Loving the Alien by: Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

 

Ace is dead, long live Ace.  Mike Tucker and Robert Perry are for all intents and purposes the architects for the Seventh Doctor novels in the Past Doctor Adventures line.  From writing the debut to penning most of them (with Tucker taking Prime Time solo), their direction formed the basis for a story arc not only for the Seventh Doctor and Ace as an alternative take on Season 27 but also tying into the continuity changing hijinks of the later Eighth Doctor Adventures.  Loving the Alien is the culmination of that arc in this range, Dale Smith’s Heritage being a lead into this final showdown.  The Doctor fails.  Ace is shot dead after falling in love.  The Doctor can barely keep it together with added medical torture.  The rest of the novel plays out with the idea that she is not actually going to come back, or at least not in the way that we think.  There is explicitly a shift in the timelines, the reason for resurrection left vague and the Doctor not caring because his best friend is back  He is not going to question the gift, even if deep down he knows that this is not the Ace he met in Dragonfire.  Tucker and Perry structure so much of Loving the Alien around this central event yet what propels the first half of the novel is setting up for the reader the idea that Ace’s own decisions: rebelling against the Doctor and falling in love with a boy called Jimmy, is going to somehow subvert her death.

 

There is a world where this is a television story, and Sophie Aldred has decided to leave Doctor Who.  Being a novel, the timeline is corrupted somewhat and there is a slight uncomfortableness with the Ace that we have here because the Past Doctor Adventures won’t return to this arc.  Tucker and Perry leave the reader on this implication on where the Doctor and Ace will go from here, though there is an argument to be made that their story is going into its own new, adventurous territory.  After all, Ace has already left in Set Piece.  She even died in “Ground Zero”.  Tucker and Perry’s portrayal of the Doctor in Loving the Alien is particularly excellent.  The Time Lord is taken by the grief of losing Mel in Heritage and the very real possibility of losing Ace, bringing to the surface his worst impulses.  His decision to plant a bug on Ace so he can track her is the final straw to push her away.  Loving the Alien is a look through the Doctor’s past mistakes, with several footnotes reminding readers to check the other Past Doctor Adventures that have been leading to this moment.  Tucker and Perry examine the Doctor as over planning, the sequences in the TARDIS where he is emotionally distant from Ace are great as are the haunting description of his autopsy of her corpse.  The Doctor is planning for something far bigger than him but Loving the Alien despite being explicitly a sequel to Illegal Alien, isn’t actually all that big in terms of stakes.  Yes, there are timestream diversions that need to be put right, and they are put right at the end, but the extent of the diversions still leaves the setting of the late 1950s London looking like the late 1950s London.

 

Above everything else Loving the Alien is Mike Tucker and Robert Perry’s tribute to the atomic monster genre of film with a particular love of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials.  While not taking the plot from a Quatermass serial, instead using giant ants as our primary “monster” threat until Cyber technology can reenter the plot as the book becomes more of a sequel to Illegal Alien over anything else.  The British Rocket Group and the space program seen in The Quatermass Experiment and its subsequent film adaptation take center stage in the plot for the first half, there even is a character named Kneale as tribute.  Tonally this is great for the novel, Tucker and Perry setting it in a very specific period of history and the pacing of the book takes on the pace of a very early science fiction serial with flashes of film noir.  Cody McBride and George Limb are our two major returning characters, McBride now being an older private detective being hired by American reporter Rita Hawks to investigate a classic case of adultery that isn’t adultery.  The book keeps the film noir elements until the timeline slipping becomes slowly more and more apparent but having McBride and the Doctor both fill a detective role leads to some of the lighter moments of the novel which are particularly great.  George Limb doesn’t fare as well.  He works well as the villain of the novel being run on survival instinct and an accrual of political power.

 

This is where the larger issues of Loving the Alien comes through.  Itis packed to the brim with ideas and plotlines that are constantly shifting and twisting.  The atomic monster plot of the giant ants is resolved so it can shift to explicitly use Cyber technology for political gain that is incoherent.  The explanation of the Waverider as being responsible for everything is also far too quick after a lot of buildup.  Loving the Alien does set up its many twists and turns, however, outside of the central Doctor/Ace conflict it becomes a mess.  The most egregious is Ace becoming pregnant with James Dean’s child.  Yes, that James Dean who slipped a timeline and didn’t die in the 1955 car crash.  The actual pregnancy happens almost too quickly and Ace’s own feelings on potentially having a child are not explored before her death and when resurrected it is undone.  Jimmy as James Dean is a twist that feels more like an idea that Tucker and Perry had without thinking it through.

 

Overall, Loving the Alien works best in the first half with the mounting sense of dread in the reader as Ace goes slowly to her death.  This is a novel where Mike Tucker and Robert Perry take some big swings that really do pay off by the end, even if that ending becomes all too cluttered with the resolution not entirely involving the Doctor’s actions enough.  The characterization is fantastic, and it does feel like a season finale to the several books leading up to this.  It’s also a book that is begging for Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred to star in an adaptation as a pair with Illegal Alien.  8/10.

Stairway to Heaven by: Paul Cornell and John Freeman with art by: Gerry Dolan and Rex Ward

 

“Stairway to Heaven” is written by: John Freeman and Paul Cornell with art by: Gerry Dolan and Rex Ward.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issue 152-155 (December 1989) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: Nemesis of the Daleks by Panini Books.

 

“Stairway to Heaven” is a one and done comic story all about modern art.  Okay, the modern art in question is basically the miniscope from Carnival of Monsters because this is the first commission for Doctor Who fan and now legend Paul Cornell, with editor John Freeman getting co-writing credit in the end.  You can certainly tell that a Doctor Who fan wrote this story, outside of the general idea of an art instillation having its own living society being allowed to evolve on its own.  The goal of the instillation is for the inhabitants to climb out of the instillation to meet their maker, genetic artist Garg Ardoniquist.  Honestly, the idea here is great, the underlying satire of a society that uses people as spectacle, only giving them delusions of grandeur that they might rise above their station is one of those things that screams Cornell and perfectly in line with what Doctor Who was doing on television at this time, this being the first story of the wilderness years.  Doctor Who is gone from television and the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip is making a story read as explicitly anti-capitalist.

 

Or at least it would be if it wasn’t for the sense that Cornell, or possibly Freeman, fell into the trap of portraying contemporary art as inherently highbrow and representative of capitalism.  Ardoniquist as a character is lauded by society, even in his death he is praised for getting involved in his own art.  It’s this weird, almost out of touch segment of the story.  “Stairway to Heaven” does at least characterize the Seventh Doctor’s anger quite well, even if this is still on his solo travels wandering into these situations.  Cornell is a writer who has so many ideas that like Grant Morrison’s “Culture Shock!” before it does not have enough time to really explore the ideas.  The ending of the strip is still quite effective at conveying the cycles of history, Cornell clearly wishing to play with the idea that even as technology advances society may not catch up, there just isn’t enough time to really get to the bottom of the ideas.  This is also the only strip drawn by Gerry Dolan and Rex Ward which is a shame because their work is quite good at feeling like a sophisticated piece of science fiction.  They’re particularly good at adapting Sylvester McCoy’s face into the strip, it’s very expressive but not enough to be a complete clown.

