to do with Ducktales? Well, the 10th Doctor was played by David Tennant, the actor who succeeded the late Alan Young as the voice of Scrooge McDuck in the new revival of the 80's cartoon. The announcement of his casting inspired a slew of Doctor Who + Ducktales ="Ducktor Who" fanart. His casting was a huge surprise to me and the rest of the world; he simply wasn't on anyone's betting pool for the part, but when he was revealed, nobody cried foul. In fact, if there's one thing that old fans seem amicable about in the steady buildup to the big premiere, it that's the new actors seem okay. It's the new character designs/personalities for the nephews and new look of the show that's got fans' feathers ruffled..

Ah, the irony. I can recall that, for decades, Ducktales was often judged harshly by so-called "purists" as a crass deformation of the Carl Barks material. Now the new revival is being looked down in terms of fidelity to that same cartoon! It's all humbug, to me. I'm still amazed we're getting new episodes at all. I want to see this new series - I'm looking forward to it.

In the final 1/3 of The Eyeless, The Doctor drops a reference to Scrooge McDuck as Ebenezer Scrooge in Mickey's Christmas Carol, with the line, "Lead on, McDuck." The character/companion whom he's dropping this line to doesn't really get the nod...and the Doctor's way of explaining why he said it - that the nature of the short trips to the past, present and future of his companion's timeline/lifespan is reminiscent of the Ghosts of Christmas Spirit accompanying Scrooge in Mickey's Christmas Carol and has repercussive effects felt on the traveler - is so offhand that it's really oddly put; I had to read those passages several times to understand it.

So...I thought that was a fun bon-bon to chew on among the other Ducktales bon-bons we've been fed. We were shown hints that the crew knows who these characters are, knows about the old comics, knows about the new comics, remembers the lyrics to the theme song, has a tie-in comic book coming to coincide with the premiere..there was even a life-size replica of the inside of Scrooge's bin as a photo-op booth at the Disney23 convention... They KNOW. We just have to watch. We've been assured we're not getting a journeyman effort from this team.

...confidentially...I DO wish they had kept Scrooge's coat blue with the red collar, cuffs and matching spats. Was that so much to keep?

"Doctor Who: The Glamour Chronicles" - "Royal Blood" by Una McCormack, "Deep Time" by Trevor Baxendale and "Big Bang Generation" by Gary Russell (A Review)

Three Doctor Who novels, three treasure hunts - one big quest. The Glamour Chronicles sounds reminiscent of The Key to Time serials from the Tom Baker era of Who, in which a series of adventures is loosely connected by a hunt for pieces of a large artifact, culminating in a showdown with the enemy. That's not quite what we get here...

What is the Glamour? It's a maguffin, that's for sure - the plot element that motivates a character to go from here to there, as Alfred Hitchcock would establish in a lot of his cat-and-mouse thrillers, but even if the answer wasn't entirely interesting, we knew what it was: Roger Thornhill was mistaken for a guy named "Kaplan", Richard Hannay was trying to find out what "The 39 Steps" are, etc..but it feels like we got 3 different answers to what the Glamour is. In Royal Blood, it's a shapeshifting sentient being. In Deep Time, it's a parasite/honeypot trap linked to an ancient race of "elder gods". In Big Bang Generation, it's a lodestone, a key that sets off a doomsday machine...I think (that one is a little muddy to me). It's implied the 3 books follow in that sequence via various remarks said in each book, but either of the last two have conclusions that could easily wrap it up, so this double solution (an Ellery Queen shoutout in Doctor Who - remarkable!) allows you to choose to read no further..ultimately, the Glamour isn't as interesting a prize as the situations wrapped around it. Regardless, the sales receipt revealed the numbering, so that was handy.

Royal Blood is the Doctor Who fairy tale story. Think The Curse of Peladon, The Androids of Tara, The Keeper of Traken, Robot of Sherwood, even Day of The Doctor, with Queen Elizabeth and the Zygons. Two warring kingdoms, the Doctor and Clara in the middle, then Sir Lancelot shows up, plus we get a "magic" amulet. It's all good stuff, plus McCormack employs a mixed-narrative with jumps from 2nd to 3rd person perspective, so we get to care about who these characters are that the Tardis team befriended. One problem: the Doctor has no scenes with Lancelot! I didn't get that at all...maybe the dialogues would've sounded too reminiscent of Twelve's with Robin Hood in Sherwood, particularly since he has the same skepticism about the Arthurian legend that he had with the green archer. Clara gets a lot of nice moments, here, although that might add fuel to the vitriol from fans who loathed the character and joked about changing the title to Clara Who. Grade : B+

