The Seeds Of Death: Ranking - 93

           The Seeds Of Death

(Season 6, Dr 2 with Jamie and Zoe, 25/1/1969-1/3/1969, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Brian Hayles, director: Michael Ferguson)

Rank: 93

   '...Hissssss. Why did we transssssssssssmat to England? It'ssssssssss too cold and rainy for me. We should have gone sssssssssssomewhere warmer. Like Icccccceland! Now there’ssssss a place an Ice Warrior can feel at home and live in peacccccce!'

          

Thissssssssssssss issssssssss another one of thosssssssssssss black and white Dr Whos that doessssssn’t get the love it dessssssservesssssssss, mosssstly because itsssssss a bit sssssssssslow for modern viewerssssss. But there’s ssssssso much to love here: The Ice Warriorssssss are ssssssstill my favourite Dr Who ‘monsters’, with their sssssssssibiliant hissing tones and sssssssslow menacing walk…Aha, I’ve finally unstuck my ‘s’ key!...Now what was I saying? Oh yes…Every story with the Ice warriors was always going to rank highly in my list (give or take ‘The Monster Of Peladon’ anyway). The Ice Warriors are such a wonderful design, both on paper and in costume, with writer Brian Hayles really sitting down to properly think his race through. They have a nobility and poise, a sense of justice that makes them the sort of army you secretly wouldn’t mind being outwitted by them very different to other Dr Who monsters - definitely something the Daleks and Cybermen don’t have - and they kill more through competition than conquest (Earth is their near neighbour after all – invasion is just their way of saying ‘hello’ as part of a friendly backyard tussle). While most Dr Who aliens and indeed most Humans are happy to jaunt between planets without a second thought the Ice Warriors are very different at home and abroad. They aren’t an aggressive race killing because they enjoy it but a noble one with set idea of welfare. Their big plan isn’t to take over the Earth and kill the Humans wahahaha, it’s to terraform the Earth as a last desperate solution after ruining Mars and if some Humans die along the way then never mind. While other fans (Steven Moffat included) laugh at them for being lumbering and slow it fits. Earth (well, the moon that’s been made to be like Earth) has a totally different atmosphere, being built for a totally different species and Hayles adds to his first Ice Warriors script by having that cause his monsssster’s sssssibiliant ssssspeech (oh no, the key’sssss ssssstuck again!) The fact that they hiss is perfectly in keeping with their reptilian look (think snakes crossed with lizards ant turtles) and it’s so refreshing in this era to have a monster that whispers rather than shouts. I love the fact that they’re taking their sweet  time to hunt you down because they know they’re going to win in the end anyway so what’s the rush? (And yes, technically I know the walk is because the poor actors are walking round with half a tonne of fibreglass on their back but even so, where the Daleks wheel, the Cybermen loom and the Sontarons pounce the Ice Warriors stride. Or at least they do till someone turns the heating up). It’s a whole different matter when the Ice Warriors plan to change London’s atmosphere with seed-pods starts to come to fruition and (thanks to some natty camera tricks) start walking quickly and talking ‘normally’.