 

Overall, “Stairway to Heaven” struggles because there is not enough time to tell the story it wants to tell.  At the very least it does have something to say even if the deeper implications are actively contradictory to the surface satire being done with yet another short comic strip.  6/10.

Data's Day by: Harold Apter and Ronald D. Moore, from a story by: Harold Apter, and directed by: Robert Wiemer

 

“Data’s Day” is written by: Harold Apter and Ronald D. Moore, from a story by: Harold Apter, and is directed by: Robert Wiemer.  It was produced under production code 185, was the 11^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 85^th episode overall, and was broadcast on January 7, 1991.

 

“Data’s Day” is an example of what TV Tropes names ‘A Day in the Limelight’, an episode where a secondary character of an ensemble will be the focus but in a way that is largely atypical to a story’s established format.  Data has been the focus of several episodes before, they are often excellent, but they are also structurally standard episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  “Data’s Day” is presented as lower stakes despite the background plot of a secret diplomatic mission inside the Neutral Zone to rendezvous with the Romulans.  This is just one spear of the plot as there are multiple subplots circling around the marriage of transporter chief Miles O’Brien, played by Colm Meaney, and the other interactions through a day in the life of Data.  There is the obvious juxtaposition of high and low stakes being given the same weight in the eyes of Data by several small scenes where Data interacts with other characters.  Brent Spiner narrates the episode with Data’s personal logs in the always measured tone that sets the tone and atmosphere more than anything else in the script.  This makes “Data’s Day” such an effective episode, the breaking of the typical format means that we thoroughly examine who Data is while not tempting a viewer with a more interesting episode happening just off-screen.  The Romulan plot is the closest thing to a B-plot the episode actually has and Data does become important to discovering the twist that the Vulcan ambassador was actually a Romulan agent who had infiltrated the Federation.  The tension of faking her death using the transporter is perhaps a bit too brief, but the plot also isn’t the point of the episode as the reveal comes about through exploration of Data’s own love of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

 

Much of the episode is presented as examining Data’s lack of emotions in situations, however, underneath the text there is the idea that Data’s emotions are just experienced a different way from the way human beings experience emotions.  There is a scene early in the episode where he attempts to joke with Geordi La Forge, outright insulting him, and Geordi immediately recognizes what Data is doing and does not chastise him for it.  The interesting bit of logic is that Data realizes that he could only attempt what he sees as good-natured ribbing with someone like Geordi and not, for example, Captain Picard.  As much as he would deny it, Data has deep personal connections.  He has friends.  The episode posits he is the character on the Enterprise with the most friends because of how different he processes and displays his emotions.  There’s a clear reason why he has earned the trust of everyone on the ship because of the way he experiences the world, not despite it.  His part in O’Brien’s wedding is to walk the bride, Keiko played by Rosalind Chao, down the aisle, an honor that would only be given to someone akin to family.  Ending the episode on the wedding followed by Data taking command of the Enterprise for a night shift is a particularly beautiful image about humanity.

 

Data’s own internal conflict around the wedding is twofold, the one most important to the episode is his anxieties of ruining Keiko and Miles’ big day.  There is a sequence in the episode where Data learns to dance from Dr. Crusher, Gates McFadden getting the chance to show off her skills as a dancer and choreographer.  There is a miscommunication, and the initial dance is not a slow, ballroom, but an energetic Broadway style tap dance.  In the hands of a lesser writer or two lesser performers, this is a scene that should be superfluous and drag the episode down, but from both McFadden’s choreography and the fact that for his part Brent Spiner’s history on Broadway means he can keep up.  They are both keeping the characters’ deep trust and friendship present throughout this dance and the explanation as to why Data cannot easily pick up the simpler steps of ballroom dancing.  Data’s literal minded thinking means that he can easily copy the complicated steps of tap dance, but the spontaneity and connection inherent in a slow dance is a skillset that Data blocks himself from having.  It’s a skill he has to learn, paralleled with his own interactions with Chao as Keiko.  Harold Apter and Ronald D. Moore introduce Keiko as a bride having jitters on her wedding day and while they do not give her as explicit an arc as they could, they do use her to examine how rigid Data is.  Like his emotions, Data experiences love differently and cannot understand exactly how cancelling the wedding the day of is something odd.  Meany as O’Brien equally gets time to shine with Chao, both having chemistry in their brief scenes together.  It’s the wedding resolution that coalesces the thesis statement of “Data’s Day”, despite our differences, people belong to the world in their own way and nobody deserves to be relegated as outsider.

 

Overall, “Data’s Day” works so well because we adhere to a different storytelling format than the rest of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Even with the sheer amount of Data focused episodes, this being the third episode this season after “Brothers” and “Legacy” to center the character, “Data’s Day” finds something new and exclusively humanist to say about where society needs to be.  Much of it gets away with it by simply showing how these different people exist with one another and are inarguably drawn closer because of this.  It’s a day in the life and that can be the happiest thing in the universe.  9/10.

The Dresden Files: Twelve Months by: Jim Butcher

 

The Dresden Files’ routes in classic pulp noir fiction mixed with the 1990s sense of fantasy was what drew me to it six years ago.  The series changed, gradually, never quite outside of its urban fantasy roots but closer to an epic that by Peace Talks and Battle Ground there were several pieces on the board and the internal world had changed: the supernatural revealed, a main character killed in a rather emotional but sexist manner, and Jim Butcher continued a streak of five year gaps between the books in limbo as to how to continue.  Twelve Months is a book that by Butcher’s own admission was not part of the initial plan, yet it’s The Dresden Files novel that feels the most personal.  The Law, released in 2022, almost reads in retrospect as the catalyst for Butcher writing Twelve Months, not as a stopgap but with real intention to examine the new world pushing the series forward.  In his personal life it becomes clear reading Twelve Months that the pain Harry Dresden is going through is at the very least semiautobiographical.  The conclusion of Twelve Months is an obvious one, but one that everyday people sometimes just need to hear again, that healing from grief takes time and is a different process for everyone and that one’s community is more important than anything.  People may become scared in the face of disaster, those selfish enough will stoke them into violence, but in the end it’s the people that are why we do what we do.  It is not for me to speculate as to whatever hardship Butcher experienced in writing Twelve Months, but this is the novel of a man who has also changed in the time between books, as we all must.