Deep Time is the most suspenseful of the three volumes. The Doctor and Clara are last-minute passengers on a spaceship with a crew on a archaeological expedition that goes sour when the ship crashes on a planet that's evolving through time in increments, with the whole team along for the ride (reminds me of the planet from Star Trek III). There's frozen tundras, deadly plants, poisonous bugs, catacombs, haunted spacecraft, ghosts, the Tardis in peril and - the fans always eat this up - Time Lord mythology. Also, Twelve tries making coffee from recycled waste material. It's a good Doctor Who sci-fi/horror tale. Grade: A

Big Bang Generation, in theory, seems like an easy sell. It's got a reunion with one of the Doctor's old companions from the Doctor Who novels of the 1990s and audio plays by Big Finish Productions - Bernice Summerfield, who was one of the conceptual prototypes for River Song (the other being 'Time Lady' Iris Wildthyme). The problem is Bernice has too many supporting characters along for the ride, so the adventure is always digressing to what they're doing, what they're thinking. Imagine if The Husbands of River Song had Clara, Danny Pink, Rigsy, Oswin AND Missy tagging along with Twelve - there's no room for any of the scenes with the Doctor & River to have any weight. There are moments of Twelve & Bernice together that are very fleeting, but considering that this is the only companion known to have had sex with the Doctor (the documented kind, of course) and appeared in one the most acclaimed Doctor Who novels ever (Paul Cornell's 7th Doctor novel Human Nature, which was adapted into a two-part episode with David Tennant) then it feels like this is meant to get people interested in digging back into the old material to see what all of it means. Or not, since I  think there are limits to how much of that material should be considered canonical, even if it's name-dropped in episodes of the TV series. The adventure itself feels like a mashup of Time Heist with assorted special effects from The Christmas Invasion, The Stolen Earth, The Bells of St. John and Doomsday, with the alien bar from The Witch's Familiar. It's a book that warrants a 3rd or 4th read to get a handle on the details. Grade: B- (A- if you're familiar with the continuity of Bernice Summerfield and her adventures).

With 2016 featuring no new episodes, aside from a Christmas special, these 3 books are entertaining, brief and worth a look during the looonnnggg wait. Of course, I posted quotes. Enjoy!

4 Doctor Who Novels: "Beautiful Chaos" by Gary Russell, "The Coming of The Terraphiles" by Michael Moorcock, "Dead of Winter" by James Goss, "The Crawling Terror" by Mike Tucker

Four Doctor Who novels. Three featured boilerplate storylines, though one purportedly had an original idea, only it's author wrote it on a whim, resulting in boilerplate execution. As such, I felt all four books deserved to be written up in a single review..with good quotes for your viewing pleasure, of course. Onward...

Beautiful Chaos by Gary Russell: Among Doctor Who villains, the Mandragora Helix - a malevolent, sentient constellation with mind-controlling abilities - is not unlike the Great Intelligence from "The Snowmen" and "The Bells of St. John", and his/it's scheme has the same m.o. to it. The big difference is the Doctor and companion highlighted. The Tenth Doctor  is more fun to read about than The Eleventh Doctor, but Donna Noble, in retrospect, has nothing interesting to say..I don't think she ever did; her whole "arc" consists of her becoming better-educated/worldly via her travels with the Doctor before receiving a "Flowers For Algernon"-style I.Q. boost that allowed her to save the universe and serve as deux ex machina ( by typing, very fast, nonsensical technobabble onto a random computer keyboard ), before having to give it all up and become "Uneducated Get-To-The-Toe Donna" again ( this is certainly no Clara Oswald )..Thankfully, Gary Russell has her granddad Wilfred play a larger role here. The subplot about Wilfred's girlfriend coping with Alzheimer's is clearly trying too hard to echo Russell T. Davies' faux-TV style sentimentality, and Mandragora has more in common with The Wire from " The Idiot's Lantern " in it's ineffectiveness as a compelling villain, plus I don't recall Donna's mother really regarding the Doctor with contempt onscreen, so that bit seemed phony, but the Tenth Doctor characterization is just right, so it made the book a breeze to read. The book balances between fanfic and potboiler - Average.

