Books: Doctor Who: Frankenstein and The Patchwork Man by Jack Heath (2025)

“When an unsettling folk tale leads the Ninth Doctor and Rose to a remote village in Wales, they get more than they bargained for. A scientist has taken it upon himself to create new life – imitating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a book that has sent shock waves around the country. But, much like his fictional counterpart, this doctor is playing god, and with forces beyond his understanding. As the Doctor and Rose attempt to put the brakes on the experiment before it gets out of control, a sinister supernatural presence reveals itself.”

Frankenstein and The Patchwork Man is a nice slice of Gothic terror that once dominated the early years of the Fourth Doctor. Heath is able to grab onto the voice of Billie Piper and make her Rose Tyler more realistic in book form – less so the Ninth, but that’s nitpicking here. 

It’s a well paced take that evokes the Mary Shelly title very well (even, though like Rose, I’ve not read the book, but have seen the film adaptations). It’s a solid young adult novel that will give both old and new fans a delightful treat. I like how much Rose grows here and why she became such a favorite of fans who had doubts about the actress and her role in the live-action show. Heath gives her plenty of heart –though she too becomes another companion willing to sacrifice her life because the Doctor puts her in great danger. Still, it’s done with creepy style and panache. 

Also, not one to questions an authors intention, but Heath is Australian, and I’m curious if he knew Wales probably does not have lochs. 

I’ve also read this is probably the last Puffin Crossover Classic for the Doctor, which is pretty sad. I think they’ve done well, and there could be more tales with different Doctors, but this appears to be the end of this lineup. 

Books: Doctor Who: In Wonderland by Paul Magrs (2024)

"The Doctor and his companions visit the dreaming spires of peaceful Oxford, hoping for a brief respite from their travels. But when Lewis Carroll appears at a garden party and their fellow guests transform into animals, they realize that everything is not as it seems. An unknown cosmic foe has trapped them in a twisted version of Alice’s Wonderland. Separated from the TARDIS and from each other, their only hope of escape lies in cryptic clues; teased by fan-favorite characters from Carroll’s classic tale." 

The next Puffin Book that has the Doctor crossing-over with public domain characters continues with In Wonderland. This is a Fifth Doctor adventure, set in the twentieth season of the Classic Series and begins shortly after the TV adventure Mawdryn Undead. It features companions Tegan, Nyssa, and recently joined Turlough (who is still working for the Black Guardian, who is using the young man in hopes of destroying the Doctor - long story). 

Paul Magrs once again brings his odd brand of humor and Lewis Carroll's peculiar style of fantasy for this short novel. There are a ton of Easter Eggs, but while other authors just seem to drop them in for the fans, Magrs are less evident, and thus more entertaining. Also, with the setting of this tale in the Fifth Doctor era, the whole idea is perfect for the very British Doctor and would’ve made a fun serial had there been more money, CGI, and setting a tale outside the norm of 1983 (the recent animated release of the 1966 classic serial The Celestial Toymaker on Bluray is a prime example of surrealism the show could never really afford to dabble in). 

Magrs also ties the tale nicely to the Black Guardian saga, and there is great sequence with an older Alice that seemed to me have a double meaning. Insomuch as the real Alice wanted to hide from the fame Lewis Carroll brought her and fans of Doctor Who that can no longer be objective about the 60 year old franchise.

The Puffin line up will continue next spring when the TARDIS crew encounters Frankenstein!

Books: Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures: The Well-Mannered War By Gareth Roberts (1997)

“Two factions have laid claim to the planet Barclow: humans from Metralubit, and the Chelonians. But instead of fighting, for nearly two hundred years, the two sides are the best of friends. The Doctor, Romana and K-9 arrive to find an important election looming. K-9 begins a career in politics, Romana reunites with an old friend, and the Doctor discovers a plot to alter the war's friendly nature. And what has Galatea, leader of the beautiful Femdroids, got to do with this?”

