The Eighth Doctor Dances (The Last Waltz)

On Tuesday, I missed the early bus home from work. Determined not to spend twenty minutes sitting in the bus shelter, I wandered down to Waterstones to kill some time and there, browsing around as one does, I found half a dozen copies of The Gallifrey Chronicles and after grabbing a few other bits and pieces to make a decent-sized purchase, was about fifty pages in by the time the bus deposited me home. About three years ago I decided to get myself up to speed with the Eighth Doctor’s printed adventures and, in the week prior to ‘Rose’ being transmitted, I did it (barring possibly four or five books that have eluded me along the way). I don’t intend to review the novel here, but as the end of the Eighth Doctor’s ongoing adventures there’s been a certain pull on the heartstrings. From here on, the Eighth Doctor is a Past Doctor as far as BBC Books are concerned, although it remains to be seen how many Ninth Doctor adventures we get in print- not least because we’ve already had two separate Ninth Doctors in print. If Virgin’s New Adventures led the way in giving Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor another seven years of life on the printed page, BBC Books achieved even more in extrapolating eight years’ worth of novels from roughly an hour of screen time. No doubt Big Finish’s Eighth Doctor releases will go on for as long as Paul McGann is happy to do them, but one of the many lives of the Eighth Doctor has come to an end.

The birth of what we’ve come to abbreviate down to the EDAs came in uncertain circumstances- having retrieved the licence from Virgin, BBC Books began with an ambivalent approach to the series’ past and their readership. The rumours (or fears) at the time were of the Eighth Doctor’s future adventures being written for the young-adult market which a McGann series would have been expected to bring, but wiser counsels evidently prevailed- no doubt somebody pointed out that the Virgin ranges had a committed readership and abandoning them to chase another market made dubious commercial sense at best. One hangover from this phase seems to have been the character of Sam- in her early adventures, she’s a two-dimensional caricature of a "concerned" 1990s teenager and painfully pre-Buffy in her lack of real character. Any attempt at development was also hindered by somebody at Worldwide evidently thinking that it would be a good idea to use the books to promote the video catalogue, so the early adventures include not only the continuity smorgasbord of The Eight Doctors but a vampire story roughly simultaneous with the video release of the E-Space trilogy and return appearances for the Zygons and Jo Grant. Thank goodness for Lawrence Miles and Alien Bodies, reintroducing complexity to the Doctor’s adventures in print. The next phase of adventures, up to the mammoth Interference, saw much more consistency and quality in the writing, as well as the introduction of the range’s most effective original characters, Fitz and Paul Magrs’s Iris Wildthyme. Loved and hated in roughly equal measure, Iris’s presence as a semi-regular character whose various incarnations and adventures roughly parallel the Doctor’s is nevertheless a stroke of ingenuity and, overall, effective. From Interference onwards, the ongoing story arc achieved greater and greater prominence- not only do Sam and the original Fitz leave, but the Doctor’s past is changed and the game takes on a different feel. Compassion is another interesting original character, not least after she realises her destiny in Shadows of Avalon. It’s a shame that The Ancestor Cell comes so quickly in a way, because the TARDIS-as-character analogy is used so often in the series that it’s interesting to see the consequences of reversing things so that the companion is the TARDIS- but at least the idea never had time to become over-familiar.

Destroying Gallifrey was, depending on who you believe, mooted in the TV series as early as 1986, so it should probably come as no surprise that the books eventually did it. It’s a shame as far as it means the end of characters like Romana, but then again the televised series managed for years without showing us the Time Lord society and in some ways it’s a recognition that narratively the story of Gallifrey had, as far as the books were concerned, run its course- Big Finish would of course disagree. Instead, the Eighth Doctor spent the twentieth century in exile on Earth without his memories (this being a Doctor who loses his memory the way other people lose socks) in a generally strong series of adventures which directly contrasted the traditionalism of Terrance Dicks with the innovation of Lance Parkin. The arrival of Anji added a contemporary aspect to the lineup before the Sabbath arc relaunched the range, culminating in an attempt between Timeless and Sometime Never to tie everything up in a way which gave some sort of order to proceedings. As a nemesis for the Eighth Doctor, Sabbath is both theatrical in the finest Who tradition and unsettling, but the arc probably needed to be half as long as it turned out to be. The last few adventures have been refreshingly small-scale in the main, emphasising character over scale and, with a new series on the cards, going back to the principle of being fun again.

The new series, for all its positives, has meant the Eighth Doctor’s new life drawing to a close, and yet not being wound up categorically. As Russell T Davies has pointed out, the story of the Time War and, presumably, the Doctor’s regeneration simply can’t be told in a spin-off format. The New Adventures and EDAs had the freedom to push the Doctor’s story forward precisely because there wasn’t a series on television at the time, but the new series has to be self-contained in terms of its questions and answers. So at some time between the events of The Gallifrey Chronicles and ‘Rose’, the Time Lords somehow come back into being (the Doctor possessing at least some of the raw material), fight the Daleks and are destroyed again, and the Eighth Doctor becomes the Ninth. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether and how we will ever hear or see this story. But then again, it’s another sign of the chaos caused by the arrival of a series nobody dared hope for that during the Eight Doctor’s extended tenure, Doctor Who continuity has become increasingly broken-backed and unable to support its own weight. Once we’ve decided where the Big Finish audios fit into the BBC Books timeline (if they do), there are Faction Paradox books, Miranda comics...if there’s one legacy of the Eighth Doctor’s continuing adventures in any and all formats, it’s that any idea of a set and stable continuity has long since been abandoned in favour of telling the best story possible. In many ways, the numerous resets in the books and audios have prepared us for the jump to both (or all three) Ninth Doctors. But it’s only in retrospect that we can see what the EDAs did achieve- even more than the Seventh, the Eighth Doctor has lived most of his life on the printed page, and in extrapolating and developing a character from Paul McGann’s sole television appearance, the EDAs may have done more than a few series of McGann as the Doctor would ever have done. No doubt in due course we’ll see what happens to the Ninth and Tenth Doctors in print (although the Ninth Doctor’s adventures will of necessity presumably be confined to the gaps between episodes in this one season), but it was with a heavy heart that I closed the book on the Eight Doctor, on Fitz, Trix, Anji, Sam, Compassion and Sabbath. One day I’ll go back and read them all from the beginning- one day. Because now I can hear The Clockwise Man calling.