Who Reviews The Good Doctor by Tony J Fyler

Tony meets the Good Doctor

Written by Juno Dawson.

.

In the run-up to the launch of Series 11, there was a lot of frankly tedious jibber-jabber in the fandom about how ‘the Doctor should never be a woman,’ and how, for instance, ‘she’ll be Nurse Who now’ – a piece of idiocy so strong it manages to be sexist in two directions at once, while emasculating previous companion Rory into the bargain, solely  on the basis of his job.

Hello, Juno Dawson.

We love Juno Dawson.

We love Juno Dawson for many reasons across the page-count of The Good Doctor, but first and foremost, she takes on these attitudes and makes them a central strand of the problem to be solved in her Thirteenth Doctor novel. On a world where a religion has sprung up based on a previous visit of Team Tardis, oppression is rife in the name of ‘the Good Doctor’ – and the Thirteenth Doctor faces all of these attitudes to her physical body, and why they disqualify her from being who she is. It’s a masterpiece of take-down, without being ‘just’ about the fact that the Doctor now has a female form and carries with it all the weight of other people’s (and particularly men’s) opinions on what that means she’s capable of.

In fact, The Good Doctor’s about lots more than that. It’s a blending of lots of elements, and ends up feeling like one of those rock solid Pertwee six-parters, but with a crisp, brisk tone and a modern storytelling style.

On the planet Lobos, the Loba (a race of canine bipeds, with a longstanding connection to humanity) are at war with incoming humans when we start out, and Dawson gives us, in one extended sequence, a more concise, precise distillation of the nature of the Thirteenth Doctor than has yet been seen on screen. She stops the war, builds the peace between humans and Loba and then, in typical Doctor fashion, strides off to her magic box and disappears.

There’s a lovely callback to the First Doctor story The Ark when Ryan realises he’s lost his phone while helping end the war, and the team ‘just nip back to get it.’

Clearly, the Tardis’ temporal drift compensators are knackered, because they return some 600 years in the future. And things have…changed. Really rather a lot. There’s a techno-nod to Four To Doomsday about the place, but chiefly, women are not allowed out after dark without a chaperone, and are generally subjugated (there’s also a fab nod to The Handmaid’s Tale, as surveillance camera-bots are known as ‘eyes’ to report any infraction). The power structure of Lobos is run by human men (and priests, no less), and women are considered a lower type of creature. Not, however, as low as the Loba, who have been enslaved both by the doctrine that dogs are man’s best friend and by the ferocity of humans driven by the sure and certain knowledge that their god has given them instructions.

Their god, incidentally? That would be the Good Doctor. But it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Juno Dawson makes the most of a full Tardis to show us life on every level of Lobos, Graham and the Doctor swanning about with the priests who run the show, Yaz making contact with the Loba Resistance movement, and Ryan finding his way through a loophole into a niche where both worlds collide. There are two generations of love story, an arena duel straight out of Peladonian history for the Doctor, a terrorist threat to blow up the main temple of the Good Doctor, shedloads of gender politics and doctrinal blasphemy, and, for Yaz, quite a lot of crawling through filth – because it’s not really cracking Doctor Who unless at least one of the companions is mercilessly punished.

What The Good Doctor ultimately provides is pin-sharp characterisation of all the members of Team Tardis – you’ll definitely have a stronger handle on who the Thirteenth Doctor actually is, deep down, after reading this book than you might have from the TV series so far (up to and including The Witchfinders) – and a multi-stranded, multi-level Doctor Who story that’s perhaps more memorable than anything in Series 11 so far, with plenty of fighting of foes, righting of wrongs, and the belief that people and love can overcome anything, even an entrenched religion based on privilege and the impact of past mistakes. It’s also a lesson, both to this new Doctor and her new friends, in the dangers of careless talk and of leaving footprints behind on the cultures with which they interact, even if, like the First Doctor in The Ark, the initial impacts look entirely positive and helpful.

The Good Doctor is a cracking Thirteenth Doctor story, making use of the whole Tardis team, involving the reader in every level of Loban society, taking on sexist and classist arguments in the subjugation of women and Loba, and delivering a story that feels very fresh and modern. It’s also a novel that feels like the continuation of Classic Doctor Who’s storytelling breadth, with gracenotes to some previous adventures and an unhurried exploration of the planet and its issues which makes it feel more like a six x twenty-five minute episode story than anything that could be achieved in the frantic pace of a New Who one-shot. Pick it up – as long as you don’t have issues with the Doctor being female, you’ll love it, whether you prefer the New Who energy or the Classic depth. The Good Doctor has both, and welds them together in a way that satisfies fans of both.

