Simon Bucher-JonesReseñas

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-hand-of-fear-tv-novelisation-black-archive-a...

Simon Bucher-Jones has produced a really good Black Archive on this story, considering mainly the horror tropes. It’s quite long but has only four chapters.

The first and longest chapter, “Why Are Hands So Significant?”, looks at the history of the hand in art from the stone age onwards, and at the precedents for detached hands in horror films, looking at the obvious Addams Family, The Beast with Five Fingers and Carry On Screaming, but also a 1963 B-Movie called The Crawling Hand which features a detached body part from a spaceship explosion.

The second chapter, “‘Eldrad Must Live’: Three Types of Fear in The Hand of Fear“, points out that the hand itself doesn’t strangle anyone and isn’t bloodied; so why is it scary? Or even, is it scary? Bucher-Jones diverts via the Flixborough disaster to considering the story’s plot structure and how the narrative beats function. He’s not completely certain that it all works, but I’m more confident that it does.

The third chapter, “The Thing from the Aeons: Fossil Horror and The Shadow Out of Time“, looks at how ancient figures coming back to life are treated in Doctor Who, linking Eldrad with Omega, Davros and Rassilon.

The fourth chapter, “Gender (and Other) Issues in The Hand of Fear“, briefly considers a) the fact that Judith Parrish’s female Eldrad is much better than Stephen Thorne’s male version; b) how the Hand could have landed relatively undamaged; c) the morality of the Doctor’s disposal of Eldrad; and d) the perfection of the final scene with Sarah’s departure.

An appendix, “Kastria and the Kastrians”, considers the difficulties of locating Kastria and of the Kastrians’ biology.

It’s a rare case among the Black Archives where I think I like the story more than the writer does, but in any case he does a good job.½

Apparently the editorial directive to the authors of this series was "We know you're not Douglas Adams, but please pretend to be as hard as you can so that the desperation shines through more clearly with each subsequent sentence."

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-impossible-planet-the-satan-pit-by-simon-buc...

Short and punchy.

The first chapter reflects on just how few New Who episodes are set on other planets, compared to most of Old Who (apart from the Pertwee era), the reasons for this, and how this shapes the sort of programme it becomes.

The second chapter, the longest in the book, goes in depth into the physics of black holes and how they are portrayed in fiction, notably in The Three Doctors in Old Who as well as the Disney film. I had not realised, or had forgotten, that the term “black hole” was coined as late as 1967, only a few years before The Three Doctors was shown.

The third chapter, almost as long, looks at the Devil as portrayed in Christianity, and satanic creatures as portrayed in science fiction (rather than fantasy) in general and Who in particular. Its second paragraph is (with footnotes):

As Sherlock Holmes – with whom the third Doctor has often been compared (as the Master has with Moriarty)119 – remarked, ‘The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.’120 The Doctor might well have said in The Daemons, and almost will say in The Satan Pit, ‘The universe is big enough for us. No Devils from before it need apply.’
119 While the fourth Doctor dresses like him in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), the third arguably does so all the time: while he doesn’t affect a deerstalker like the theatrical or televisual Holmes, he does have an inverness travelling cape.
120 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of The Sussex Vampire’, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes p73.

The fourth chapter looks much more briefly at the Ood and the problematics of slavery.

The fifth and final chapter looks even more briefly at the Doctor’s fear of domestication, ie of settling down with Rose, even though he obviously loves her.

A first appendix apparently has a graph in the paper version, absent from the electronic publication, listing all of the alien planets to date in Doctor Who.

A second and final appendix very briefly goes back to the Beast, making the connection with Sutekh and with Abaddon in Torchwood, points that I felt could actually have been folded into the third chapter.

As usual with these books, recommended, even though there’s very little about the production process of the TV show in this case.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3816574.html

I generally enjoyed this, but I am going to start with a serious imperfection in the .epub version which I bought: endnotes and references to them are wrongly joined up, with individual endnote references sometimes taking you to the start of that chapter’s notes section, rather than to the specific note, and sometimes instead to the start of the bibliography for the book as a whole; meanwhile if you do find your endnote, read it, and then want to return to the main text, clicking on the reference instead brings you to the start of the chapter you were in, rather than to the place where you left off. Other books in the Black Archive series have got this right, as most ebooks do, and you would have thought it a fairly straightforward technical tweak, even with 180 notes to a text with rather fewer pages. This may seem like petty whining, but in a book like this where there is a lot of good stuff in the endnotes, the publisher's failure to hyperlink them correctly is a real barrier to reading pleasure.

Which is a shame, because otherwise more than any other book in the series so far, this gave new depths to my enjoyment of something I already really liked. As usual, it is neatly divided into thematic chapters, and as usual, I’ll quickly summarise them in order.

* Looking at the context framed as “audience expectations”, both from the Hinchcliffe era of Who and from wider concerns about TV horror;
a deep dive into the Gothic, especially the 1965 film The Skull;
* the origins of humanity and evolution, as depicted in fiction;
* H.P. Lovecraft, the missing fifth planet and the devastation of Mars;
* ten problems with the script (eg who lets the Doctor out of the cupboard?) and six great things about the story;
* an appendix looking at the novelisation, and at other appearances of the Fendahl;
* another appendix with a carefully argued continuity theory that the destroyed Fifth Planet is actually Minyos from Underworld, the story after next.

This is meaty stuff, all done in tremendous, affectionate and often convincing detail. Recommended.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2297663.html

The Seventh Doctor, Chris and Roz end up in Paris all involved with the Dreyfus case and Ace. I'm afraid I thought this wore its historical research a bit too heavily, without compensating gains in characterisation or plot

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1896996.html

Another Eighth Doctor Adventure which involves the Fendahl, the Cthulhu mythos, and the future beings into which Time Lords will evolve, but which is less than the sum of its parts. I hope that this series picks up soon; I've been rather underwhelmed by the last few.½

Ghost Devices sees Bernice on a mission to a strange artifact on a distant planet. Again. Surrounded by a bunch of "comedy" academics. Again. Also, I am pretty sure a pubcrawl is involved in her decision. Again. The early Benny books really suffer from a monotony of setup. The first half of the book is awful. Nothing interesting happens, and when it does, Bernice narrates it after-the-fact for some reason. Most of the people on the dig are dead boring, and so are their antics. The plot keeps on jumping to characters who seem to have nothing to do with anything (the People and some criminals). The jokes aren't even funny. I really struggled to get through it.

Then, halfway through, the book suddenly improves. I don't know if Bucher-Jones hit his stride or if I was suddenly in a good mood, but the archaeological dig was abandoned, the number of characters was reduced to a manageable number, and the jokes became utterly hilarious. Benny is kinda along for the ride for most of the second half, but she has a number of great moments, and so does an air vent she befriends. I was constantly stopping to tell my wife about the hilarious jokes, and the action sequences were tight. The ending was huge, bizarrely so, but it worked. I don't know what happened here, but at least I got to read half of a great book.

The Taking of Planet 5 was...not as bad as I thought when I started it before putting it down for the better part of a year, but still nothing I'm going to go out of my way to recommend. I might have understood more of it if I knew more about the Chthulu mythos, but I sincerely doubt it. I definitely understood at least a little bit better because in the intervening time since I set this one down, I'd read Alien Bodies. Some knowledge of the Timelord continuity presented during the Eighth Doctor novels seems essential. The story was confusing to say the least, but at least it had Fitz in it, as he rarely fails to amuse me.