By Rob McCow

The Infinity Season

The Collector

The Infinity Season was text-based and lasted for one issue, appearing in Doctor Who Magazine #151 of August 1989.

It's a new low for comic strip grabs and captioneers alike

The World Shapers

Story – Dan Abnett

Pictures – Gerry Dolan

Fellow Travellers

Huksley is a hard-bitten female reporter from the future. She's got short, dark hair which is slicked back in a very eighties fashion. Huksley owns a small flat on the colony world of Archimedes and she works for UniMedia, the biggest network on the planet. Her work is dangerous and she carries a Pelkov gun.

In short, she's a suspicious woman in a paranoid world.

The Deal

A female reporter uses an off-world line to contact her editor, Molit and she tells him about a big story she has uncovered involving the Fountain Corporation. The reporter, whose name is Huksley, is worried that she has been found out. She has had a dream of herself injured and lying on a stretcher. What Huksley doesn't know is that she is being followed by someone called 'the Hound'.

Huksley returns to her flat where she finds that the Doctor has been pottering around in her belongings. Huksley is surprised by the Doctor's non-synthetic clothes and lack of tattoos. The Doctor introduces himself. Huksley greets him as an 'independent', sent by Molit. The Doctor plays along with her perception that he is a secret agent of some kind.

Huksley is a reporter for UniMedia. The owners of the Archimedes colony, the Fountain Corporation, have discovered a process called the 'Fountain Programme' that negates the effects of ageing in humans. Huksley has been investigating a series of bizarre and violent deaths connected with the Corporation. She has uncovered part of a chemical formula, which the Doctor identifies as 'Chronex'.

Huksley accompanies the Doctor to the Corporate Tower. Her scoop will be the 'Ultimate Season', or 'Infinity Season' that will run in the news forever and make her career. They break in to the Tower only to be confronted by the Hound that was tracking Huksley.

The Hound takes them to 'The Centre', the largest room in the Tower. The Doctor explains that Chronex has been illegal on most planets for millenia. It is a mind-expanding drug developed by the Hyst to control their slaves. It dulls the human perception of time, making it appear to the user that they are eternally young. The fountain of youth is nothing but a sham.

A Hysk arives and tells the Doctor and Huksley that their invasion has begun. The Doctor is shocked, as the Hysk have been extinct for hundreds of years. When Huksley shoots the Hysk, it vanishes. It was just a hologram.

The new Blue Peter line up investigate a starch factory with stiff consequences

Molit appears from behind a screen. He has orchestrated the whole thing using material found in a derelict spacship. His plan was to create a story that would generate huge ratings and give UniMedia the Infinity Season.

Back in her flat, Huksley tells the Doctor that she will make her scoop by exposing corruption in the media companies. As the Doctor leaves, Huksley realises that if Molit was behind the conspiracy, then who sent the Doctor?

TV Action

Futuristic news corporations can be seen at work in the new series story 'The Long Game'.

Sarah-Jane Smith (a companion of the third and fourth Doctors and recent star of her own spin-off series, the Sarah-Jane Adventures) was a hard-bitten female journalist.

This story would have been far too thin to have been made for TV. If it had been, the Archimedies colony would probably have been rendered in a similar all-studio way to the corridors of Paradise Towers, or the streets of Terra Alpha from The Happiness Patrol. The portrayal of the Doctor is close to the season 26 version rather than the pratfalling buffoon of season 24.

4-Dimensional Vistas

This short story has a couple of detailed illustrations, where Sylvester McCoy is exceptionally well drawn. Although atmospheric, the pictures are badly laid out and the characters are forced into unnatural poses. They serve the purpose of highlighting exciting points of the story though.

The Hysk we see resembles a man-sized insect that has been stuffed into a boiler. It's quite cool and menacing.

End of The Line

A new departure for the magazine, this short story by Dan Abnett is a slim tale of a newspaper conspiracy, using only three characters. In my opinion, prose stories don't really work in Doctor Who Magazine. I bought this issue of the magazine way back in 1989, yet I only read the story for the first time a few weeks ago so I could do this review. Comic strip adventures suit the tone of DWM much better. Even in a photo-heavy issue of the magazine comic strips can always attract the eye, but short stories have to work much harder to entice the reader.

What's interesting about The Infinity Season is the tone. Stylistically, it's very similar to some of the New Adventures novels which were released in the early nineties; a kind of William Gibson cyberpunk-lite. It all stems from the Cartmel concept of the Doctor as an interfering manipulator, playing chess on a thousand boards. Or the TV reality of the Doctor acting a bit strangely for no properly understood reason and solving his problems really easily.

The whole set up is built around 'Chronex', a drug that is supposed to extend life but in fact merely creates the illusion of longevity. The New Adventures investigated similar concepts, particularly in stories such as Cats Cradle: Warhead where there was loads of drug-taking and literally tons of people trying to live forever. At least, that's what I remember about it.

Since The Infinity Season there has been mountains of original Who prose fiction, including hundreds of short stories. Although the Infinity Season has been bettered many times including stories by Dan Abnett himself, this is an important but not terribly exciting adventure. There are some interesting ideas and it's quite atmospheric, but it's let down by a heck of a naff ending and it's failure to come to a point. And its characters are boring. And it doesn't make much sense. And it starts really slowly. And yet… at the time it was a brave and exciting new direction for Doctor Who.

Maruthea is misspelled as 'Marathea' throughout. No wonder the Doctor’s finding it so hard to get to Bonjaxx’s birthday party.

Gerry Dolan would return to DWM to illustrate Paul Cornell’s first story.

No letters were published in DWM regarding this story. It was not included in the list of stories to vote for in the Season 26 Poll. In the TARDIS Wiki the story doesn’t even have a page. In the article they ran a few months later about the history of the comic strips, Doctor Who Magazine referred to this as ‘a text story’.