A Big Hand for the Doctor

The 50th anniversary of Doctor Who was, in one way, perfectly timed: with eleven Doctors, it meant that basically every medium of Doctor Who tie-in could do a monthly series, which one adventure for each Doctor. Audio gave us Destiny of the Doctors, comics gave us Prisoners of Time, and prose gave us 11 Doctors, 11 Stories, a series of e-novellas by contemporary children's writers, allowing experienced writers new to Doctor Who to each take a spin at it. In late 2014, they were all collected in a sexy box set with covers based on each Doctor's costume, and I resolved to read them monthly in 2015-- so only two years later.

The first is A Big Hand for the Doctor, by Eoin Colfer of Artemis Fowl fame. Colfer is going for something whimsical, I think, maybe projecting the sensibilities of Douglas Adams (he also wrote the seventh Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel) and the Steven Moffat era back onto the 1960s. I'm not against this kind of thing in the abstract: though Big Finish has created some great audio dramas by emulating the writing and production style of the 1960s as much as possible, that's not the only valid approach to early Doctor Who. The problem with the book is that it isn't very good, full of "jokes" that aren't very fun, and just kind of flail there, or feel out of character for the first Doctor-- who could, after all, be quite whimsical and mischievous when he wanted to.

But I don't think he would have ever thought, "Mano-a-mano. And that pirate is a much bigger mano than I am." Nor should anyone, much less him. Colfer uses a lot of asides like "if one could be reminded of the future," which are less funny versions of jokes Douglas Adams was making thirty-five years ago. Once you get past that, there's not a lot of substance here, even for a 60-page novella. Plus there's an eye-rolling epilogue where you learn how this adventure inspired J. M. Barrie, one of my least favorite sci-fi time-travel tropes.

I liked that the villains of this piece were properly nasty villains, with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever. I also liked the fact that the First Doctor got to be a bit more active than he usually is (since he's seen as an older man). But I really don't think he would make Harry Potter references. That's more the Tenth Doctor's territory. Overall this was a good story to begin the collection. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2064702.html

This is the first of the planned 11 short Penguin ebooks to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, one doctor per month, the books to be released for £1.99 on the 23rd of every month up to November. It is by Eoin Colfer, best known for the Artemis Fowl books, but also author of an authorised sequel to the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it is about the First Doctor in London in 1900 trying to get a cybernetic replacement hand and defeat the Soul Pirates. There are meant to be lots of references to Peter Pan, which mostly passed me by. The central character bears little resemblance to any other interpretation of the First Doctor on screen, audio or page. The author's Guardian interview about the book is much shorter and much more interesting. ( )

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, and I don't think there's a better time to be a fan of the show. So much is being done to celebrate the anniversary, and one of my favorites is a series of 11 new eshorts celebrating all 11 Doctors being written by some of the biggest names in young people's literature. Each eshort is going to be released on the 23rd of the month, with the eleventh story released on the 50th anniversary date, November 23. They are keeping each of the writers under wraps until early in the month of release for their story, so really, nobody knows who is writing which Doctor.

Eoin Colfer (of Artemis Fowl fame) was selected to write the First Doctor's story. In this new adventure, the Doctor is facing off against the Soul Pirates, a vile alien species that kidnaps children and harvests either their brain power to power their ship or their organs to repair themselves, allowing them to live inordinately long lives. The Doctor had been tracking them and wanted to put a stop to their evil ways, and along the way his granddaughter, Susan, is also kidnapped by the Soul Pirates, thereby making this a personal fight for the Doctor. What follows is a brief but exciting adventure as the Doctor does what the Doctor does best, saving the day.

(Full disclosure here: I've come at Doctor Who more with the New Who than the Classic Who. I remember watching Doctor Who in the late 70s/early 80s with Tom Baker, but I never really understood what I was watching, since I never saw a full story in a row. I've watched several of the William Hartnell stories now, but haven't seen them all.)

The First Doctor was portrayed by William Hartnell from 1963-1966, and his characterization of the Doctor was different from just about every regeneration of the Doctor that we've seen since. He's slightly grumpy, slightly curmudgeonly, and not very proactive. He was more of the think it through type rather than a call to arms type of Doctor, and I've read several reviews of this short that find fault in Eoin Colfer's First Doctor, as that is not necessarily the characterization that Colfer went with. Colfer's Doctor is a little more witty and adventurous than Hartnell's Doctor, and for hardcore Whovians, I can see where this would be a problem.

However, I think Colfer is creating a First Doctor for a new generation. Kids today, and especially their attention spans, probably wouldn't hold up well to Hartnell's characterization of the Doctor, so Colfer took the basic idea of the First Doctor and updated him a little bit. He still thinks things through, but he's a little more proactive in his execution of a resolution. He's still slightly grumpy, but has a certain wit that runs through that grumpiness. I've read complaints that the Doctor drops too many current references (Harry Potter, for instance). I'm sorry, but if he went around in this story only dropping references to things that happened in the 1960s when Hartnell was portraying him, kids today wouldn't understand those references. I think that's the point that many hardcore Whovians are missing, that these stories are written not for them, but for kids, and modern day kids, not kids in the 1960s. Maybe I'm wrong, and Colfer is actually doing a disservice to the memory of the First Doctor and William Hartnell, but for this reader, I think he did an admirable job of taking the old and making it new again. ( )