 

Let’s get the major criticisms of the novel out of the way.  While the time span of the novel being a year allows for more time and a deeper focus on the character work, Butcher does not adjust to the pacing of a year in approximately 450 pages for the first 100 pages.  There are points, especially early on, where editorial mistakes have slipped through the cracks: Harry having the same internal expositive narration which is very likely a mistake that was not caught in editing as the most egregious example.  The emotional climax of the novel also happens approximately 50 pages before the final action sequence acting as a second climax instead of a falling action.  This is a perfectly fine action sequence, but it does read more as a tease for things to come with what it represents, and it releases some dramatic tension between Harry and Thomas almost too quickly, but this might be part of Butcher’s own reconciling of issues with himself.  It does at least thematically fit within Twelve Months’ thesis of people coming together.  What may have incorporated it more would be if the subplot of citizens in unrest and protesting Dresden and the now revealed supernatural had more of a presence.  Again, Butcher expresses this subplot as repetitive scenes instead of developing it within the narrative.  The attempt is to make the protesters seem normal, scared people who just wish to go back to something they could never get back, but it reads as if Butcher is not really making a stance or giving enough of their perspective.  Not giving any of them individual identities is particularly weak, they are not characters but a means to an end to have the secondary climax occur.

 

Where Twelve Months really succeeds is the examination of Harry Dresden as a man becoming less and less human.  In covering a year in Harry’s life, Butcher draws on the entire tangled web of being the Winter Knight, Murphy’s death, the destruction of Chicago, and Thomas being in a coma.  Practically every character Butcher has introduced throughout the series somewhere and introduces several new characters as setup for the end of The Dresden Files which is clearly approaching including a new apprentice in Fitz, a bodyguard Valkyrie Bear, and several gargoyles, but it is use of Molly Carpenter as Harry’s anchor to humanity that is fascinating.  They are both under the power of Mab and the Winter Court, making them equals of their own sort.  Molly has grown as a character, Twelve Months casting off any remaining shackles of her attraction to Harry, instead the pair find solace in friendship.  While the conclusion of the novel is that Harry has several friends, he does push several of them away.  Molly is the one who tells Harry that he needs to be a father to his own daughter, and much of the novel hangs on Harry taking those little moments to do that.  Maggie becomes the one aspect of Harry’s life that he can keep his agency with, the twists of Twelve Months being specific to how both Lara Raith and the White Court of vampires and Mab and her Winter Court have their own machinations.  The engagement between Harry and Lara is the other major subplot of the novel.  Butcher is restrained here, this could easily have fallen back into misogynistic tropes with Lara as the femme fatale, but the growing platonic relationship between Harry and Lara has its own type of sweetness.  It’s sweet enough that when Winter’s plans are revealed, the betrayal feels as horrific as it should as stealing agency from the cogs in the machine that is society is an idea at the heart of Twelve Months.  While there is occasional power fantasy involved, mainly in Harry building towards getting exactly what he wants, Butcher does remember to put a price on things, an obvious price for any genre savvy reader, but still a price to add at least some bittersweet weight among the novel’s generally happy ending.

 

Overall, Twelve Months is close to a return to form after the underwhelming regression found in The Law.  The Law feels more like a prelude to what Butcher was working through with Twelve Months as something almost entirely different to what The Dresden Files has become.  Different is actually what the series needed to put pieces in place and really allow for development of the characters as an endgame comes slightly clearer into view.   It’s a novel emblematic in the change of the last six years, weakest when elements from earlier drafts and ideas slip through the cracks, but Butcher brings just enough of the charm to make it one of the stronger entries in the series.  8/10.

Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Light by: Claudia Gray

 

After three phases of The High Republic, Claudia Gray made me feel terrible when a rock with absolutely no dialogue but so much characterization sacrifices itself.  Geode as an integral crew of the Vessel has been in this publishing initiative since the beginning, almost out of place in Star Wars as a franchise while being presented as almost coming from the pen of the late great Douglas Adams.  Gray’s decision to end the character in self-sacrifice while being placed in the third act of Into the Light symbolizes an end of the young adult line, the entire novel swerving to an ending where the protagonists don’t win.  Gray ends the novel not on a downer, but a sense of growing up while the Nihil are still out there and the publishing initiative is coming to an end.  Geode’s death is a focusing of the novel to the destruction of a Thornseed, an artefact of the Sith, that when destroyed indicates a returning of the light to the galaxy.  The trouble there is that before this point, Gray had been building up that Into the Light would be about undoing the blight that had been spreading across the galaxy.  To Gray’s credit, there is very likely somebody higher up at Lucasfilm stopping her from resolving that plot in this novel, but the ever present threat of the blight is the drive behind the actions of the novel.  The Thornseed provides a last minute goal as it becomes clear that destroying the blight is not going to be what this book does.  That isn’t to say the Thornseed is not interesting, it’s essentially an evil terraforming device that makes plants evil which leads to some great scenes, it just feels like an extra addition pushing the trajectory of Into the Light away.

 

Claudia Gray, despite weakening the ending of the novel in this way, is still an excellent writer when it comes to character work.  Gray understands that the overarching story is in fact winding down.  Interestingly there is a lot of development for Burryaga and the Wookiees as a culture, examining how their experiences as Padawans to Jedi work differently.  Like Geode, Wookiees not speaking English means that there is not actually dialogue, but the planet Kashyyk being afflicted with the blight is one of those turning points where the book tonally becomes more real.  The blight throughout presents this larger than life threat, despite Marchion Ro wishing to show the galaxy he has it under his control to position himself as political savior it couldn’t be further from the truth.  Watching the Nihil slowly unravel themselves is particularly interesting, while Avon Starros deals with the real fear that if the Jedi unravel her safety is in danger, unknowingly being in a similar position to her mother.  This is largely as another addition to the idea of the galaxy being at war with something far bigger than itself.  The Thornseed represents things becoming too big, when it falls there is a sense of everything falling around it.  Seeing the Nihil internally begin to fall apart is one of those additions to the novel that create this sense of hope at its core, especially when considering how much of this book is also focused on Amadeo Azzazzo and Reath Silas, even if their respective character arcs while continued in this novel are on the downward trajectory towards resolution.  There is also the active effort to connect the book to more familiar Star Wars ideas: the Sith get several mentions throughout and there is something more present about the character of Yoda different from other books in The High Republic.

 

Overall, Into the Light while continuing to be good is a novel that reads as if something is missing.  The ending leaves you with this question of if there should be more, not in a way of a forthcoming sequel, but in a way that the ideas are gone.  The idea of the light returning as the villains become too big to keep their empire going.  It is a novel that is clearly the resolution to much of what had been setup and for the young adult line there is a satisfying conclusion for the characters even if the plot is still technically going by the end.  7/10.