So when Hayles was contacted by Derrick Sherwin to write another cracker like the first ‘Ice Warriors’ story (partly because of a good fan response but also partly because the costumes over-spent and cost so much everyone thought they’d better get their money’s worth out of it) he got his thinking cap on and came up with an entire ‘origins’ story. His script ‘The Lords Of The Red Planet’ is one of the series’ many cold war parables, with a civil war breaking out on the planet between two different caste systems. The Gandorians are green and scaly and a little bit posh, big bullies who boss around the Suarians, who are a bit more Human looking (and helps explain why they think Earthlings are beneath them). It’s a lot more like Hayles’ other stories and especially the Peladon ones, about how man needs to live alongside his fellow man if he is to have any peace at all, played out on a planet where compared to us everything seems a little ‘backwards’ (it’s a very funny script, especially the Gandorian Queen being considered ugly because she isn’t green and scaly like her ancestors!) The Doctor inspires the friendlier Suarians, Jamie becomes the pet of the Gandorian Queen and there’s an epic civil war battle in the last episode where (in a shock twist – oh  and spoilers…) the Gandorians win (defying all sense of normal Dr Who justice) and set off to conquer the rest of the solar system. It’s a slow building epic which grows episode by episode from a small misunderstanding that feels like it can be easily solved to an attempted genocide that feels unavoidable. The script was one of the first to land on new script editor Terrance Dicks’ desk and, well, he was a bit bored: he found the story too slow to sustain six parts. He was, so legend has it, a bit worried about what to do: Hayles was far older and more experienced than he was at the time and Terrance was a nice old   chap who didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But he screwed up his courage, asked Hayles to have another go – and was relieved to find that Hayles was really sweet, agreeing to try a different tack. The resulting ‘Seeds Of Death’ is much more in keeping with the 3^rd Doctor stories to come, with less characters, a single set and a simpler invasion all round but Hayles maintains a lot of the best features of his old script, adding a caste system to the Ice Warriors (this is where get our first ‘Ice Lord’, less brutish and more of a thinker) and having them attack Earth for added jeopardy. As it happened Dicks still got a bit bored and ended up re-writing most of episode three to six when the story descends into more of a typical Dr Who runaround, but even so you can tell that this story digs a little deeper than most stories. Even so, ‘Lords’ probably has the edge I would say (you can judge for yourself after Big Finish recorded it with a few alterations for their ‘Lost Stories’ range in 2013).

The Ice Warriors seem more of a threat now that there are more of them – all of them notably different, from personality to costumes, making them a relative rarity amongst Dr Who races who tend to all think the same (which is daft when you think about it – if humans are our model of life on other planets, because that’s all we know about for sure, then you can’t get two humans to agree on anything. Particularly Dr Who fans. So why should aliens agree on anything?) While other aliens can be reduced to warriors, by stealth or conquest, with the occasional genial and often forgettable race, ironically despite the name the Ice Warriors are the most like ‘us’, whose motives change depending on individuals and whose behaviour can change with the wind. They look amazing too: the fibreglass body armour with tufts of hair make them quite unlike any other scifi creation, while the idea of aliens being reptiles makes them one of the most plausible species based purely on what we know about our own planet. Put them in a corridor, with nowhere to run, and they look more imposing than anyone, even The Cybermen. While no one will ever beat Bernard Bresslaw’s Varga in my eyes Alan Bennion makes Slaar a worthy successor, distinctively different but still recognisably of the same ruthless racer, while Sonny Caldinez finally gets a decent part after being lots of Dr Who ‘heavies’ (he’ll take over as chief Ice warrior for their next two appearances). Bennion is also responsible for the ‘original’ panicked bystander story: during the location filming on Hampstead Heat the actor went for a cigarette break and, unable to sit down in costume, leaned against a tree. A car came past and the driver was so shocked she ran into a kerb and very nearly crashed the car (there will be so many more stories like this one in the future but this might well be the first).

