The Eight Doctors

Recuperating after the trauma of his recent regeneration, the Eighth Doctor falls foul of a final booby trap set by his arch-enemy, the Master. When he recovers, the disorientated Doctor looks in a mirror and sees the face of a stranger. He knows only that he is called the Doctor - nothing more. But something deep inside tells him to trust the TARDIS, and his hands move over the controls of their own accord.

The TARDIS takes him to a strangely familiar junkyard in late-nineties London, where he is flung into a confrontation between local drug-dealers and Samantha Jones, a rebellious teenager from Coal Hill School. But the Doctor soon finds the TARDIS transporting him to various other places in order to recover all his memories - and that involves seeing seven strangely-familiar faces... - Book blurb

This is a review/commentary about the first book in the Eighth Doctor Adventures (EDA) series, The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks. In this episode, we are reintroduced to the Eighth Doctor and his future companion Sam Jones. I will preface this review with some valuable and important context before delving into the episode proper. And it goes without saying that these are my opinions, you do not have to agree.

Let's talk about Paul McGann.

The Enemy Within, or Doctor Who: The TV Movie as it's more commonly known, holds a special place in my heart. I had always heard of the elusive Paul McGann but knew little about his tenure. I was aware it had been cut short, Paul being deprived of a television era, and that the movie sat on the sidelines of both the highly-praised Classic era and the uberly-highly-praised Revival. People liked to acknowledge it but not much more than that.

My curiosity struck me as a freshly-turned-twelve year old and I asked my mum for it for Christmas. When we got it, I sat down to watch it with my family and yes, while it wasn't the Doctor Who I was familiar with, I loved it. Any time I was in a dark period in my life, I put the movie on to rekindle that childhood nostalgia. Every time without fail, it would improve my mood by five hundred thousand percent. They say I exaggerate, but they are nine billion times more wrong than they think.

Joking aside, this movie has always made me really happy. It's such a fun time, Paul is in his element and he's just brilliant as the Doctor. It also helps that he just happened to be the one I had a crush on as a kid, which indirectly led me to realising I was bi - a fun fact you have no use for. Remember it if you want, I don't really care either way.

The point is, Paul's Doctor is my favourite because I associate the movie with times in my life where I needed comfort food. I couldn't really afford to purchase Big Finish for the most part - even now I don't have an awful lot of money to spend on the company - and I didn't know the books existed, so for the longest time in my life, 8 was a one-and-done that I wished the show would spend more time on.

I was glad when he appeared in The Night Of The Doctor and even more glad when he appeared in The Power Of The Doctor but there's still a part of me that hopes my favourite Gallifreyan incarnation gets a proper run on TV because he bloody well deserves one.

Let's talk about Terrance Dicks.

Uncle Terrance always seemed a curious figure to me as a kid. He seemed amiable and approachable and his ideas for the series intrigued me, however, I did notice a tendency of his not to know much about the eras he wasn't involved with and an ignorance to learn more about said eras. This concerned me as a kid because I wondered how someone so associated with the show would know so little about it.

Ah, the innocence and stupidity of little Tilly. She thought everything revolved around Doctor Who. Sweet sweet summer child, how cynical you'll become with age.

Anyway, this notice became more prevalent as I got older and started looking into his other works - his Target novelisations of any Doctor who wasn't Patrick, or Tom showed a tendency to divert to a “standard” style of lead: a Doctor that embodied the key traits of the character but not much else. This worked sometimes but often left lots to be desired, so when I found out he'd be penning Eight's first trip, I was a tad concerned that he would be reduced to little more than Hartnell's characteristics with Paul's face - I'd already seen him do this with Davison in The Five Doctors and Sylvester in Timewyrm: Exodus, so my expectations were not all that high.

Still, I held out hope that maybe people were wrong when they said the story wasn't great or that I'd end up enjoying it.

As you could probably tell by that previous sentence, holding out hope was not the best idea. I didn't enjoy it... it just wasn't my cup of tea.

I think the reason I didn't gel with it is that my love of The Enemy Within clashes with Terrance's abject hatred of it. He dismisses the film as rubbish, dispenses with its unique control room and jettisons most of Eight's characterisation, instead giving him more Hartnellian lines - I can't for the life of me picture Paul McGann calling someone “young lady”, that just doesn't sound right coming out of his mouth.

I mean, I knew he didn't like it, but I didn't think his distaste would be that strong.

So - the 96 console room is out, replaced by what I can only assume is meant to be the 1963 room or one of its counterparts from the 70s and 80s. Charming. Eight is not McGann, it's William Hartnell in a wig. Our companion, Sam, is only in the plot for a total of about 10 minutes, and the hopping back and forth between previous stories is definitely... a choice.

The plot is thinner than a sheet of 3 ply and has about as much depth as condensation on a summer day. For a 280-odd-page book, it's surprising just how little there is here. Had this come out now and someone other than Terrance written it, I'd make a jokey comment about how this might've been written on autopilot or generated by ChatGPT, but so soon after the film and by a veteran writer of the show? That's just disappointing.

If I had a nickel for every time a Doctor Who novel series started with a bad book... etc etc, you know the meme.

Like... what do you expect me to say? There's nothing here of substance. The best way I can describe the reading experience is with this hypothetical: a director comes along and sees a brief short story of about 7 minutes that transitions between two much bigger stories. They think “Hey, that's a cool idea” and expands it to a full feature-length production. Doing simple subtraction and that's 83 minutes of filler. This book is just filler upon filler with the start and end being the interesting parts.