As typical with a Gareth Roberts tale –especially with his love of the Fourth Doctor -story was good with some funny characters, including the communist character which made me smile -he's spot on with a lot of his comments. The combination of producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s horror and Graham Williams humor is handled very well. For the “guest characters”, he fleshes them out enough it and gives weight for their actions and motives. The return of his Chelonians, who he first introduced in the New Adventures lines, works fairly well in this story. There is a disappointing cliffhanger at the end, which is no fault of the author, but what happened to the book line up.

This was thirty-third and final book in the Missing Adventures range (and set between the TV serials Shada and The Leisure Hive) and The Well-Mannered War is one of a number of Virgin Doctor Who novels which sell for far in excess of their cover price, especially on online auction sites such as eBay and Amazon. This was my second attempt at getting a copy. The first time, bought some time ago (a year or so), I paid well over $40 for it. And it was a fairly horrible mess. This time, I paid about $30 and got a reasonable copy –certainly not new, but not that used. At the time, in the late 1990s, Virgin lost their license from the BBC to publish original Doctor Who fiction. Lungbarrow and The Dying Days are similar in this respect, as they were the two final Virgin New Adventures to be published (though, originally, Lungbarrow was to be the last, which lead directly in the 1994 TV movie, but due to publishing issues, it became the penultimate title instead). And those can go for well over $100 a piece.

Years later, it was learned by Who author Lance Parkin the reason the last three books in the Virgin range, were so expensive on the secondary market was excessive demand, rather than an unusually low initial print run. However, he also noted that reprints of these books were not allowed, because Virgin's license expired before a second printing might otherwise have been made (which also may explain why all those books have never been reprinted over the decades – the original authors retain the copyrights of various characters and situations they created for the story, which would force the BBC into contract negotiations that they would see as untenable to them financially –as seen with the tales written by Douglas Adams). 

Doctor Who: Season 6B: Fan Theory that Could Work?

 

With the advent of home video and repeat airings in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, fans who were watching Doctor Who started to notice a few things between the end of The War Games –the last serial featuring The Second Doctor- and beginning of Spearhead from Space (1970) - the first serial featuring The Third Doctor. Fans pointed out several inconsistencies with this new Doctor, such as when did acquire a ring, a bracelet, and a TARDIS homing watch when he makes his first appearance, falling out of the TARDIS, if events happened the way it did –that there was no time between Patrick Troughton’s final appearance and first appearance of Jon Pertwee?

 

Back in 1969, in the final episode of the epic 10-part Classic Doctor Who serial, The War Games, we see the Second Doctor (Patrick Toughton) go through a “forced” regeneration after being found guilty by his fellow Time Lords for breaking their cardinal rules of time travel - interference in the natural order of the universe, planets, and its people. Time Lords sentenced him to exile on Earth in the 20th Century, and as viewer saw in the closing seconds of that finale was an image of

the Second Doctor, him twirling around the cosmic maelstrom on his way to Earth to begin his exile.  

 

It’s worth noting a few things were happening at this point in the series' history. First, the show was now going from black and white to full blown color season; the episode output would be cut nearly in half, from around forty episodes a year to just twenty-six. Also, for first time since the series debuted, there would be a close to a six-month gap between seasons. How would this gap affect Polystyle Publications, the a company who was producing the weekly comic strips of adventures featuring the Doctor since it started? It was easy with the one-week gap between the First and Second Doctor, but with nearly 24 weeks with no Doctor Who, not knowing how season seven was going to go, what would the fill this space with?

 

They quickly decided to soldier on and created (non-conically, but this changes a bit later) a series of adventures featuring the Second Doctor. The interesting bit, and seemly long since forgotten, are these adventures would take place not before The War Games, but after. In these comics, the Doctor has indeed been exiled to Earth, but is awaiting his Time Lord-imposed regeneration. For a time, the comic portrays the Second Doctor living the high life as a celebrity based in London’s swanky Carlton Grange Hotel. He travels the Earth, responding to calls received via the Carlton Grange switchboard, with nary a UNIT soldier in sight.

