This story is made up of the good, the bad, and the awkward, and they are somewhat intertwined. Let's start with the basics. The cast sound right; I can easily picture them saying the lines they are given. On the other hand, there is a clumsiness to the prose that means I can't really enjoy it just for the flow of words. To take an example from the first page, the writers say
"It was too dark to make out his face, but [Barbara] could imagine the look of irritation leaving his usually wise, knowledgeable features to be replaced by a manic grin."Then, in the next paragraph:
"She couldn't make out [Ian's] face in the poor light either, but she could easily picture his clean-cut appearance being ruffled by what the Doctor was proposing."These are not quite close enough in structure to work as a deliberate repetition, but too close for anything else. And the choice of words is... well, perhaps "inelegant" would be most appropriate.
Still, this wasn't enough to spoil the story for me. Other aspects of the writer's craft are well-handled - take, for instance, the imagery. Auchterlonie and Isles have managed to produce something very visual, with a high concentration of scenes memorable for the pictures they conjured up in my mind. I'm particularly fond of the TARDIS crew driving North from London in a borrowed van, and a scene in the ship at the end which links to Logopolis, 16 years in the series' future. The plot holds no real peril (unless you include the danger of them being "found out" by police who stop to help them change a tyre), but this works - the story is never boring.
Less successful is the way the history is tied in with the characters. Ian is surprised by how cheap things are in 1950, and he and Barbara discuss whether they are really suited to the time, with food rationing still on. Hang on - they were both in their 20s (or at a stretch, very late teens for Barbara) in 1950 the first time around! Their thoughts and discussion should take a different form, such as "do we really want to go through this again?"
Similarly, the Doctor doesn't act like he should at this point. He's too proactive, spending a lot of energy and time on an issue he could, in theory, have ignored. Now, I would say that this is fallout from when he came up against a problem he couldn't leave alone in The Time Travellers, that those events changed him; but really I see no other evidence for such an interpretation. He also whips up an antigravity device for moving the stone that seems more appropriate for later incarnations, leading to a passage highly reminiscent of Remembrance of the Daleks.
And this is a great example of why I say the good, bad and awkward are all jumbled up. We have here strong imagery, but it's the wrong imagery, and it raises questions I don't want to be asking right now. Our heroes' theft of the stone is beautifully handled - but what happened to the students who admitted to the crime? Do they exist in this version of history, and if so were they lying? Are the references to the program's future just nods for the fans, or something more? How does it all fit in with the wider Whoniverse?
And since I've asked that question...
A Confused Chronology, part 6: The Closest We've Ever Been to Our Own Time and Place
As mentioned in a previous post, Iananbarbara discuss staying on - since they are the closest they've ever been to their own time and place. Which is odd; it's quite possible they don't think that Planet of Giants counts because of the size difference, but Kilmartin in 1950 is further away than Bristol in 1954, which they visited while still travelling with Susan, during The Witch Hunters.
Or did they? So far as I can tell this story only references the TV show, and (with the caveat above) the statement here makes sense in a Whoniverse consisting only of TV serials plus Set in Stone. Which isn't quite as crazy as it sounds when you consider that Gary Russell went to some lengths to demonstrate that the audios, novels, and comics existed in different continuities. Still, it's not a particularly satisfying answer to a continuity fetishist like me.
A single timestream with both discussions is never going to work, unless you posit an unpublished story in between during which their memories get wiped or some such, and even then you run into similar difficulties reconciling it with The Revenants (set in 1956). If you place that one last the repeated discussion is at least accurate, but I would still find it odd that it's so similar in the three cases; and the fact that Iananbarbara are calm, contented, and at home in the TARDIS at the end of Set in Stone makes their eagerness to leave when they reach Orkney unlikely. Swap the order and you run into other difficulties. What to do, then? I can see a couple of possibilities:
(a) Don't Worry About It.
This is the simplest solution: ignore the contradictions, or if you can't do that, mentally edit the stories until they fit.
(b) A Quantum Superposition of Stories.
Quantum's always a good word to use in technobabble; there's a sense in popular culture that even the scientists who work with it don't really understand it, and as a result it can do anything. It even has a 'many worlds' interpretation, which sounds like just what we need here.
In brief, the idea behind quantum superposition is that a system which can exist in a number of different states actually does exist partly in all of them simultaneously - until we examine it, when measurement will give us a single, concrete result. We can do something analogous for Doctor Who stories: they all exist, contradictions and all, until we experience one - when that becomes "fact", potentially excluding others. The analogy falls down if we then go and read, watch or listen to one of those excluded stories, but not if we allow crosstime slippage: we are effectively shifting into an overlapping, parallel continuity.
Rubbish? Maybe, but admit it - it's fun, isn't it?
I'm going to do a couple more timeslip entries before leaving Susan behind altogether, and I'll discuss another theory when I tackle The Longest Story in the World. For now, though, this has got far too long and I'm shutting up.
Published:
Date: December 2005
ISBN: 1-84435-149-1
Rating:
4/10.
Next Time:
It probably will be a look at the post-Susan gap period overall. But you never know.
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