So Much Forgotten Thunder

A belated Happy New Year- doesn't 2016 sound impossibly futuristic and far-fetched? Christmas 2015 already seems quite distant. I don't often catch colds but I was saddled with a stinker during the first weeks of the holidays. As we'll see, perhaps that left me a little disenchanted with seasonal Dr. Who- but I enjoyed the audio adventures when I went home to Glasgow and up to Strathaven before Hogamanay:

As you can see above, the miniature railway was being maintained but the John Hastie museum, axed by the council about four years ago, sadly appears to be undergoing demolition. It was also dispiriting to see East Kilbride undergoing further regeneration, having descended into a welter of charity shops and vaping outlets.

So, back to the Time Lord. Doctor Who's eleventh Christmas Special ,The Husbands of River Song, was a tinselly, festive romp, It seemed designed to mark a tonal shift from the sombre epic that began with Face the Raven and concluded with Hell Bent. The episode's other intent was to show the Doctor what his timey-wimey better half got up to in his absence.

A half-baked diamond heist and a demented cyborg king were fluffy, rather comic-strip elements that jarred for me with the tragic elements of River's character. Unlike some fans, I am always charmed by Alex Kingston's performance.  But where the final scenes between River and the Doctor were meant to be poignant, they were undercut, I feel, since Moffat's characters never truly leave the series. In addition, River's presence on the starliner Harmony and Redemption "where genocide comes to kick back and relax", positions her in a moral vacuum. How can the "never cruel or cowardly" Doctor truly love his "bespoke psychopath"? On a metatextual level, many fans knew anyway that River was about to embark on audio adventures with Big Finish, so her saga was hardly over.

Another Moffat creation continues his adventures with the box set. Only The Monstrous- which you can just see among my Christmas haul below:

John Hurt stars in a three-part serial as the War Doctor ( last seen in the 50th anniversary special The  Day of the Doctor), dispatched on a suicide mission into the Daleks' Null Zone. This tale of the Time War will play out over further box sets but cautiously I would say I enjoyed it, although it wears Nicholas Briggs' love for 60s war films very clearly on its sleeve. I particularly enjoyed Jacqueline Pearce's ruthless strategist Cardinal Ollistra, who is a fine foil for Hurt's gruff and hoary Time Lord. The one thing that took me out of the story was the voice of  Beth Chalmers, who also plays  companion Raine Creevy in Seventh Doc stories.

Where timey-wimey comedy seemed a little bilious on Xmas Day, You Are The Doctor is an entertaining compendium of  four adventures for the Seventh Doctor and Ace. The tone of this release is more playful, especially the titular first story, a parody of the Choose Your Own Adventure genre. The other stories centre on a murder mystery, a show trial and a blackly humorous take on space tourism.


In the absence of a filming date for the next series of tv Who, the fan community appears to be girding itself for the inevitable departure of Peter Capaldi, an eventuality about which I have mixed feelings. The actor Tim Roth has expressed an interest in the role and over the holidays, I tried to sketch how the character might look. The likeness is a difficult one to capture and I badly pinned the scarf with a Thoth brooch:

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In a future post, I'll look at the latest adaptation of a 90s Virgin New Adventure and some other exploits of the Doctor in prose

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