The Loss by: Hilary J. Bader, Allan J. Adler, and Vanessa Greene, from a story by: Hilary J. Bader, and directed by: Chip Chalmers

 

“The Loss” is written by: Hilary J. Bader, Alan J. Adler, and Vanessa Greene, from a story by: Hilary J. Bader, and is directed by: Chip Chalmers.  It was produced under production code 184, was the 10^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 84^th episode overall, and was broadcast on December 31, 1990.

 

“The Loss” is a complicated and deeply problematic episode.  Structurally it fits right in with the character focused brief of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.  The idea at the core of “The Loss” is examining the reality that anybody could become disabled, permanently or temporarily.  This is represented in the episode by Deanna Troi losing her empathic abilities due to the Enterprise encountering an energy phenomenon.  The crew understanding the phenomenon makes up the episode’s B-plot, discovering it to be two dimensional creatures heading towards a cosmic string which would tear the ship apart.  The B-plot is an example of a good B-plot, if one that is clearly underdeveloped due to the script having three distinct voices, and the resolution to that plot being what restores Troi’s empathic abilities as the status quo needs to be largely maintained in these episodes.  On the surface, the episode should be simple: focusing on the emotional fallout of a character becoming disabled is a bold and progressive choice for 1990.  Marina Sirtis plays Troi as incredibly distraught, fully committing to the loss of one of her senses and becoming an outsider among the crew due to the empathic abilities inhabiting a second nature of the character.  Where the script succeeds is at the raw emotion of the situation and the initial rejection of her friends’ sympathy.  That sympathy is portrayed as subconsciously ableist, and rightfully so, as a disabled person is not a broken person who needs fixing.  There is an almost immediate acknowledgement of certain myths about the disabled, such as the sharpening of other senses being unscientific for the reliance on other senses.  Sirtis’ performance is a powerhouse performance with this aspect of the material.  Troi throughout the first act is attempting to make adjustments but is not quite able to recover her ability pre-disability.

 

Absent are the question of accommodation for the lost sense, Troi as the ship’s counselor is expected to deal with part of her mind being forcibly removed on her own, which is the first sign of cracks within the episode as it moves past the first act.  This is made worse by how the other characters react to Troi’s condition.  There is an implication that these empathic abilities subconsciously put Troi above the other members of the crew, Riker even calling her aristocratic which reads as a substitution for having a superiority complex, which is not explored nearly enough.  This is the strongest aspect of “The Loss” after the first act even if it is incredibly shallow, only used as some flirting played wonderfully by Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes and ultimately dismissed.  There is a moment where Picard tells Troi that the loss of her empathic abilities just makes her the same as other counselors, something the episode frames as a disabled person being an inspiration for the able bodied.  This is particularly odd as earlier in the episode the script is clearly aware of this exact trope and why it is problematic, only to play the trope straight, a further indication of three writers contributing to the script.  This lack of accommodation could also have been integrated into the plot actively as a limitation of Starfleet’s structure, Troi as the only counselor is a problem as the episode clearly wants to position her as needing counseling as accommodation.  The loss of empathic abilities is used as an allegory for physical ability, using a science fiction based mental ability in its placed, and as the episode moves further away from the initial incident writers Hilary J. Bader, Alan J. Adler, and Vanessa Greene forget that Deanna Troi is still an adult with a neurotypical brain functioning in the same capacity as an adult, neurotypical human being.  “The Loss” posits that Troi is not a qualified counselor without these fictional empathic abilities, going so far as to make her incompetent and unable to perform her duties as counselor.  According to the script, she lacks basic human empathy.  A generous reading of the episode would have this be another aspect of the grief of losing the empathic abilities and the road to acceptance of that loss, overestimating how much her empathic abilities were relied upon.

 

Troi is paralleled with a recently widowed crewmember to explore how the road to cope with a loss, though a different type of loss, is one of ups and downs.  However, this is an episode that instead of showing Troi going on that journey, this is told to her by her coworkers.  Once again, Star Trek: The Next Generation infantilizes one of its few female characters, ignoring their own agency and failing to characterize them as a full adult capable of making her own decisions.  Were this just an extension of her grief, while it would likely not read as perfect it would be a softened blow.  Paralleling Troi with a widow clearly wants to show Troi not being able to see where she is making the same mistakes and focusing on the wrong details, but having her coworkers spell it out like this makes it worse.  It takes away Troi’s agency once again, continuing the clear pattern of the character.  Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan is included as pseudo-counselor since she is a bartender and yet from a performance standpoint Goldberg is almost uncomfortable with the role she is given here.  This is not because she cannot play the character, she has done in practically every previous appearance, but because on some level Goldberg understands what’s wrong with the script.  The episode then resolves itself; the breakthrough is incredibly short, lacking impact.  Troi gets some snippy lines towards Dr. Crusher to indicate a new confidence and the episode ends.

 

Overall, “The Loss” is an episode that uses more emotional manipulation.  Watching it the performances are obviously quite strong, strong enough that until writing this review I was even leaning towards positivity despite some rough edges.  Then you take the time to think about exactly what was being said after the first act and how Troi as a character is continually infantilized, losing any agency and being painted as an incompetent counselor as base state.  There is an implication of bigotry towards humanity that goes unexamined in favor of flirtation and a joke, while the script itself clearly has conflicting voices about how disabled people are meant to be viewed.  If it wasn’t for the first act’s genuinely progressive look at becoming disabled (at least for a 1990 episode of television), this would be among the absolute worst of the show, possibly even the franchise.  3/10.

Final Mission by: Kacey Arnold-Ince and Jeri Taylor from a story by: Kacey Arnold-Ince and directed by: Corey Allen

 

“Final Mission” is written by: Kacey Arnold-Ince and Jeri Taylor, from a story by: Kacey Arnold-Ince, and is directed by: Corey Allen.  It was produced under production code 183, was the 9^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 83^rd episode overall, and was broadcast on November 19, 1990.

 

Wil Wheaton’s decision to leave Star Trek: The Next Generation is a moment in fandom that was unfairly celebrated.  Wesley Crusher is a character who entered the gestalt of pop culture as the prime example of an annoying child character who saved the day when the adults in the room failed to see solutions right under their noses.  This is a kinder stating of the sentiment early internet forums at the time displayed.  This assessment has issues.  While there certainly are episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Wesley is responsible for saving the day, especially in the first season, this is due to the writing staff not knowing what to do with the character.  His journey to become an ensign and enter Starfleet Academy is a compelling character arc, Wheaton as an actor is allowed to grow even if he’d already proven himself as a competent actor with earlier film appearances such as Stand by Me.  Wesley Crusher is a character who works best when he’s allowed to be written as a child and not an adult in a child’s body or Gene Roddenberry’s self-insert.  Even subpar or mediocre episodes like “Coming of Age” are elevated by characterizing Wesley as a full character and not a sketch of what these adult writers think a child acts like.  Wesley’s exit from Star Trek: The Next Generation came about because on paper Wil Wheaton wished to pursue film opportunities, and the production staff of the show would not accommodate him.  Wheaton has spoken of other reasons for leaving, including emotional abuse from his father contributed to the decision.  His decision to leave, like Denise Crosby before him, is entirely due to being rightfully unhappy with choices made by the production team, usually placed at the feet of executive producer Rick Berman.

