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: Josephine and the Argonauts By Paul Magrs (2023)

“Everyone knows the Doctor loves museums (it's his way of keeping score). But when Jo Grant and the Doctor visit the British Museum in London, they might have got more than they bargained for. A mysterious object is revealed, which grants those who touch it strange visions of Greek Myths. Gods, warriors and monsters are contained within this device, which its discover calls the MythoScope. But there is something sinister at play. A powerful influence seems to be controlling the MythoScope,  mastering it. Jo and the Doctor must enter the MythoScope to face an old and terrible enemy - bargaining with Zeus, battling dragons and journeying into the underworld. As dangers beset them on all sides, only an object of wondrous power can save them from total destruction.”

Josephine and the Argonauts is the fourth in the Puffin Classics Crossovers series that features various Doctor’s interacting public domain literature characters and situations. After dealing with the Wizard of Oz (13^th Doctor), Camelot (10^th Doctor), and Robin Hood (4^th Doctor), this one takes on Greek Myths and features the 3^rd Doctor and companion Jo Grant (which takes place after the events the 1973 serial Planet of the Daleks and just before her departure serial The Green Death).

It’s a cute, often funny tale that takes all the Greek Myths we’ve grown up with in books, TV, and movies and then takes on a adventure with the most well known, like the story of the titular Argonauts, of course, but we also see Medusa, Prometheus and the eagle, Peruses and Pegasus, and many others which all leads the reader to the Garden at the End of the World. The plot itself is actually fairly light, as it was designed for kids, but as I noted, it’s very entertaining, humorous, and fits perfectly within the Third Doctor’s era.

Noted above, the, story is set in Jon Pertwee’s fourth year as the Doctor, which author Paul Magrs further muddles the UNIT timeline by giving the date of 1973 (too long of a story to get into), but the Doctor also mentions Gallifrey, which the viewing audience in the 1970s would not learn about until the Pertwee’s fifth season opener. Also, for long time Who fans, Magrs gives us a non-canon explanation of why The Master vanishes from the series after the serial Frontier in Space. Of course, sadly, Roger Delgado died in a car accident while on location in Istanbul in June of 1973, but here he is escorted into Hades by Prometheus. When The Master returned three years later in the Tom Baker serial The Deadly Assassin, his desiccated look can be explained by his time in Hell.

Books: Doctor Who: The Return of Robin Hood by Paul Magrs (2022)

 

"Gold had come to the greenwood . . .Robin Hood is disenchanted. Maid Marion has disappeared, and the legend of the Doctor has retreated into the shadows of Sherwood Forest. But the Doctor is back! (Although this is his first visit - time travel does strange things to a story.)And the timing couldn't be better. A new Sheriff of Nottingham is in town, out to get the Outlaws, and behind the scenes, the mythical Mother Maudlin has designs on the realm that are not of this earth. With the Kingdom in peril, it's time for the return of the Lionheart."

Set just after the 12^th Season serial Revenge of the Cybermen and before The Terror of the Zygons, The Return of Robin Hood has the Fourth Doctor meeting Robin of Locksley for the first time, but not the first time Robin has met the Doctor. As with modern Doctor Who, the story is takes on some timey-wimey aspects, as its set about twenty years after the Twelfth Doctor and Clara met the Prince of Thieves in the episode The Robots of Sherwood.

Magrs remains a witty writer, and he captures the voice of the TARDIS cast from season twelve very well, especially Harry Sullivan. But I sense this would’ve actually been a better story had it featured K9 and Romana, and set around season seventeen of the Classic Series. Unlike most tales dealing with Robin Hood, King Richard the Lionheart and his brother King John (the pretend King), we get a more realized, more truthful historical version of era –Magrs goes out his way to point out how bad both King Richard and King John were (and despite his awfulness, King John did sign the Manga Carta). Still, there are some historical flaws within the story, including setting it two decades after the Twelfth Doctor story (reality is Richard was King from 1189 to 1199, ten years, so how does this timeline work?). Also having the Doctor referred by the name Doctor Who is distracting –as much as it was when WOTAN called the Time Lord that in the First Doctor serial The War Machines.

As the third book in this Penguin Kids series, it’s still a fine, easy to read tale. It’s always nice to read a Fourth Doctor story, even if the story has some glaring plot holes which left me slightly frustrated.

Books: Doctor Who: Verdigris By Paul Magrs (2000)

 

“High above London is a ship the size and shape of St Pancras railway station. On board, the Doctor and Iris Wildthyme are bargaining for their lives with creatures determined to infiltrate the Earth in the guise of characters from nineteenth-century.” Or if that is not enough, we get this from the Doctor himself near the end of the book: 'Let's see. We've got the disappearance of all UNIT personnel, excluding the Brigadier, and Mike Yates, who has turned into a cardboard shadow of his former self, we've got a spacecraft full of very irate, hand-bag worshiping aliens hovering above the planet, we've got a forest of deadly trees on fire, a mysterious green man who seems to be our sworn enemy, and, on the other hand, we've got killer robot sheep and the safety of Jo and Tom to account for. Is that a fair summary?"

Paul Magrs Verdigris is an attempt at all out comedy of Doctor Who, in particular the early 1970’s version with the Third Doctor (set sometime between the serials The Daemons and The Three Doctors). It’s a send up of post-modernism that tries to explore what made this version of the Doctor tick. It introduces Iris Wildthyme is a time traveling adventuress (a Time Lord or Time Lady, depending on your POV, and a potential early version of River Song), who travels the universe in London double-decker bus, which seems smaller on the inside. Iris is the Doctor’s self-proclaimed paramour, with a fondness for alcohol and cigarettes (I kept thinking of Amelia Ducat, the eccentric artist that helps the Fourth Doctor in the serial The Seeds of Doom). She, and her assistant Tom, is here to help the Doctor, but in all fairness, she seems to muck things up, including telling him things that have yet to happen to him.

This book also tries to parody The Tomorrow People, called The Children of Destiny, but while there are a lot of great ideas here, the book only works for me sometimes. I appreciated some of the in-jokes, with Iris making fun of the Third Doctor –after all, he is most establishment, the most authoritarian, the most sanctimonious of all the Doctors- as well as the idea that the top people of UNIT, the Brigadier, Benton and a cameo appearance by Liz Shaw all work in a grocery story is a hoot, but most seem a bit silly. It is a very silly novel, I guess.

I did find it interesting that the Doctor had a home outside of UNIT and his TARDIS, something the series never really explored. But a lot of the tale does not get explained, especially Verdigris and his “Green” magic, which is apparently different from Black and White magic. The fact that Doctor Who has avoided the supernatural is because explaining magic is complicated on a science fiction series.