Dr. Who

[valdemar]

It's funny, I was thinking of those early Jon Pertwee stories recently, and I was saddened by the thought that all three leads from that time are now dead: Jon Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney, and most recently, Caroline John.
Hands up if you 'found something in your eye' in the 11th Doctor story 'The Wedding Of River Song', where the Doctor is told over the 'phone that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart has died in his sleep. The Doctor is visibly saddened by this - but should he be? Way back in his 7th incarnation, in the story 'Battlefield', The Doctor thinks that the Brigadier has been killed in the explosion caused by the Brig's successful shooting of a demon called 'The Destroyer' with silver bullets. The Doctor berates the Brigadier's apparent corpse by saying words to the effect of: "You idiot! you're meant to die in your bed years from now!" Does this mean that The Doctor knows the futures of all those who travel with him? You must admit, that's more than slightly creepy. Is this why he always finds it almost impossible to say goodbye to any of his friends?

On a slightly less grim note, I was very pleased to see, in the story 'Asylum Of The Daleks', that the new, ugly Daleks were sidelined in favour of more of the big, hard-looking bronze ones. Also, the new Daleks had been repainted in 'Classic' colour schemes [still looked utter toss, though]. New Daleks, like New Coke = really pissed-off fans.

[valdemar]

By the way, if you're reading the Target Books, I'd like to point out a peculiar Jo Grant anomaly. Canonically, her first appearance is DEFINITELY 'Terror Of The Autons'. However, in the Target Books, for some reason, her first story is ALSO 'Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon' [broadcast as 'Colony In Space]. A possible editorial oversight - this story is the first time Jo takes a trip in the TARDIS, and it's the first time that the 3rd Doctor is released from his exile on Earth by the Time Lords, although they are controlling the TARDIS, and at the end, the Doctor is stuck on earth again, but it is NOT Jo's first adventure. Oh, and totally ignore the book numbering - it's something Target did, and pretty much all their readership thought, almost as a gestalt: "WHY?", and ignored it.

PS: And why David Whitaker changed the beginning of 'Doctor Who and the Daleks', I'm not sure. But I do prefer it to the rather ordinary episodes 2-4 of 'An Unearthly Child', or whatever various Who experts are calling it today.
PPS: I refuse to use the term 'Whovian' - it sounds bloody stupid. Also, whilst I'm here, I like the work of George Bernard Shaw, but I refuse to use the term 'Shavian' - that's the kind of word search engines mistake for something totally different, and from there, you're on the long and mucky road whose final destination is inevitably donkey porn.[or so I've been told]...

[ripper]

It's very sad when actors that you grew up watching pass away. I hadn't heard that Caroline John had also died--very sad.

It does make you wonder if the Doctor knows the futures of his companions, Valdemar. Very interesting if he "knew" that the Brig was supposed to die in his sleep.

I grew up watching mainly the Pertwee/Baker series, with a few of the Troughtons near the end of his tenure. I drifted away from the programme and didn't watch it regularly after that. I would guess that I am in a small minority when I say that I don't like the new series of Doctor Who. I've seen a few, but I missed the episodic nature of the classic years with their cliffhanger endings. I know that the budgets and special effects are now much improved, and for modern audiences the slower, episodic classic series may well be off-putting, but, for me, I much prefer the older serials, particularly those starring Jon Pertwee.

I heard about the anomaly with Jo's first appearance, though I have yet to re-read Terror of the Autons. I did read the Doomsday Weapon a few months ago. I seem to prefer the stories where the Doctor is Earthbound. Perhaps that is a consequence of growing up watching the Pertwees, most of which were set on Earth during his exile :-).

Re-reading Auton Invasion did remind me of one of my earliest memories of being scared watching TV. In Spearhead from Space, the part where an auton menaces the poacher's wife and she blasts it with a shotgun in the shed frightened me for years, and that particular story remains probably my favourite.

[rob4]

I read most of the Targets at school and found Terrance Dicks the least effective of all the DW writers but unfortunately he wrote the majority. my favourite was Ian Marter who never compromised in regard to age.

in answer to the question which DW's have a horrific content? I guess the answer is most of them as that is what attracted the kids to the series in the first place. however I think you are looking for the ones that are overtly horrific? i.e. the ones that were perhaps influenced by horror films or literature?