The Coming of The Terraphiles by Michael Moorcock: The hype/backstory behind this book is more interesting than what we got...I recall that the original plan was for Moorcock to introduce a new status quo for Captain Jack Harkness as commander of a ship that traveled through a route between alternate universes and have him meet the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond for the first time, but the launch of Torchwood: Miracle Day likely derailed that idea, so he has the Doctor & Amy meet a new incarnation of his character, Jerry Cornelius, instead, and introduce his take on the application of parallel universes in Fantasy-Adventure fiction...sounds intriguing...but what we got was a potted, rambling, shaggy dog mess. Eleven and Amy weren't really complete characters at the time Moorcock was writing this, so they read like complete ciphers, here; he would've been better off using the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, although BBC Books was still shy about relaunching a line of Past Doctor Adventures in the wake of the new series until the novelization of Shada in 2012. The strongest passage in the book has nothing to do with any high-concept stuff: it's a P.G. Wodehouse-esque pastiche with a Bertie Wooster-like character attempting (i.e., failing) to steal a ghastly hat and clumsily take credit when it disappears. Everything else feels like it was just Moorcock typing away unconsciously...lots of incoherent nonsensical descriptions of ships encountering ships and traveling through spatial matter...I do remember THIS book was hyped up just as much as it's faded away into obscurity. - Pure Drivel **

Dead of Winter by James Goss: Of the four books featured in this post, this novel had the strongest character work, featuring character development we didn't get from the show, because the writers became increasingly preoccupied/distracted with hashing out River Song's paradoxical backstory. Her absence from this book allows Goss to offer insight on the relationship between The Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory that confirms suspicions  ( that Rory and Eleven tolerate eachother's presence to keep Amy happy, while Amy sees her husband as consolation for the unattainable and forever enigmatic Doctor, who seems to be trying to recreate the relationship the Tenth Doctor had with Rose Tyler, but frustrated that Amy would have feelings for someone else* ) and plays on expectations with a brief amnesia/role-reversal subplot for the trio. The main story - about a seaside clinic ridded with doppelgangers - is given some snap by Goss's decision to used a mixed 1st-person narrative; most of the characters featured narrate several chapters in rotation. Never dull, though lacking surprise, I was disappointed that the scene depicted on the cover does not occur in the book...an attractive zombie woman wielding the Doctor's sonic screwdriver sounds epic to me. - Not bad

The Crawling Terror by Mike Tucker: The author probably noticed the nod to Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor when Peter Capaldi's initial costume for the Twelfth Doctor was revealed, so he fashioned an adventure fitting the Third for Twelve. Giant bugs are ubiquitous in two of the 3rd Doctor's best-known stories ( The Green Death, Planet of The Spiders ), along with misguided wealthy British meglomaniacs delving into mad science abundant during that era. Technically, I thought this the best-written book of the four in this post - the suspense is genuine, the atmosphere has the right mix horror and sci-fi/adventure, and the Twelfth Doctor & Clara are depicted right, so it felt authentic, and the pace is just right for an adventure about English villagers possessed by colonies of giant aliens resembling Earth insects. It risks bad taste by putting a baby in danger in one scene before coping out. Clara gets her mind swapped with the leader of the alien spider bugs, so we get more "Evil Clara", which is fun. The only drawback is a personal one: giant alien bugs aren't an appealing menace to me; I picked this up because I had already read the other two novels featuring 12, but it is a well-written adventure - I would've preferred alien foxes or mummies..if Paul Magrs can have the Eighth Doctor encounter alien dogs..plus, I liked the passage about wild foxes in the village being regarded like wild raccoons...and then Tucker drops a suggestion/hint about a possible rejected idea that he might recycle someday: UNIT soldiers fighting robots emerging from a volcano in the Canary Islands...a sequel to The Fires of Pompeii ?!! Mike Tucker! - when Moffat finally gets around to answering the question of why The Twelfth Doctor chose to look like the same man his Tenth incarnation met in Pompeii, may we PLEASE see THAT story?
- Okay

*That last bit about 11 wanting his own Rose Tyler for a companion was my pet theory; once Billie Piper left, Tennant's Doctor became increasingly angst-ridden and melancholy, which soured the acting chemistry the actor had with his later co-stars; perhaps Moffat was trying to casually recreate the same dynamic with his launch as showrunner?...

**I'm keeping this one - I'll try it again some other day...it's like they say: "Some books are just for having."

Doctor Who: The Blood Cell by James Goss

Can the best Doctor Who stories be summed up with one question?

Can an impossible man and an ineffectual milquetoast coexist in a backwater prison on an asteroid without driving each other crazy?