 

“Final Mission” opens with Picard informing Wesley he has been accepted into Starfleet Academy, he has two weeks to report and will be accompanying him on a final mission to mediate a mining dispute.  Picard and Wesley are joined by a Captain Dirgo, played by Nick Tate, while the Enterprise is taken to resolve a distress call involving a radiation leak and a mysterious spaceship as the B-plot of the episode.  The A-plot is the shuttle crashing onto a desert moon, cut off from the Enterprise.  The episode is a race against the clock to save themselves, Picard as the calm and rational man in a crisis while Dirgo is always on the knife’s edge of exploding.  Wesley is caught in the middle, “Final Mission” acting narratively as a final test for the character to see how far he has grown.  The weakest part of the episode is the B-plot, it’s perfectly serviceable and puts Riker in the spotlight but it is at this point a standard Star Trek plot.  The A-plot could also be described as a quintessential Star Trek plot where the dramatic tension is being put on the acting ability of Wil Wheaton to deliver on the episode’s premise.  Wheaton is up for it, Kacey Arnold-Ince and Jeri Taylor (Taylor more than Arnold-Ince) write plenty of material to examine how much he has grown and how much he still has ahead of him.  The more interesting elements are Wesley’s own need for paternal approval from Picard, the final line being Patrick Stewart giving Wesley that pride and approval.

 

Picard is not Wesley’s father, even if Picard and Dr. Crusher have chemistry, but he is the father figure in the child’s life.  The episode ends with this admission of pride, not a goodbye from Dr. Crusher to her son.  Crusher is in the episode, but Star Trek: The Next Generation would not be Star Trek: The Next Generation without leaving a female character with less to do than their male counterparts.  Dr. Crusher in this episode is part of the B-plot and only in the final act of the episode where she does get to be concerned for her son, Gates McFadden playing the material she is given quite well.  The shame is that there is not enough of the material to really excel at portraying the relationship between a parent and child.  A deeper reading of it and the previous episodes to include interactions between Crusher and her son as shallower than interactions between Wesley and his male counterparts.  Star Trek: The Next Generation is still a show largely made by men and “Final Mission” is a revelation of how it separates the relationship between father and son over mother and son as different and almost incompatible.  Indicating a rigid view of gender, Dr. Crusher is not a character who can provide the same type of pride and approval that Picard can to Wesley because she is a woman, he is a man.  She is his mother and could not understand the male psyche, while Picard can.  Jeri Taylor’s influence on this episode specifically makes that about the absence of the father Wesley never knew, however, the reflection on the series is there.  Picard gets the last word, Beverly barely gets one.

 

Overall, “Final Mission” works as a good exit for Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher.  There is certainly more care than the last time a cast member was being written out, Jeri Taylor’s position on the production team is certainly additive to the experience.  Wheaton’s performance is his strongest in the series, even if the script is doing in the greater scheme of television a basic final episode for a character.  Where it falls is the B-plot being largely uninteresting and not including enough of Dr. Crusher in a parental capacity except for worry and a brief scene at the end of reunion.  “Final Mission” is the definition of a standard good episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  7/10.

Reckless Engineering by: Nick Walters

 

The cover of Reckless Engineering is one of the more effective from the BBC Books.  An alteration of an 1857 photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in front of the launching chains of the SS Great Eastern turned askew with head replaced by skull, the imagery evokes death and altered history.  The Eighth Doctor Adventures’ alternate timeline arc is alluded to by the specific edits made to the photograph while indicating an example of a celebrity pseudohistorical.  Nick Walters does eventually include Brunel as a character, though this is largely in the final act, as Reckless Engineering is another alternate present story following The Domino Effect, Time Zero, and to a lesser extent The Infinity Race.  On its surface, it shares a premise with The Domino Effect: the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji arrive on Earth where technological development has been arrested and society plunged into dystopia.  David Bishop puts this around the development of the computer through Sabbath’s intervention while Walters is far less specific, setting Reckless Engineering in a world where the initial alteration was far less violent.  The intervention is seemingly additive, an effort to preserve humanity, implied to be due to the end of The Domino Effect, causes a temporal acceleration.  The population of Earth is forced to age 40 years in the span of a few minutes, causing babies to suddenly become adults, the middle aged to suddenly die, and society to collapse.  Walters presents this in retrospect, setting the novel 150 years from the presumed divergence point.  Technology has not progressed, England has turned to religion for comfort, and there is a segment of humanity regressed to animalistic desires that are often shot sight.

 

Where the first half of Reckless Engineering succeeds is the exploration of setting, Walters paces the chapter breaks whenever a mini cliffhanger seems necessary.  The Doctor, Fitz, and Anji integrate themselves with the society from the perspective of it being an alternate 2003 and not the mid-1800s.  Walters does fall into the trap of bringing up Anji’s race almost as a lampshade while during much of the story pushing her aside as lost in the time vortex when fixing the alternate timeline becomes the focus on the plot, but she is great through the first half of the novel.  This is especially great since the Doctor and Fitz are explicitly paralleled, each taking a strong moral stance as the ‘reckless engineering’ of the title is not of Brunel, his engineering is lauded throughout as making the modern world what it is, but of the Doctor.  The Doctor is determined to correct the timeline as he would in every Doctor Who story with a similar premise.  The question becomes what if this “alternate” timeline is not alternate, that the aberration is what the reader and the Doctor would call the “proper” timeline.  Fitz becomes an advocate for this, even when Anji is thrown into the time vortex, with the evidence being that the alteration was created by an evolved species of human called the Eternine.  The alteration was simply trying to bring them into existence sooner rather than later.  Fitz and the Doctor have one of their biggest rifts in quite a few books over this, Fitz knowing that the Doctor is going to be condemning many of these peoples into unexistence.

 

Walters does falter, Malahyde, the poet possessed by the Eternine Watchlar, is in fact lying and the Eternine come from their own pocket universe.  This revelation does weaken the novel, Walters not sticking to his guns and softening the actions of the Doctor who becomes unraveled when his initial attempts to fix the timeline fail and Fitz begins to integrate into the alternate universe even by bringing Brunel to this future and Anji falling on the TARDIS in the time vortex.  Brunel in the TARDIS is an incredibly charming sequence, there’s something inherently charming of a historical engineer coming to terms with time travel and the Jules Verne aesthetics of the Eighth Doctor’s TARDIS.  Even Malahyde does an interesting switch from passionate poet to possessed villain.  Fitz integrating, however, barely lasts a chapter and these decisions are made in the final third of the novel.  There is too much setup getting there, yet the setup is not bad setup.  Walters’ supporting characters are strong with Aboetta as the point of view character allowing the reader to see the TARDIS team from the outside, often focusing on the Doctor’s blue eyes as visual purity for a deeply disturbed mind, almost creating this ghost of Sabbath hanging over the novel where he does not actually appear.  The Doctor since The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and Camera Obscura has become a darker figure despite his place as the protagonist and in the end as the hero.  His actions are controversial for a reason, and not exploring them more thoroughly is what holds back Reckless Engineering from greatness.