Reviews The Dollhouse by Tony J Fyler

This is not the Torchwood you’re looking for.

Almost beyond a shadow of doubt, this is not the Torchwood you’re looking for.

By that, we don’t mean it’s bad necessarily, just that it bears only the tiniest resemblance to the Torchwood anyone knows or understands.

It’s Charlie’s Angels.

This script of the latest Torchwood audio story from Big Finish, written by Juno Dawson, isn’t even really ‘Torchwood does Charlie’s Angels.’ It more or less is Charlie’s Angels. The only things that make it more Torchwood are the voice on the phone which gives the three female American 1970s investigators, which is British and talks about them being the last vestige of the British Empire (which in itself seems odd), and the fact that the threat here is alien, rather than crookedly human.

Having this American Torchwood, and making it so rag-tag and under-resourced as three specially talented young women in LA who take orders from a disembodied British voice feels a little like trying to bend one show far enough out of shape that it’s actually another show altogether, and there’s a disconnect early on with all the usual Cardiff-based shenanigans. But once you accept that this is in almost no way whatsoever the Torchwood you probably signed on for, there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had in The Dollhouse.

Torchwood’s Angels are Marlow Sweet (played by Laila Pyne), Charley Du Bujeau (Jelly-Anne Lyons) and Gabi Martinez (Ajjaz Awad), and they’re African American, corn-fed Southern and Latina respectively, bringing a more inclusive dynamic to its set-up than Charlie’s Angels ever did. Together they’re investigating spikes in cosmic radiation, leading them to a very sleazy casting agent by the name of Don Donohue. Big Finish strikes casting gold here, with Donohue played by Stuart Milligan, who was seemingly born to embody self-justifying sleaze with an American twang. Milligan gives the bad guy more teeth than you might otherwise expect, and while you struggle for a little while to accept that this is a Torchwood release you’re listening to, and probably fantasise more than somewhat about the version of a modernised Charlie’s Angels that, say, Gwen, Tosh and Martha could have delivered, Pyne, Lyons and Awad work with what they’re given to create a more grounded, realistic team of crime-fighting, alien-busting sisters than seventies TV ever allowed. There’s just a little too much reliance on the baddies being stupid in the story, as angel after angel investigates Donohue’s very special casting service for what is revealed to be the role of a lifetime, but Pyne, Lyons and Award quickly become a very audio-friendly team – you’re anticipating their characters’ reactions long before the end, and Awad surprises by occasionally pulling off so convincing a Rosie Perez vibe as Martinez that you prick up your ears.

Where Torchwood Dollhouse is at is best is in its underlying message, which is clever and depressing by turns. Donohue’s operation funnels clueless actresses off the carousel of potential humiliations awaiting women who aspire to change their lives in Seventies Hollywood, but what happens to them then is a lesson in the weary acceptance of objectification. Lyons’ Charley even says at one point, ‘So what’s it for? Intergalactic sex trafficking?’, and she says it with a sigh in her voice that’s indicative of the passive acceptance that that’s what it would be if there were a human behind the idea, the simultaneous valuing and devaluing of a handful of biological real estate driving men to do appalling, unspeakable things to women, and to deny what should be the obvious reality of female bodily autonomy throughout our species’ history – a theme that’s still so, so depressingly relevant in the age of Trump. What it’s really about…that, admittedly, has a properly Torchwood vibe, an alien species teaching even humanity a lesson in shocking objectification. Dawson plays with us and delivers her shocks well on this level, especially when Donohue is asked how he could agree to be a party to something so grim. His answer will punch you in the face and give you things to think about long after the more action-based climax of the story.

Torchwood has always been for grown-ups, its language and its content dealing with more overtly adult themes, and this is such a story (there’s even a sub-argument here about pubic hair as a feminist cause, given the originally porn-driven infantilisation of women’s bodies to match some moderately dark male fantasy from the age of their sexual peak – don’t panic, it’s not as overtly stated as that in the story, but it’s there). Frustratingly then, while it makes the most of Torchwood’s ability to use more adult language, when people swear in Torchwood Dollhouse, it feels like a wasted opportunity, adding little if anything even to the emphasis of lines.

Ultimately, this is a very unusual Torchwood story, and listeners expecting anything of the ‘usual’ Torchwood vibe from it will be disappointed. What it is is an attempt to tell a new kind of Torchwood story, with some solid messages and good politics. As Torchwood, it would be misleading to call it a spectacular success. As an audio story that gives you more than you might have expected to think about though, Dollhouse is definitely worth giving a spin.