 

In 1995 came The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping. This non-fiction book looked at the Doctor’s adventures and tried to make sense of the continuity errors that kept cropping up, including the Third Doctor’s arrival, and these mid-1960’s weekly comic strips.

 

What came out of it was Season 6B.

 

The Season 6B idea is rather than undergoing the “forced” regeneration shown starting at the end of The War Games, the Second Doctor was recruited to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency, a clandestine Time Lord organization first shown to exist in the Fourth Doctor serial, The Deadly Assassin, some seven years after The War Games. During this time, the Second Doctor regained Jamie and Victoria as companions, acquired a Stattenheim remote control device to summon his TARDIS and undertook an unknown number of missions, including three serials Troughton returned for years later. Eventually, the Doctor's association with the CIA ended for reasons not known, though in a comic entry entitled The Nightwalkers, it shows the Doctor being dragged into the TARDIS by animated scarecrows, allowing his and his full The War Games sentence to be executed at the beginning of Spearhead from Space.

 

But Pandora’s Box was opened, and the authors also asked these:

 

 

How, in The Five Doctors, does the Second Doctor know that the Time Lords had erased the memories of Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot?

Why do the Second Doctor and Jamie appear older in The Two Doctors?

How does Jamie know about the Time Lords in The Two Doctors unless The Two Doctors comes after The War Games for him?

Why is the Second Doctor working, apparently willingly, for the Time Lords in both The Three Doctors and The Two Doctors?

Why does the Second Doctor possess a TARDIS recall device of a type the Sixth Doctor does not have in The Two Doctors?

In The Two Doctors, why is the Second Doctor's TARDIS control room of an obviously different design to that which he used prior to his trial?

Possibly, related to the above: How can the Second Doctor be confident of his ability to retrieve Victoria after The Two Doctors when he could never control the TARDIS during his own era?

Why is the Doctor's recorder in the second console room in The Masque of Mandragora?

 

Still, for a long time, The Discontinuity Guide's notion of the post-War Games Second Doctor working for the CIA would remain a purely theoretical idea –it was just a cute and clever way to explain the discontinuity on such a long-running show.

However, Terrance Dicks, one of the great architects of Doctor Who in the 1970s (that also included Barry Letts, Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe), took the idea of Season 6B and put theory into action decades later. Dicks' was prolific author, penning dozens of adaptations of Classic Doctor Who serials, writing many, many of those serials, and then took on a few original novels that were released in the 1990s. Here the whole Season 6B would begin to take shape.

In Players (1999), the Sixth Doctor and companion Peri meet Winston Churchill at three of the “wilderness” periods of his life and discover that he is under threat from a group of aliens who use Earth as their gaming table. It seems that Churchill is one of the most important pieces. The Players were a group of the Immortals who tampered with history to amuse themselves. They were capable of traveling through time, but their abilities were limited. They had knowledge of the Time Lords, and knew them to be devious. If anyone with a working familiarity with The War Games serial will note that these Players and their plan resembled a lot of the plot of that final Second Doctor story (which was co-written by Dicks and who had a habit of recycling ideas). This book, though, features a lengthy cameo for the Second Doctor, which is set after the events of The War Games, which finally canonizes the once theoretical Season 6B.

 

It would be another six years before this theme would be explored again, in Dicks Second Doctor novel, World Games (2005). Under threat of execution after his conviction by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games, the Doctor is granted a reprieve if he agrees to undertake missions for the Celestial Intervention Agency (Dick’s also pilfered psychic paper here, and idea not introduced until the series return in 2005). It’s the ultimate Terrance Dicks novel. It's got it all: sequels or prequels to most of his other novels, continuity overdosing on The War Games, the Players, a the Raston Warrior Robot, you name it.

In the end, though, while the whole Season 6B idea became fact in the books, on TV it never became “canon”. Nevertheless, by using the theory explored in that 1995 book by Cornell, Day, and Topping, it apparently gives us a logical reason, maybe willing reason (which is interestingly, btw) why the Third Doctor was working for the Time Lords who exiled him to Earth in the 20^th Century in The Three Doctors and again, much later, in The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors (1985).