Interference - Book Two: The Hour of the Geek by: Lawrence Miles

Metatextual analysis is weird.  It’s looking at a text through a lens dependent on the existence of other texts which changes the context of the text you’re looking at.  For instance, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a play that only works within the context of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Including metatext in your work is a gamble, it can become like Stoppard and excellent, but it can also come across like say Hell Bent where it comes off as pretentious.  Interference Book One: Shock Tactic was the start of a book published in two parts, finished with Interference Book Two: The Hour of the Geek.  Miles introduces metatext to the first installment, but it really is the second installment which fulfills the metatext of what Miles is doing, writing an analysis of Doctor Who as a program.  The 300 pages of this novel analyzes what Doctor Who means, who the Doctor is, who the companion is, and somehow manages to predict to what the show would evolve into with scary accuracy.  Unlike the first review I wrote, this isn’t going to explore Miles’ plot, it’s largely a continuation of part one and is excellent, but I’ve said just about everything that I can about that aspect of the book.

Miles plays with the idea that the Doctor is dead, he has been dead since The Monster of Peladon, caused by a paradox on the planet Dusk.  Killing the Doctor at this point is his razor to cut canon in two.  It’s the Tom Baker era where the expanded universe started to take shape with Doctor Who Weekly and of course the 90’s already gave the world the Virgin New Adventures and Virgin Missing Adventures.  It’s cutting everything up and telling the reader to just enjoy the ride.  It’s a story, stories matter.  There’s the setup for future arcs and the promise that this tangled web is going to be untangled eventually, but for now enjoy the ride because it’s important.

The character of I.M. Foreman is Miles metatextual answer to the Doctor as a character, a runaway from Gallifrey who has quickly used up their regenerations for a good show.  They mean merely to entertain.  Their final life is even female and their place on Dust is one of self-discovery becoming what they need to become, who they need to be to serve the frame story.  Gallifrey is going to be destroyed one of these days, restored, and destroyed again because of some enemy and Foreman won’t be there, but perhaps they can save it.  From that description everything from Jodie Whittaker’s casting as the Doctor to stories like Hell Bent, The Timeless Children, and Death in Heaven have their roots here which is odd.  It’s not like Miles was a fan of the revival, but he’s been unintentionally pulling the strings all along.  Like the Eighth Doctor here, he just doesn’t seem to know that’s what’s happening with him.

The Eighth Doctor here is broken.  Sam leaves him and Fitz suffers a terrible fate at the hands of Faction Paradox, while Compassion begins to live up to her name while being forced into the role of companion.  Sarah Jane sees what he has become, and he turns his back on her.  He is a pawn in some cosmic game of creating interference for brainwashing purposes.  The geek is eating everything up and there really isn’t much that is bringing everything back.  Spaceships made of bone provide some of the visceral imagery found in this book’s pages while the story finds its way to an unsettling conclusion.  It goes beyond the pulpy fiction of most Doctor Who and into something greater.  Miles is writing something that he never intended to return to, he was saying goodbye to something he loved while leaving his mark.  It’s something that I think needs to be read to be fully understood.  While Shock Tactic took over 1,000 words to discuss, this one doesn’t need nearly as many, it’s cutting the fact and setting up the Doctor as damaged with a clone and a construct as companions leaving Sam in some sort of happiness, something that the VNAs would never do.  It leaves you thinking and perhaps that’s what the best works can do.  10/10.