I'd say none of the Hartnell's or Troughton's fall into this category and just a couple of the Pertwee's - these being:

The Daemons - devil worship in an English village (was this made before the Wicker Man? the Doctor is almost burnt alive at the maypole!)
The Green Death - giant maggots in a Welsh mine (one for the 'when nature attacks' cycle of the 70s)

then we went into what has been dubbed DW's 'gothic period' (Tom Baker) and you can see a lot of horror influences here but i'll stick to the most obvious:

The Ark in Space (insect aliens take over a space station by laying eggs in the bodies of the sleeping humans - Alien anyone?)
The Planet of Evil (Jekyll and Hyde in outer space)
The Brain of Morbius (Dr. Solon ahem Frankenstein cobbles together a body for the brain of a renegade Time Lord out of the body parts of various aliens - one of Dicks' best novelisations)
The Seeds of Doom (DW's answer to the Day of the Triffids with one of the best lunatic humans thrown in for good measure)
The Masque of Mandragora (cultish happenings in Italian catacombs)
The Robots of Death (really the living dead in a closed room mystery)
The Talons of Weng Chiang (Sherlock Holmes meets Fu Manchu masquerading as the phantom of the opera)
The Horror of Fang Rock (a body count horror based in a fog bound lighthouse)
The Image of the Fendahl (skulduggery at an archaeological site heavily influenced by Nigel Kneale)
The Stones of Blood (bloodsucking stone circles that can move!!!)
State of Decay (vampire story)

after this I seem to recall there were one or two in the Peter Davison era but I can't remember any titles.

[valdemar]

I'd have to agree with you about Ian Marter. His novelisation of 'The Ark In Space' is a great example of the genre we would now call 'Body Horror'. Marter's descriptions of tendrils, open wounds, foaming, sizzling corrosive pus, and scar tissue shocked me the first time I read it. I'd seen the series - and it hadn't shown any of this. This proved to me the old adage about books and radio have the best pictures.

[dem]

Much obliged for the comprehensive listing, Rob, yet more stuff scribbled in my little black book. Have since been gifted a Dr. Who & The Daemons (thank you, KC), one of too many novels I still have to finish. Certainly fancy a number of these from your descriptions - The Stones Of Blood sounds as if it's not so far removed from E. R. Punshon's amazing The Living Stone in Richard Dalby's Dracula's Brood (You'll believe a Druid Altar can hunt people down and crush them), and we've always been interested in pinpointing where exactly that second-wave of 'when animals attack/ nature is revolting' novels began.

[rob4]

as an afterthought some others from the Tom Baker have overtly horror influences (at least in part).

The Pyramids of Mars - with its Egyptian paraphernalia. however it's more interested in Egyptian mythology rather than vengeful mummies
The Android Invasion - influenced by Invasion of the Body Snatchers methinks as various characters are replaced by androids rather than pod people - but I seem to recall the androids arrive in pods which I thought was a clear nod to the sci-fi classic
The Deadly Assassin - has one very effective episode based on The Most Dangerous Game, but with the twist of it taking part in a computer matrix (was this early cyberpunk?). I remember the Beeb got into trouble for this one for it being particularly violent and it has only been recently restored to it's original ending!

[valdemar]

Some of the later 'Classic' Doctor Who stories have definite horrific content, viz:

The Sixth Doctor:
1] 'Attack Of The Cybermen': This has dead, and rotting cybermen; cold aliens that boil to death outside their refrigerated habitats; the partial cyberconversion of the alien mercenary, Lytton, and surprisingly graphic crushing of his hands by the Cybermen. the Doctor's furious and justified shooting of the Cyberleader.
2] 'Vengeance On Varos': This has many elements of horror - a prison planet; poisonous plants; sadistic TV programming; the rather ambiguous sequence with the Doctor, two guards and an acid bath.
3] 'Revelation Of The Daleks': Where to start? This blackest of black comedies features lots of horror tropes; Mr. Jobel's stabbing by hypodermic is particularly unpleasant. Set on a planet that functions as a huge necropolis, where Davros has set himself up as 'The Great Healer', and is creating a new Dalek army by mutating not-quite dead humans into Daleks - and converting the dead into food.
4] 'Trial Of A Timelord : The Mysterious Planet' Part 1,episode 4: The horrendous radiation burns on Katryca when Drathro dies and the black light is released.