However it’s what Hayles does with the Humans that makes ‘Seeds Of Death’ stand out. You might remember that quite a few of these 1960s reviews have discussed what will happen when the kids of the day take charge in the future and how they might fare in another world war (indeed, whether there even would be a world war left to their own devices). Notably it’s a second Dr Who story set on the moon within two years and just six months before mankind lands there for real back in the days when the moon was the obvious place to go next and somewhere the children watching might realistically think they could travel to in the near future. This story went on air just after Apollo 8 had proved that NASA could get man into space successfully and plans were well underway for the Apollo 11 moon landings pencilled in for eighteen months away. It was written against the backdrop of humans being a little smug about their progress, with news bulletins full of the sorts of model shots you get in this story of how things will look when we got to the moon any day now honest (and after that, the universe is our oyster!) We know, sitting here in 2023, that it didn’t quite turn out like that – but even back then, before it happened, Hayles is playing down that sense of freedom and exhilaration. I love the fact that the technicians treat these amazing feats of 1960s ingenuity as if they’re just another machine, taking them down for spare parts and fixing them up with a screwdriver like they’re a toaster (not even a sonic screwdriver but a normal one!)What’s more we don’t have the 1960s baby boomers when they’re adults coming of age, like other stories do, but when they’re effectively OAPS with their time in the sun been and gone for the most part. Though we don’t have an actual fixed dating most fans agree this story is set somewhere round about ‘now’, when most of the fans who saw this as children are getting their bus passes (and wishing it was a shuttle pass instead the way their childhood ‘promised’). This story does to the new and exciting fad of space travel what was happening in the 1960s to the steam train, making an invention that was once seen as the pinnacle of man’s achievement that once meant escape adventure and opportunity seems archaic and quaint and unsustainable. I love the fact that, even before man landed on the moon, a Dr Who writer has already sat down and imagined a future where our base is dusty and unloved, everyone having moved on to the next big thing. We start the story looking at a model of a rocket that’s just like the ones in the news in 1968 – only for the camera to pull back and for us to realise that we’re in a space museum of archaic dusty relics nobody cares for anymore (alongside such amazing technology as some recycled Who props from storage: the astral map from ‘The Web Planet’, The Sensorites’ ‘table, the Dominator’s drill and the Morok freezing machine from ‘The Space Museum’ amongst others. How did Earth get hold of all those?!) Just to ram the point home the rocket is rather aptly modelled on Mariner 4, the unmanned probe sent to map the surface of Mars in 1964 and that’s real NASA footage fans might have recognised when The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe go up into space. It’s such a clever idea: don’t get too ahead of yourselves kids because one day all this will be obsolete and it’s easy to imagine Hayles sitting there watching the news, with its juxtaposition of the trains that were once considered cutting edge being sent to the knacker’s yard for scrap with tales of Nasa’s latest adventures in space. Writer Hayles, 37 when this story went on air, was young enough to be excited by the prospects of space travel but also old enough to have lived through a time when steam was king and seems to be saying to the still-mostly-children audience watching this story ‘it will happen to you one day’. And he was right, given our reticence to send anything manned into space properly in half a century (maybe the real Martians scared NASA off because they didn’t like their portrayal in stories like this one?) Like all good intelligent writers Hayles knows that the era he’s living in isn’t the high point of technology but another passing phase on getting there; that all eras are until humanity blows itself up. To add to that feeling of the kids of now in the future this story’s dress sense would have really stood out on first broadcast: it’s a bit lost to younger fans now that it just looks like a ‘retro’ look but just see how all the characters in the base bar Miss Kelly are on the older side and how they’re all wearing the sort of mod shellsuit that was all the rage for a few weeks in the mid-to-late 1960s (it also makes for a fun contrast with the Ice Warriors suits literally made of shells). That would be like watching OAPS today walking about with Brazilian butt lifts and single eyebrows: It’s meant to be that strange and to make children think about where the world might be in the future.

You can tell that Hayles considers the death of the stream train a ‘waste’ too. In this future people don’t use rockets anymore because some bright spark came along and invented the T-Mat, which is Dr Who’s answer to Star Trek’s teleport and transports you anywhere that has another T-mat base instantly. Only original Trek never did a story like this (though ‘Next Generation’ will do a few) where far from being a good thing for humanity that makes life easier it’s a bad thing because it’s made them lazy, relying on the technology to the point of ignoring all other forms of transport. It also leaves them open to invasion when the T-mat is itself taken over by an alien race for their own designs, the Ice Warriors using it to send their seed-pods to colonise Earth before a full takeover. Though this plot gets some stick in some quarters from people who don’t think the t-mat would make all other forms of transport obsolete in one go, I reckon that’s accurate: if you could teleport anywhere instantly you wouldn’t faff about with anything else, or at least not in enough numbers to make the cost of railways or roads or boats viable. Hayles is making the point that in our haste by robbing ourselves of some ‘hardships’ we lose out on other things as well, such as the joy of a slow train ride or a canal cruise. I’ve often wondered if this was a dig at Dr Who’s nearest rival too, then entering its final year on TV before cancellation and is intended as a very British dour response to all that utopian hope of the future our American cousins were writing. It would be very British to say ‘we can’t even get it together down here, why should we get it together up there just because it’s the future?’

