Virgin Missing Adventures

#002. Evolution ~ 5/10

◆ An Introduction

John Peel: now there’s a name I never wanted to see again. Someone on Twitter told me that they couldn’t understand how he kept getting work, though I’ve got a sneaking suspicion it was because – once upon a time – he was the only writer the Terry Nation estate would actually trust with the Daleks.

Believe me when I say that I’d quite happily ignore this book altogether, but I promised myself I would go through this entire range to make up for the fact it took me five months to review ‘The Wheel of Ice’. I’m really regretting that decision now!

I severely doubt that ‘Evolution’ will be worse than ‘Timewyrm: Genesys’, because it would be an impressive feat to be quite so appallingly awful. I’ve been proven wrong before though, so don’t hold your breath.

◆ Publisher’s Summary

"Someone is tampering with the fabric of the human cell," the Doctor said darkly, "perverting its secrets to his own dark purposes."

Sarah wants to meet her fellow journalist Rudyard Kipling, and the Doctor sets the co-ordinates for England, Earth, in the Victorian Age. As usual, the TARDIS materialises in not quite the right place, and the time travellers find themselves pursued across Devon moorland by a huge feral hound.

Children have gone missing; at the local boarding school, the young Rudyard Kipling has set up search parties. Lights have been seen beneath the waters of the bay, and fishermen have been pulled from their boats and mutilated. Graves have been robbed of their corpses. Something is going on, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the ship's doctor from a recently berthed arctic whaler, is determined to investigate.

The Doctor and Doyle join forces to uncover a macabre scheme to interfere with human evolution — and both Sarah and Kipling face a terrifying transmogrification.

◆ The Fourth Doctor

I think many people would describe the Hinchcliffe era as the golden age of Doctor Who, though its reputation has definitely soured in recent years: people stopped trying to deny how horrifically racist the final serial was! Realising that I hadn’t seen any of this era in several many years, I rewatched ‘Planet of Evil’ to brush up on the characterisation of our regulars.

John Peel handles this incarnation surprisingly well – certainly a damn sight better than when he wrote for the little fella with the umbrella! The Doctor spends a great deal of time with Arthur Conan Doyle: they strike up a friendly relationship over the course of the book and, based on the cover, it shouldn’t surprise you that the Doctor served as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

The Doctor had been very moody of late. Well, he was always moody; Sarah imagined it was because of his alien nature and incredibly lengthy life-span. He claimed at various times to be anything from four hundred to a shade over a thousand years old. For a being who travelled in time as much as the Doctor did, he seemed to be very shoddy about keeping note of his personal time. Either he wasn’t certain how to calculate his age due to all the varying times he had stepped into and out from, or – which Sarah personally believed – he had virtually no interest in it. She couldn’t blame him, really. Imagine the size of the cake he’d need to fit on several hundred (or a thousand) candles! You’d need a flame-thrower just to light them, and even the Doctor could never blow them all out with a single breath. Which all meant that the reason the Doctor seemed unsure of his age was because it wasn’t simple to work out. But he was showing all the signs of some sort of mid-life crisis. If, of course, four hundred to a thousand years old was mid-life for a Time Lord. The Doctor was always pretty vague about that, too. He’d once claimed to be ‘immortal, give or take a few years’ and at another time had said he was as mortal as the next man. Consistency was not a virtue he believed in or practised. When he wanted to, the Doctor could talk the hind legs off a donkey, and probably the front ones, too. But when he was in a mood you couldn’t even get the time of day out of him. Assuming he either knew or cared what time it was.

◆ Sarah Jane Smith

Some tragedies are capable of embedding themselves into your memories, and the passing of Elisabeth Sladen is something that will stay with me forever. Tributes flooded in from all across the globe; performers that had shared scenes with her, people that had the pleasure of writing for her, and fans who had nothing but respect and adoration for one of the most talented actresses of her generation.

The advantage of these book reviews is that I can copy the characterisation of our regulars, word for word, from the text itself. This is why the next paragraph begins with the writer dedicating a whole scene to our companion taking a bath! I sincerely wish I was making this up, but this is surprisingly tame when compared to the usually nauseating stuff Peel comes out with (more on that later in the review).