Best moment for old-school Who?

Well..if you're a fan of the years when Phillip Hinchcliff and Robert Holmes were running the show, pitting the Doctor against sadistic characters in bleak confrontations, this one is for you. The one twist is that Bentley, the irredeemable head prison guard, is a woman. She remains unlikable all the way through her demise...which might be the one likable thing about her - that she gets some comeuppance in the end.

Best new thing?

A new sonic screwdriver! The Sonic Spoon! That's right - while in prison, The Doctor cobbles together a new sonic built around a spoon. There are Doctor Who utensils modeled after the sonic screwdriver that are available at retail, so it's possible that the author has a set at home and got the idea while eating fish fingers & custard while watching Peter Capaldi swordfighting with a tablespoon in Robot of Sherwood, then gazing at the sonic screwdriver-shaped handle of the spoon and saying, "Why not?"

They'd never have gotten away with that in the 20th century...

The Twelfth Doctor gets beaten up a LOT. This book is essentially a grim prison story, offering no new twists, aside from the lower-ranking guards being robot "caretakers", who reminded me of the Sheriff of Notingham's robots in Sherwood. There are plenty of bright spots - Clara's visits to the prison, the Doctor's ability to easily escape from his cell whenever he feels like it, the Garfield book the Doctor checks out of the prison library - I like that stuff, but I imagine Goss thought Peter Capaldi's tenure would be dour, so he envisioned a dour scenario, when in actuality, The Twelfth Doctor's adventures have felt more like classic Who than any episodes of the Matt Smith era. The darker approach to the series has been there, but at most, it's atypical of a family-friendly adventure series that managed to stay light in the shade.

Hooray for Jackie Tyler - best guest moment?

The Doctor's rapport with Lafcardio, the de facto prison librarian over the assortment of books kept in the library. The moment includes a subtle nod to River Song when the Doctor glances at a copy of Moll Flanders - which Alex Kingston starred in when it was adapted for television!

The 'I love me Nan'...' moment?

I think we're supposed to gain sympathy for the Governor - the warden of the prison - as the book goes on, in part because he's narrating this adventure...but I didn't. I found him too complacent to be interesting..and the build-up to his "redemption" of sorts at the end feels perfunctory than genuine. I found it more likely the Doctor would prefer to have been in far more control than is displayed, particularly after the denouement unveiling the nature of the prison and the role the Governor plays there. Episodes like Time Heist and Flatline show The Twelfth Doctor is a man of action who prefers to hold as many cards as possible; and when he's in over his head, Clara steps up to the plate to show what she has learned, but we don't see that here; that's the downside of writing a tie-in anticipating the execution of a TV series that had not aired yet.

What?!

The twists at the end: The Governor is actually a politician exiled to the asteroid, with all of the prisoners made up of his subservients and Bentley the guard was the true authority figure; the Governor hates the Doctor because he's responsible for his being there; Bentley despises the Doctor even more for having to endure the Governor as her boss - all of this is supposed to be the aftermath of a much larger adventure that's barely told in snippets of conversation in the final third of the novel; if I thought the events of Silhouette - the previous Doctor Who novel I reviewed - pastiched too many familiar twists and turns from episodes of the show..this book tries too hard to pastiche the climaxes of Steven Moffat's scripts, in which things are not as they seem, but play out as if they are, regardless. At the end of the day, this book is about The Doctor trying to persuade a guy to change his mind...in a way that this Doctor would not go along with.

Huh?!

The Judge - the monster responsible for killing the inmates and guards at the prison, is a massive robot that upgrades itself by consuming people and machinery..kind of a morbidly obese Cyberman, I think.

Where was I?

The episodes "Mummy On The Orient Express" and "Flatline" had just aired. Blood Cell had been a quick read - Goss got the dialogue of Twelve and Clara right, so the adventure sounded authentic, but the supporting characters were too opaque to tolerate, and he needed to play off the twists much sooner to keep the book entertaining. Once it's revealed who the players really are, you wonder why was it so hard for the Doctor to persuade them to rebel from it other than for the author to play off a formula? And  what the heck was the Oracle character about? That subplot felt like something that was supposed to have a payoff, but didn't.

Singlemost fabulous thing?

It's hard to top the sonic spoon, especially because it reminded me of the lightsaber spoons that came in boxes of Kellogg's breakfast cereals to tie-in with Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of The Sith...I'll say it's the scene where Clara presents a birthday cake for the Governor to pass along to the Doctor...with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver as the candle.