A friend of mine, Mary, put it best by saying “It's great how he does everything he criticises the movie for but way worse in the book”. Like, that's the best summary, I genuinely could not put it better myself.

I was mulling over what I would've done with the premise and a few thoughts came to mind, but I genuinely can't even begin to recommend how you would approach this story without changing the vast majority of it. Like, everything other than the start and the end would have to go if were to even consider changing anything.

It's a damn shame, though. Eight is such an interesting Doctor because theoretically you could do anything with him and it would work, provided you keep him in character. This book doesn't do that, instead trying to reinvent the wheel and drag Eight kicking and screaming across strict points of continuity because... I dunno, fanservice?

The worst part is... I genuinely can't think of who this book is even for. Is it for fans of the film who want to see more of Paul's incarnation? Is it for continuity sticklers who must have everything tie together? Is it for the casual crowd, most of whom won't even know the stories being referenced? Why do any of that at all?

I was trying to think of a way to properly conclude this review, like making some bold statement or giving my treatment of the plot, but I dunno guys... this book kinda just left me feeling a bit cold. I am gonna keep going with the EDAs though, I've heard good things about Vampire Science so I'm eager to see where that might head narratively. Maybe I'll retool this book's narrative into something more interesting and punt it on Twitter at some point, but I'm content on putting this weird introduction to bed for now.

No spoilers in paragraph one; yes spoilers in paragraph two.

So, finished my first EDA! It did not disapp- well, actually, that's a lie. It very much disappointed. I found it dull for the most part, with little emotional depth. Had I not, yano, consumed other eighth doctor media, I would not have cared for the character at all. It often felt like reading a script with a lot of stage directions, rather than a novel. It's a real shame, as I know Terrance Dicks was an absolutely prolific novelisation writer and TV serial writer, but I just could not enjoy this novel. There were a few moments that made me laugh, and a couple interesting tidbits lore-wise that aren't original to the novel, but that I hadn't heard before. Those funny moments brought the book up a little for me, but not enough to give it three stars.

Good things about the novel - Sam Jones. At the beginning, the part with the drugs felt too much like Terry was trying to be "down with the kids", using as much slang as he could get in there. This took away from my enjoyment of the character. However, the part right at the end, Sam's introduction to the TARDIS? That was funny, witty, and a great introduction to the character. If only we'd seen more of her, I think I would have enjoyed the book more. I am very chuffed that I get more of her in the next book, which I've heard amazing praise for, so, very excited for Vampire Science! The other thing about The Eight Doctors that I thought was interesting was the Seventh Doctor's depression. I really hadn't expected this novel to go into mental illness, and so it certainly surprised me when we got to that part! I liked that Terry tried to deal with the Doctor's depression and loneliness, as that's not something that's often said in those exact words in Who. We see the effect of it, but we rarely hear people go "The Doctor has clinical depression". I wish that the section had been longer, with more time to explore the effect of the Doctor's illness on his life.

Alright, that's all for now!

Potentially an intriguing premise, but an ultimately botched execution. Slapdash and confusing, I remember several scenes vividly, but couldn't explain the overarching plot for love nor money, possibly because there wasn't one. Attempts to introduce every previous Doctor as Eight travels back to meet them in a series of vignettes that ranged from fascinating to perplexing to downright tedious in a manner that I can only compare to CATS! (2019). I would accept it on AO3, but as the start of an official BBC-licensed series? Downright execrable.

Oh, Sam's here too. Hi, Sam. This really wasn't a good place for you to come in, Sam.

This was a decent bit of self-insert fanfiction. It was not a good book.

There's almost no room to breathe and get to know our main character before he's thrust directly into the plot. A lot of characters are introduced in rapid succession with very little to tell them apart, and then that entire plot is dropped within a handful of chapters, and an entirely new story begins.

For a book that advertises itself as a multi-Doctor story, we spend drastically different amounts of time with different incarnations, and a disproportionate amount of time with previous Doctors' companions and villains. The Eighth Doctor has very little interaction with any Doctor other than the Sixth. It feels as though the author wanted to place himself in Eight's place and spend some time with all the other Doctors.

The amnesia is severely under-utilised. I didn't get the sense that there was anything actually wrong with the Doctor.

Even the multi-Doctor plot is disjointed. Each of the longer parts individually would make very good epilogues, and the characters are very well written - the author clearly knew how to write them - but a bunch of good epilogues do not a good novel make.

The part with the Sixth Doctor was by far the best, and the only part of the book that actually felt like a novel. The Gallifreyan plot was weaved into the rest of the book and came to a satisfying conclusion (even if the inclusion of the Master was somewhat gratuitous). I enjoyed the politics and the worldbuilding.

The ending is just as jarringly short as the beginning, and Sam's transition into a companion is severely lacking.

It's possible I would have enjoyed this book more if I was more familiar with the other Doctors. As it stands, I had only reached the Third Doctor's era before reading this, and I didn't feel that his part was particularly relevant, even if it was good.

There's also the matter of formatting: any digital version of this I could find had the same strange errors where lines would cut to a new paragraph in the middle of a sentence. Practically every line had this issue. I got used to it, but I can't say it made for a particularly pleasant reading experience.