 

Overall, Reckless Engineering despite almost single handedly justifying the alternate universe arc after two particular duds, does fall flat by being limited into the 280-page count of the BBC Books line.  Walters spends almost too much time on setup for a bigger story, falling flat by not being able to explore all the ideas it proposes.  There’s enough here to make it a good novel, the Doctor’s arc being both what works best and leaves something to be desired by giving him a slightly more heroic sense of morality in the end of the book.  The historical aspects of the story do work well, but despite the cover they are actually in the background for much of the novel and it helps that Walters is doing something different with the alternate history idea here.  It helps get the series out of a mediocre spell of Eighth Doctor Adventures.  7/10.

Future Imperfect by: J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carren and directed by: Les Landau

 

“Future Imperfect” is written by: J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carren and is directed by: Les Landau.  It was produced under production code 182, was the 8^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 82^nd episode overall, and was broadcast on November 12, 1990.

 

“Future Imperfect” nestles two twists inside itself, with the second recontextualizing the episode into meaning far less than without it.  The premise of “Future Imperfect” puts Riker in a dreamscape of his potential future where he has everything he wanted: command of the Enterprise and a happy if slightly bittersweet marriage with son he could not be more proud of despite his tumultuous relationship with his own father.  He does not remember the events leading up to his command of the Enterprise, the episode opening with a transporter accident “infecting” Riker with an alien retrovirus that rewrites his memory.  The setup is a riff on what TV Tropes calls the Lotus Eater Machine: it’s a fantasy to trick Riker into complacency and a life that he would be happy in even if it was unchallenged. The Federation is actively in peace talks with the Romulan, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard overseeing for the Federation and Tomalak from “The Enemy” and “The Defector” for the Romulans.  Jonathan Frakes plays Riker as never quite complacent and seeing through the cracks of the fantasy scenario as the Romulan presence makes him uncomfortable and the awkwardness of being a father to a son he cannot remember is fascinating.  Frakes playing against Chris Demetral as his son Jean-Luc are the best scenes of the episode and Demetral has enough screen presence to work.  There are also multiple scenes where Riker plays the trombone, these little character moments making the episode what it is.  The first twist, the “obvious” twist, that the future is not the future but a holodeck scenario from Tomalak to coax out the location of a Federation outpost which would bring the Federation and Romulans closer to war.

 

This initial scenario and this first reality of the Romulans using Riker’s own desires against him as the holodeck scenario is from his subconscious mind is in conversation with The Best of Both Worlds and Riker’s decision to stay first officer on the Enterprise.  His subconscious tells him that he does want command but only the Enterprise, no other ship would satisfy him.  The desire can only come to pass for Riker if Picard fulfills his own command duties, the promotion to admiral allowing a standard transfer of command for both men at the correct time.  The scenario is superficially perfect, the crack that gives it away is that Riker’s dead wife is Minuet and his son Jean-Luc is not real.  Jean-Luc is actually a child called Ethan captured by the Romulans inserted into the fantasy, and with the reveal the episode shifts into an escape from their base.  It is a statement that Riker does not want an easy future, he does not want to give into the fantasies of an easy life.  This is a restatement and examination of who Riker is as a character, and then the episode throws it away for a secondary twist.  It is not in fact the Romulans, but Ethan creating these fantasy scenarios.  Ethan is a lonely alien in a really bad grey mask as the last survivor of his race, hidden from unknown invaders.  J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carren are taking the themes the first 40 minutes of “Future Imperfect” and throwing them out the window.  A charitable read is Carroll and Carren with this twist are attempting to make the episode about isolation and needing to find connection, the alien just wants to find a place where it can belong, and Riker does take him back to the Enterprise.  The final line does indicate Riker regards Ethan as Jean-Luc, the son from the initial scenario, but that does not say anything about either of these themes as Riker does not know this alien who might be called Ethan (the script is unclear).

 

In both fantasy scenarios, “Future Imperfect” as an episode is playing out like a standard, character focused episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Les Landau is in the director’s chair and continues his understanding of dramatic blocking, even in the scenes set in reality such as Riker’s birthday party and the final scene in the cave communicating the character’s emotions where the script is lacking.  Outside of the alien’s true form, the older designs for the regular cast also look great, the silliest being putting Patrick Stewart in a silly mustache while the grey streaks in Jonathan Frakes’ hair works quite well.  The crew of the Enterprise are given obvious futures: only Picard has moved on, Wesley is nowhere to be seen as that would involve recasting Wil Wheaton as an adult, Data has not changed outside of his position into a red shirt, and Geordi La Forge now has implants that allow him to see without his visor.  There is a very subtle detail in LeVar Burton’s performance of looking more intently as a blind person regaining sight would, emphasizing his eyes with specific head movements and slight strains while Landau’s direction is not giving Burton close ups.  The Romulan base is also quite a nice sequence of sets, this episode clearly getting a full budget to build new environments that sell it as reality, even if they could just reuse the Enterprise holodeck.

 

Overall, “Future Imperfect” while not a bad episode, ends by effectively removing much of the depth that it had by ending a plot challenging Riker’s view of the Romulans and implying his loyalty to Starfleet and the Federation could even be tested when abandoned on a Romulan base for something about loneliness.  J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carren write an episode too long and could not see a way to cut things down so implemented a secondary twist that’s the equivalent of a thought terminating cliché.  Luckily most of the episode is still solid and bolstered by Jonathan Frakes’ performance throughout even trying to wrap the final scene into the rest of the episode.  6/10.

Nemesis of the Daleks by: Richard and Steve Alan with art by: Lee Sullivan and lettering by: Zed

 

“Nemesis of the Daleks” is written by: Richard and Steve Alan (pseudonyms for Richard Starkings and John Tomlinson) with art by: Lee Sullivan, and lettering by: Zed (a pseudonym for Richard Starkings).  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issue 152-155 (August-November 1989) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: Nemesis of the Daleks by Panini Books.