The Seventh Doctor:

1] 'Paradise Towers': An average story, but features creepy cannibalistic old ladies.
2] 'Dragonfire': Kane's suicide at the end is similar to the death of Toht at the end of 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark'.
3]'Ghostlight': The ambulatory 'husks'; The 'Cream Of Scotland Yard' soup; The transformed clergyman. Very dark indeed.
4]'The Curse Of Fenric': The beautifully realised Haemovores lurking underwater; their leader, Ingiger, last living thing on Earth; Dr. Judson, possessed by Fenric: "We shall play again - Timelord!". Incidentally, who would have thought that Nicholas Parsons could have been that good as the clergyman whose faith had been gradually and irrevocably eroded by the events of the war? [the novelisation gives more background on this]. Oh, and when The Doctor, instead of a prayer, recites the names of his companions, you can lipread Sylvester McCoy doing exactly that. He didn't have to, but he does.

[dem]

And there was me, hoping there might be one or two, and between you, you've giving us an entire library! The bastard of it is, I used to see a lot of them on my market creepy crawls, but there was always something more suggestive of horror thrills to waste money on so never gave them a second thought. Daemons decided me to at least check out the blurbs but, of course, haven't seen a Dr. Who since, they seem to have gone the way of Dennis Wheatley and the Confessions .. books in this neck of the woods.

[ripper]

Many thanks for your lists of Dr. Who books with horrific elements, Rob and Valdemar. After reading through the titles I was pleased to see that I have a fair few of them, though I have not yet read many.

[rob4]

tbh i don't think the horror elements are that well presented in the novelisations. i think the writers (besides Marter) were very conscious of the age they wanted to appeal to and didn't really take advantage of the written format to try and creep or gross out the audience. i think it was an opportunity missed. i think you might find them pretty mild compared to modern children's literature.

[valdemar]

I think that you're quite correct. A lot of the novelizations are of the basic 'he said/she said' sort of thing, but certain writers, such as Malcolm Hulke, Ben Aaronovitch, Ian Briggs, and Gerry Davis add lots of backstory. Not many pushed the barrier as hard as Ian Marter in the 'Ewww!' direction. However, the gloves were off when the 'New' and 'Missing' adventures started being published, in 1989. Possibly the most explicitly unpleasant and horrific in this series, is from the 'Missing Adventures' series, and is the novel 'Killing Ground', by Steve Lyons. It features several POV descriptions of a character's conversion into a Cyberman. I can't help thinking that Mr. Lyons had been reading a lot of Clive Barker when preparing the book. I love this book, but the conversion process description is not for children, or people of a sensitive nature.

No, really. I put the smily there, but in the interim, have just re-read the parts of the book concerning the process... and they are really nasty. You might get away with some of the parts in a 'Saw' film, but not on TV. and, I think,

[doomovertheworld]

I would agree with you about Killing Ground being one of the more unpleasant in the missing adventure series. To be fair however the target books were adaptations of what was originally a children's tv series while new / missing / 8th doctor adventures were explicitly aimed at adults. Although, like you have noted that the conversion process is fairly unpleasant overall the book is one of my favourite of the series

[ripper]

I have a few of Ian Marter's Dr. Who books, though I have yet to read them. I checked out his Wikipedia entry and was shocked to see that he had died at such an early age. I've based almost all of my Dr. Who reading on the Target books so far, so haven't experienced the more adult adventures. I must say that Killing Ground sounds rather interesting :-).

[valdemar]

I'd suggest that you try all of the new/missing/lost adventures - if you're not sure about this, let yourself in gently with one of the earliest, and very best of them: 'Nightshade' by Mark Gatiss. It's, er, very 'Quatermass' in tone, but beautifully written and paced. It's a standalone story - a lot of the books in the series are trilogies or have story threads that stretch from book to book, and, in some cases, from series to series - 'New' to 'Missing' usually. Consistently good writers are [in no particular order]: Paul Cornell: Kate Orman: Mark Gatiss, [of course]: Andy Lane: Steve Lyons: Christopher Bulis: Marc Platt, and one of my favourites, David A McIntee. Get stuck in!