Sarah Jane Smith lay on her back in what the Doctor had dismissingly referred to as ‘the bath’ and lazily stirred her hands and feet. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to wear a swimsuit – let alone inside the TARDIS. It felt good to be able to simply relax and enjoy herself for once, particularly after the series of harrowing adventures she’d experienced. Sarah had always been rather wary about exploring the TARDIS too far from the main control room. The ship had so many corridors and rooms that it made a labyrinth seem positively simple. You needed either a guide or a long ball of string to find your way around. Sarah had often wondered what she would do if she were faced with the possibility of altering the past. Travelling in the TARDIS rendered such a thought more than academic. On her very first trip in the TARDIS, for example, she’d gone back to the Middle Ages. One change there could have affected the whole course of history. Now, here she was again, this time in Victorian England. She had met and was interacting with two of the most famous English writers of their day – Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. A little nudge from her, the wrong word even, and their lives could be altered. And while it might not change the entire course of history if Kipling never wrote The Jungle Book, say, something was bound to be affected. It was a tremendous responsibility to rest on her shoulders.

◆ Will Made Flesh

‘Evolution’ is more padded than Jimbo the Drag Clown, so you mightn’t have realised how simplistic the plot actually is. In a nutshell, a Rutan spaceship crashed in Limehouse which was carrying a hefty payload of their specialist healing salve.

The healing salve was used to fix damaged Rutans. They had an unstable cell structure that allowed them to shapeshift, so they needed their salve to be similarly unstable. When used on non-Rutans, it could create hybrids by fusing disparate species into a viable new creature.

Percival Ross obtained most of the salve from the downed Rutan spaceship, and began using it to make human-dolphin hybrids, and seals with enhanced intelligence. When a wealthy industrialist offered to fund these hybridisation experiments, he gladly accepted! Breckinridge wanted the hybrids to lay underwater cables, thereby potentially monopolising the newly established telephone industry.

There was potential to make an interesting adventure out of these ideas, but the padding kills any enjoyment I might have gotten from this book… and that’s not a lot, considering it suffers from the usual “Peel-isms”.

◆ The Curse of John Peel

Some people are completely unfamiliar with John Peel, and I don’t mind saying that I’m incredibly jealous of them. The general consensus has always been that his Dalek novelisations were pretty good, whilst his original fiction read like something you’d find scrawled in excrement on the walls of an insane asylum!

Peel is notorious for inserting gratuitous amounts of violence into his books, but that didn’t really bother me in this instance. ‘Evolution’ is supposed to take place during the Hinchcliffe era, when it was typical to push the boundaries of how horrifying you could make the show. Did we really need such in-depth descriptions of how an old fisherman had his head bitten in half, exposing bits of bone and organs? Not really, but it makes sense when Conan Doyle is examining the fisherman in an autopsy setting.

Peel comes across as something of an incel, based solely on the way he writes female characters: it would be interesting to hear his justification for dedicating a whole scene to Sarah having a bath, and probably quite horrifying too! Surprisingly, that’s not my main issue here. Things really start going down hill with the first interlude, where Lucy discusses her backstory with the others who had been hybridised. Page 64 is where I genuinely started feeling nauseous, because that’s when Peel devolved back into writing like a Reddit user after drinking several bottles of neat whiskey! Actually, I’m going to echo the person who asked me this on Twitter, why on Earth did Peel keep getting work? This isn’t just atrocious, but downright disgusting content.

◆ Conclusion

“You’re about to become the first member of a new species.”

A genuine mad scientist has been creating genetic hybrids after coming across a cache of Rutan healing salve. The Doctor and Sarah Jane are quick to investigate, finding themselves aided by two adored writers, long before they were famous: Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling.

John Peel has become notorious across the width and breadth of this fandom, but this book genuinely had the potential to be something amazing. The remote tranquillity of Dartmoor being disturbed by a fearsome mutant hound is something I could absolutely see being attempted during the Hinchcliffe era, especially given the amount of body horror present throughout this story.

Unfortunately, ‘Evolution’ suffers from excessive padding; you spend more time waiting for something to actually happen, that I actually got bored enough to put the book down and watch Smiling Friends in its entirety!

There are definitely some moments where you are left wondering how Peel kept getting asked back, but nothing on the same level as ‘Genesys’, thankfully. Overall, this book just ended up being pretty bland and forgettable.