 

Abslom Daak is a throwback character from the early days of Doctor Who Magazine.  Created by Steve Moore and Steve Dillon for the backup strip, two stories reprinted in the back of the collected edition of Nemesis of the Daleks, he is a character that fits so well into what the 1990s would bring for Doctor Who that in many ways “Nemesis of the Daleks” reads as a statement for where Doctor Who is going.  This was the last strip released by Doctor Who Magazine while Doctor Who was in its original run, finishing release in the middle of The Curse of Fenric, and tonally it’s taking itself far more seriously than anything the Seventh Doctor’s comic run had done so far.  This story reads as a special event, Abslom Daak makes his debut proper in a Doctor Who story and writers Richard Starkings and John Tomlinson directly write a sequel to Remembrance of the Daleks.  This amount of crossover with the parent show at this point is a particularly bold choice, like using Peri during the Sixth Doctor’s era, it’s making its own statement as to what Doctor Who wants to be.  Tonally this story moves away from what had been mostly lighter fare, following a very Season 24 Seventh Doctor as he stayed in the backseat of most of the stories with writers interested in writing other things.  Starkings and Tomlinson do continue the trend of the Doctor as background character, but here he is characterized as a far more serious figure.  The Daleks bring out the danger as they are essentially following the plot of Star Wars in creating a Death Wheel under their emperor, heavily implied by the Doctor to be a Davros who is now fully Dalek.  The plot is simple, using the archetype of Star Wars to show the Daleks as a great, galactic empire bent on destruction and putting the comic version of the Seventh Doctor in a scenario where he cannot make jokes.

 

At the heart of “Nemesis of the Daleks” is Abslom Daak as more than just a Dalek Killer.  Starkings and Tomlinson do write him with Steve Moore esque dialogue, emphasizing the joy that he gets from slicing Daleks in half while artist Lee Sullivan is clearly having fun with the inventive ways that can happen, but there’s the constant undercurrent of a man who just lost all the allies he held dear under the surface.  There’s a reason the Doctor allies with him, he can see the man determined to see the Daleks defeated underneath all the bluster and machismo.  He is motivated by the possibility of saving the love of his wife, the Princess Taiyin who is held in suspended animation at the moment of her death.  She dies here anyway, quite literally being a woman held in a refrigerator until the point of her death which is a shame as based on the original “Abslom Daak…Dalek Killer!” and “Star Tigers” strip there was actually development that could have been done when given to a different writer.  Her sexist handling is largely the biggest black mark against this story, as “Nemesis of the Daleks” despite being highly derivative is a well told story.  Sullivan’s art is elevating much of the more derivative material by looking modern, formatting itself with panel layout that is far closer to what the rest of the industry was doing while maintaining this realistic style.  The use of inks is particularly moody, Sullivan taking advantage of the mediums to portray the Daleks in these immense numbers, often relegated to the shadows with what seems to be hundreds just waiting to converge.  This is also very much a tribute to Terry Nation’s style of storytelling.  The setting is the planet Hell and visually the Emperor is the Golden Dalek Emperor from the early 1960s comics.  In a way Starkings, Tomlinson, and Sullivan are tributing the past while making way for a future of darker storytelling.  The question is will that be where the strip goes at this point?

 

Overall, it’s just nice to have such a solid Seventh Doctor comic strip after an entire volume of ups and downs.  “Nemesis of the Daleks” while wearing influences on its sleeve is elevated to near great status by the work of Lee Sullivan and by using its four part structure to focus on one character who was already established in the script, even if he hadn’t appeared in a decade.  It’s not a nostalgia based story, but one that works because of stronger characterization and while the Doctor is on the sideline he is clearly the Doctor, making plans and pushing pieces to quickly defeat the Daleks.  8/10.

Reunion by: Thomas & Jo Perry, Ronald D. Moore, and Brannon Braga, from a story by: Drew Deighan and Thomas and Jo Perry, and directed by: Jonathan Frakes

 

“Reunion” is written by: Thomas & Jo Perry, Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, from a story by: Drew Deighan and Thomas & Jo Perry, and is directed by: Jonathan Frakes.  It was produced under production code 181, was the 7^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 81^st episode overall, and was broadcast on November 5, 1990.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation is asking a lot of its viewers with “Reunion”.  This is the first episode to pull together different aspects of story and character arcs running through multiple seasons of the show into a single episode.  It also ends indicating that the story arc is not complete, “Reunion” is just a regular episode, nestled in the weekly release schedule.  This is a regular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and it’s taking a bold swing at doing serialized television at a time before that is the norm.  The premise of the episode is K’Ehleyr, played by Suzie Plakson, returning with Worf’s son, Alexander, all while K’mpec, played by Charles Cooper, is dying and tasks Picard with overseeing the rituals to declare a new Chancellor for the Klingon Empire.  While Picard is the overseer of these rituals, this is a Worf episode, Patrick Stewart as Picard being satisfied as the diplomat and captain, making decisions to ensure that K’mpec’s murderer is revealed.  Yes, K’mpec is slowly being murdered in the setup, a slow acting poison that has no cure so we can have the episode plot happen.

 

This is explicitly a sequel to “Sins of the Father”, the script indicating until the very end that it is going to restore Worf’s honor, instead ending with a pile of dead bodies in a bloody conflict, Worf with a black mark on his record with the Federation and a new son living with his parents, and an additional vow of revenge and restoration of honor.  The episode further examines the honor system of the Klingons as this out of date idea that is holding the culture and empire back in the past.  It’s partially why the ending works as well as it does because Worf now has strong motivation to force the change to happen within the empire.  Michael Dorn’s final scenes of the episode, especially the one opposite Stewart as Picard, are particularly heartbreaking and some of his best work.  The ending is a grave note, Picard is stalwart that Worf made the wrong decisions in killing Duras in retaliation for his murder of K’Ehleyr even if under Klingon customs he acted properly.  Worf is perfectly content in continuing on the Enterprise with this black mark on his own record.

 

K’Ehleyr’s death is presented wonderfully, Jonathan Frakes is back in the director’s chair and the entire climax of the episode is just visually dynamic.  It’s threading a difficult needle, there was very much a real possibility of this being a case of fridging a female character.  Her death is the final act to get Worf to change, however, I would argue against this fitting in traditional fridging as that is not the only thing that gets her killed.  It’s tragedy, K’Ehleyr got too close to the truth of Duras’ treachery in “Sins of the Father” after the episode was further exploring her relationship with Worf.  Plakson and Dorn have this fantastic chemistry, continuing the opposing views between the pair on Klingon culture, Worf’s dishonor, and their own relationship.  Again this is an episode that indicates that they are going to become essentially a married couple, this only being stopped this time because of Worf’s expulsion from Klingon society.  Worf does put far more stock in the system of honor than K’Ehleyr does, the warrior code guides his every action right through the end of the episode and while it takes until the final line of the episode to acknowledge to Alexander that he is the boy’s father, he wishes his son to follow the same code.  K’Ehleyr’s status as only half Klingon means that she is presented again as far more human and flexible.  Her attitude towards Worf’s dishonor continues a thread that his parents began in “Family” of fully accepting him without the need for the customs, but for who the man is at his heart.  Worf for his part in “The Emissary” was in love with K’Ehleyr but here would not wish to dishonor her, and by extension Alexander.  It’s partially why K’Ehleyr hid his son from him, she did not want Worf’s insistence on honor to force them into a marriage because of a child, something the episode presents as a noble decision, quite progressive for television in 1990.

