Bad Therapy by: Matthew Jones: Hell Hath No Fury of a Peri Scorned

Having Roz die in So Vile a Sin left it up to the next author to deal with the aftermath for the characters.  This is a bit of a risky move considering the track record with death of companions in Doctor Who.  The original companion deaths of Katarina and Sara Kingdom in The Daleks’ Master Plan were handled very well especially for the era as the Doctor at least let it sink in for Katarina and The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve is a story with the main purpose of character catharsis.  The next death is in Earthshock but in Time-Flight the death is roughed off quickly to get on which is awful.  The final death of a companion was in Mindwarp which didn’t really have time afterward to reflect.  Bad Therapy is a novel that has to follow a sketchy track record and is from a first time Doctor Who author in Matthew Jones.  This has all the makings of a failure to show the gravitas of the death of a companion, yet Jones writes a story around the grieving period of the Doctor and Chris because of Roz’s death.

 

The novel sees the Doctor and Chris go to 1950s London where at a mental asylum a Professor Moriah has failed experiments of sentient mannequins, made of genetically altered human flesh, becoming therapists as a way to get his dead wife back, adapting themselves to what patients require to heal.  There is a sinister empty black cab prowling the streets and eating people, the Doctor is off to help a young man go through the grief of losing his partner, Chris is hooking up with a woman at a bar, and Peri Brown makes her way back to Earth to discover what happened to the first king of Kron’Tep. Yeah this novel juggles quite a bit in terms of plot and easily could have fallen flat if Jones wasn’t able to find a good balance between the many plotlines.  Jones however actually manages to accomplish it as the novel serves as a catharsis for the death of Roz.

 

Chris has the most outward reaction to Roz’s death as from the get go of the novel he is trying to bottle up his feelings, until the Doctor manipulates him into going to a bar.  The bar run by Tilda “Mother” Jupp, is where he meets Patsy, a woman looking for love after the death of her husband.  They form a connection because of how compatible they are, but as Chris isn’t allowed to be happy they get torn apart by the end of the novel.  It’s because of the way they’re torn apart that Chris is allowed to move forward from Roz’s death which comes across well.  Jones writes Chris as emotionally damaged and in denial about his feelings for Roz as they didn’t get their happily ever after moment.  Patsy is also an interesting character as the way Jones writes her may feel annoying, but it is purposefully so as to leave hints to the big twist at the end of the novel which really does feel really good.  Tilda Jupp is also a character who while holding a lot of the dramatic weight in the novel, has a lot of funny moments and things that makes her feel like comic relief.  She’s essentially a diva in charge of a little cabaret, surrounded by friends, getting drunk, and caring for people.  She’s got the best bits of the book which really helps sell the story to the audience as you can believe this woman is holding a little club with parties every night for people.

 

The Doctor gets his own little plotline to follow as he does a lot of the investigating and with that we actually get to see him emote.  While the Doctor was emotionally attached to Benny, Roz was his equal and now to deal with it he is getting his nose dirty without having a plan.  He gets wrapped up with gangsters who have been threatening closeted gay Jack Bartlett and of course the Doctor cannot stand for this.  He sees the injustice that they are blackmailing him with, a grainy photo that could easily be explained away as a misunderstanding, and decides for himself that he’s got to put a stop to it.  He also gets slapped by Peri, which is the first real time he has been held accountable for the fate of one of his companions.  Peri has had a very bad marriage and waited for the Doctor to come rescue him, but no he was too busy becoming Time’s Champion to even care what happened to Peri.  While the time travel nonsense involved in Peri’s fate makes there be several versions of the character, this one is hardened and ready for action, but her fate in the novel is best left up to the reader to discover.  I’ll say no more except that Peri does cause the only problem in the novel as she gets several interludes that really don’t go anywhere interesting and Jones tries to keep us in mystery, but the mystery really doesn’t work when he credits her as Queen Gilliam.  You know Gilliam as in Perpigillium Brown.  Yeah it’s an obvious shortening of Peri’s full name and the mystery is given up right on the first page.

 

To summarize, Bad Therapy is only bad for the villains of the story as it provides therapy for its characters all through a story that feels like Classic Doctor Who.  Matthew Jones does a great job writing this novel and should be commended for putting so much into it and getting such a good story out the first time around.  The characters are interesting, the ideas are puzzling, and there isn’t really a wasted page apart from the weird mystery around Peri and her fate which doesn’t work.  Now we can get to the ending of the New Adventures and of course see where the Doctor can possibly go from here.  90/100