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Sometimes it's easy to say goodbye - to a friend, to a way
of life, to a lover. Sometimes it's heartbreaking. And sometimes
they just won't take the hint. Say hello to 14 stories of
goodbyes, as the First Doctor contemplates his flight from
Gallifrey; a young man goes to murderous lengths to prevent
Jo Grant from leaving him; the Fourth Doctor considers his
mortality after a funeral; the Fifth Doctor tries to get rid
of an unwanted companion - and more...
With
these themed anthologies, there's usually at least one story
that seems to not quite belong. In this book there are three
tales that are only tenuously connected with farewells. If
it wasn't for the back-cover synopsis, I might have struggled
to see the relevance of Gareth Wigmore's opening First Doctor
story The Mother Road (nevertheless, this is an engaging
character piece - a bonding experience for the Doctor, Susan,
Ian and Barbara). The goodbye angle is similarly tenuous in
Darren Sellars' Utopia and Paul Magrs' The Wickerwork
Man. Utopia is also guilty of being more of an
incident that a proper story (though there is a genuinely
unsettling moment for the Seventh Doctor), while The Wickerwork
Man, unusually for Magrs, is not a particularly successful
characterisation of the Eighth Doctor.
Still, these stories are more satisfying than Jake Elliot's
Wake. I remain unclear as to exactly what the Fifth
Doctor's role is in the events described here. However, even
this tale offers some enjoyment, especially if you're a fan
of the 1980s children's sci-fi game show The Adventure
Game.
Rather
more effective are...
Father
Figure, by Steve Lyons, in which a post-Web
of Fear Victoria Waterfield confronts the memory
of her dead father, and realises it is time for her to move
on - in more ways than one.
Andy
Campbell's Separation Day, a spin on Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind. This story also acts as a kind of
precursor to the new series episode School Reunion,
in that Sarah Jane Smith discovers that the Third Doctor sorely
misses his former companion, Jo Grant, and she is just the
"new girl".
Into the Silent Land, by Steven A Roman, a beautifully
written tale (though far from flattering in its descriptions
of Season 18's Tom Baker) in which a melancholy Fourth Doctor
begins to feel his age and realises that his next regeneration
might not be far away.
Stewart
Sheargold's The Velvet Dark features the Master, but
keeps the reader guessing as to which incarnation of the villain
we are actually dealing with. The Master once again goes to
extraordinary lengths to artificially prolong his life, including
a life-force draining lash-up that is similar to (and might
go some way to explaining) his use of the TARDIS' Eye of Harmony
in the
TV movie.
Like Into the Silent Land and Wake, the starting
point for this story is a funeral.
Life After Queth, by Matt Kimpton, is an endearingly
silly tale of sentient (but stupid) armadillo creatures on
a potential path to destruction. What really makes this story
is the participation of a new "companion", the Gravis, who
is being transported to the planet Kolkokron by the Fifth
Doctor and Tegan. The oversized woodlouse (who, it is claimed,
didn't realise that the people of Frontios were intelligent
beings) is keen to lead the life of a space explorer - when
he's not slipping over in the mud and having to be picked
up by his fellow travellers, that is. Meanwhile, Tegan (who
is soon to leave the Doctor in Resurrection
of the Daleks) contemplates her own effectiveness
as a member of the TARDIS crew.
Joseph
Lidster's Curtain Call well and truly gets into the
head of a supposed psychiatric patient. The woman's ordeal
is compared and contrasted with the Sixth Doctor's own struggles
against monsters within (his post-regenerative madness in
The Twin Dilemma and the Valeyard in The Trial of
a Time Lord).
The Three Paths, by Ian Potter, forms a companion piece
to The Mother Road, as the First Doctor approaches
the end of his life but realises that he needn't fear the
change. Continuity-wise, this story successfully walks a line
between such diverse accounts of the Doctor's and Gallifrey's
past as Planet of the Spiders, Lungbarrow and
Death
Comes to Time.
However,
for me the highlight of the collection is The Bad Guy,
by Stephen Fewell, a brilliantly observed analysis of some
of the clichés of the Jon Pertwee era. There's an alien, Ptela
(an anagram of Latep from Planet of the Daleks), who
falls in love with Jo Grant. He says he wants her to stay
to help "rebuild our world". "Your people must find their
own answers," the Doctor replies, "but I can think of no better
person to lead them." Later, the Time Lord urges him to: "Fight
it, Ptela... The Thrematons are controlling your mind." This
is no light-hearted comedy, though. The alien's obsessive
love for Jo causes him to become "the bad guy" when he decides
to get rid of his rival, the Doctor. For Ptela, however, "the
bad guy" is the aloof Third Doctor.
Unusually
for these anthologies, the stories - with the exception of
the final one, The Three Paths - are arranged in chronological
(Doctor) order. The good news for Peter Davison fans is that
no fewer than four of the stories feature the Fifth Doctor.
It's also quite unusual for so many of them to be so precisely
placed in terms of series continuity. For instance, Father
Figure is clearly set before the TARDIS' departure from
1960s London following The Web of Fear. Wake
deals with Adric's funeral, and so takes place between Earthshock
and the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan returning the freighter
crew and troopers to the 26th century at the beginning of
Time-Flight - thus opening up a convenient side trip
for stories such as Lackaday Express (from the anthology
Doctor Who: Decalog). Judging by Tegan's outfit, The
Velvet Dark must occur immediately prior to Frontios,
while Life After Queth obviously takes place just during
Part 4 of that same serial. Black and White, by John
Binns, is set three days after Planet of Fire, while
Curtain Call mentions a recent trip to the planet Caliban,
so must take place shortly before Spiral
Scratch. The Three Paths states that
since leaving Cornwall, the TARDIS has landed in a succession
of icy locations, thus opening a nice little gap between The
Smugglers and The
Tenth Planet for First Doctor, Ben and Polly
stories such as Ten
Little Aliens.
Into the Silent Land is a little more problematic.
This story has the Fourth Doctor donning his burgundy outfit
for the first time (for a funeral) and ends with him deciding
to take Romana to Brighton. It therefore fits between the
unbroadcast version of Shada and The
Leisure Hive (in Big Finish's version of Shada,
K-9 states that the Doctor heads for Brighton following his
encounter with the Time Scoop in Cambridge). This conflicts
slightly with Doctor Who Magazine's Fourth Doctor comic
strips, which show him switching outfits more gradually and
in Romana's absence, and with the novel The Well-Mannered
War, which takes place after the unbroadcast Shada
and ends with the travellers removing themselves from normal
space for a period of time. I theorise that, after the funeral,
the Doctor temporarily ditches his burgundy outfit and the
trip to Brighton is postponed. It's possible that the TARDIS
misses its programmed destination, which is why the Doctor
takes his time-travel proficiency test at the beginning of
Festival
of Death.
As you might have gathered from the length of this review,
I found Farewells to be a particularly stimulating
collection of stories. A good buy.
Richard
McGinlay
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