 

The episode is also fascinating that it presents Worf and K’Ehleyr’s different approaches to parenting Alexander as equally valid.  While K’Ehleyr’s parenting style is mostly off-screen, the episode devoting more time to Worf, it is one presented as allowing Alexander to choose his own path and eventually come to terms with his own identity as part Klingon and part human.  Worf, on the other hand, is arguably harsher as a parent, but much of that is because he is struggling to come to terms with the fact he has a child.  There is a scene early in the episode where Alexander lashes out at other children on the Enterprise, nearly getting violent, and Worf actually stops him because it would be dishonorable.  One should not attack an opponent who is weak enough as to not fight back, something that guides who Worf is as a person and is where the episode goes to question the actions by the end.  The script is good in leaving Alexander as a supporting character, Star Trek as a franchise does have a problem with writing child characters but here Alexander is allowed to be a particularly young child.  Alexander is played by Jon Steuer and there is a sense that it’s Jonathan Frakes’ direction that is getting him to give a performance.  It’s still the performance of a child, the line delivery is given with fairly basic grasp of the emotional context of the line, but it’s certainly better than other child performances on this franchise.  The performance is watchable which at this point is as much as you can really ask.

 

Overall, “Reunion” is an episode that takes a little bit of time to get going, not because it is lacking in material but because it is letting the character revelations breathe and the character dynamics to really sit with the viewer.  This is an episode that’s clearly setting something up for the future as a continuation of multiple episodes’ story arcs which is a bold choice, the script giving enough information and the performances enough emotion so newer viewers can pick up exactly where things are going.  This also means “Reunion” works as a standalone episode with Klingon culture and Worf at the center of it all, despite being from several different writers.  Likely the final script is Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga doing a final rewrite on the Perry’s initial script.  Jonathan Frakes is a director who gets Michael Dorn to give one of his absolute best performances thus far and the episode is just an emotional rollercoaster.  9/10.

Blue Box by: Kate Orman

 

Blue Box does not refer to the TARDIS in its title, instead it is Kate Orman’s return to an idea she initially proposed to Virgin Publishing as The Pinocchio Virus, potentially tying into her novel SLEEPY.  It was always meant to be a story involving the Sixth Doctor, Peri, and a computer virus, based on the title eventually evolving into Blue Box’s Savant.  The connection to SLEEPY feels particularly strong in Blue Box, if only spiritually, with Savant being very much in the same vein of the artificial intelligences that exist and influence the living.  Savant’s influence is far more corrupting, it creates this extreme attachment to someone, driving them into a madness where Savant is the only real thing in existence.  Orman does present Savant as amoral rather than immoral: it is a creature created by the people of Epsilon Eridani that accidentally made its way to the Earth, this entire novel being an accidental plot.  The real villain of the novel is Sarah Swan, a computer hacker slowly manipulated by Savant into an attempt to take over the world in a series of increasingly manic episodes that in the end leave her a husk of a person.  It’s a particularly cruel ending for someone but Blue Box is in many ways a particularly cruel novel.  Orman is examining identity and humanity with Blue Box, using Doctor Who as the framework to do this.  Now, it’s important to note that this was a novel written and published in 2003, 23 years ago from the time this review is being written and that I am a cisgender man.  There are aspects of Blue Box that while I will not shy away from discussing them, I am not the final authority as to what they represent.

 

This is a novel that while undoubtedly a Doctor Who novel, takes a first-person approach to the narrative.  It’s presented like David Bishop’s Who Killed Kennedy? as cowritten between Orman and journalist Charles “Chick” Peters, who finds himself wrapped up in the Doctor and Peri’s world through Savant.  Chick is a man who is confident in his own identity, an identity that is not questioned by the narrative as this is his narrative.  This is different from Swan, or to a lesser extent Peri.  Swan while an incredibly compelling villain, really ticks because her identity is in question.  Her name isn’t even Swan, Chick giving the pretense of changing the names and certain relevant details even with the mythological references in the text of people turned to swans and losing their humanity.  It is Chick’s confidence in his identity as a man that solidifies the theme that identity is something personal, something that only he can really define and damn if the rest of the world does not accept it.  There’s the snag, this empowering message is presented in the twist that Chick is intersex, something that is treated by both Swan and Peri as something disgusting.  The disgust from Peri is explicitly because of the thought of first Chick finding her potentially attractive and second at the idea of sex that isn’t strictly heterosexual.  It’s Peri’s disgust where Orman’s argument becomes weak because the audience is primed to see Peri as good, she is the Doctor’s companion after all.  Presenting the intersex condition as a twist is also generally problematic.  While being intersex is not the same as a transgender identity, this type of twist does fall into what was (and arguably still is) a popular trope of the secret transgender person, usually for the basis of a punchline.  Chick is at the very least still a person.

 

The twist is also relegated to the last 30 pages of the novel, before that Blue Box is a thriller built around discovering what Savant is.  Orman however papers over ever so slightly the twist with the way that she characterizes the Doctor.  Now outside of the twist, it’s clear that Orman loves Colin Baker’s portrayal of the Sixth Doctor: here he is just as brash but always with intelligence and care.  The Doctor and Peri are fighting not in anger but as an old married couple, a relationship built on love.  Orman also puts the Doctor in Colin Baker’s suggested outfit of blacks with pops of color on the tie, almost as a treat.  In relation to the twist about Chick Peters, Orman indicates the Doctor does not so much fit within the gender binary either, though this is sadly a brief mention.  Chick’s identity as a man in the end is not in the question, Orman even subverting the at the time general view that sex with a non-cisgender person to be somehow wrong with a single line that Chick’s girlfriends had no problem with it.  To add support to Orman’s message of identity is the fact that Savant is villainous because it cannot have an identity.  Visually Savant almost represents a Y-chromosome, Orman using it to critique an almost fragile masculinity that grabs onto people despite being developed by a planet that in Lucifer Rising was the home planet of a multi-dimensional being lacking in the concept of gender.

 

Overall, for what would be Kate Orman’s last Doctor Who novel until 2023 with Big Finish Productions’ Audio Novel range Blue Box is actually an interesting if outdated look at identity through the lens of a techno-thriller.  There is love of the Doctor and Peri, even if Peri is sadly made in the model of both the time of publication and her time of the mid-1980s.  It’s real strength is the two villains, Orman excelling at creating that spiral.  Even with its problematic presentation (and the very real openness for a regressive reading as much as my own progressive read), Blue Box is still a Kate Orman novel and because it draws on ideas that had been with Orman since the mid-1990s it really does shine.  8/10.