I do wonder too if Hayles is making a comment by going back a generation nd using a different mode of transport. Star Trek famously modelled the Enterprise on sailing ships – that’s why you have the ‘sailor’s call whenever anyone presses their ‘comms’ badges and why the spaceship has a ‘bridge’ (see ‘Enlightenment’ for the Dr Who version, with spaceships that are adapted Edwardian sailing vessels). It strikes me that Hayles was treating NASA space rockets as ‘boats’ too and wondering what a future version of World War II in space might look like. ‘The Seeds Of Death’ is as blatant a war movie as any Dr Who story, with The Ice Warriors up against the plucky Brits (and yes, unlike Star Trek or indeed ‘The Moonbase’, everyone on this moonbase is British). The Ice Warrior control of the T-mat devices is basically an old-fashioned blockade of cargo or passenger ships, cutting off supplies and replacing them with a poison of their own (a real World war fear, which is another reason why people were encouraged to grow their own vegetables). Control the only way the Humans can move then you can keep them in one place and kill them or starve  them, job done. Just to add to the feel we get the Ice Warriors presented purely in terms of their army (no WWII film ever stopped to think about the home lives of Germans, Italians or the Japanese) and there are collaborators so scared of the Ice warriors that they’ll happily sell their own kind out to live a bit longer. Admittedly I don’t remember any ventilation shafts in any war film but even that’s a ruse that’s as close as Dr Who comes to ‘tunnelling your way out of your prison’. Like ‘The Dominators’ and ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ this story worries that the kids of the day will be the gullible innocents of tomorrow, easily invaded by a race who doesn’t share their same values. Yet Hayles also gives a joyous ending where the hippies of the day (so often dismissed by their elders as weak-kneed cowards) step up to the plate and are every bit as brave as their war surviving parents. Their invention the space rocket (technically a 1950s design but such an emblem of the 1960s, in the same way rock and roll started in the 1950s but came into its own a decade later) really does save the day and Professor Eldred (a very swinging sixties kid now in his sixties) really does become a hero and save the day, with the Doctor’s help. It’s fitting, too, that we should get an ending like this in a story that is the 1960s’ last hurrah and the last real time that Dr Who holds this sort of intergenerational discussion (‘The Space Pirates’ is something of a one-off, going back even further to have The Wild West in space and ‘The War Games’ is an epic taking n past, present and future).

The idea of the seeds  - something I would bet my sonic screwdriver is either  Dicks invention or a suggestion - then takes over for the second half, with the Ice Warriors’ attempts to terraform Earth and make it colder (no prizes for guessing that they hit Britain first – given how cold it is this week for all I know they succeeded and there’s one under my sofa right now – I’ll have a look next time I go to hide behind it). It’s an intriguing idea, a monster starting their assault with most of humanity oblivious and doing a bit of gardening  (and the Moonbase who know what’s going on cut off from them), even if it feels more like the sort of thing a Cybermen would do: the Ice Warriors tend to believe in fairer fights than winning by trickery like this. The idea of taking over a planet and making it more like yours is something ‘The Tenth Planet’ touched on but this story goes a stage further: if it was done slowly and carefully enough would people even notice? Usually the moment when one of the regulars is on holiday slows the story right down, but episode four – with the Doctor apparently unconscious on the ground – really sells this story too: The Ice warriors come pretty darn close to victory this time out and the fact that even the semi-invincible Doctor can get knocked out by these things sells just how powerful they are. Without him they’re doomed and the Humans at the base are smart enough to know that (which is why they keep splintering, some of them selling their colleagues out). Typical, the last time any of the regulars goes on holiday – thanks to the shorter schedules from season seven onwards – and they’ve finally worked out how to use it properly! Really, though, it’s just an excuse for more fun with the Dr Who foam machine – there’s a lot of it in this story, even compared to ‘Fury From The Deep’ and Troughton’s never funnier than in part five, trying to slip and slide his way out of trouble before the seeds burst in his face (even Wendy Padbury gets the giggles watching him for real at one point). It’s a really strong story for Zoe too for the most part, allowing her to sue her intelligence with the added frisson that to her and her time even the T-mats are obsolete technology she’s wracking her brain to trey and remember (technology never stays still…) Jamie gets a bit of a raw deal, as he so often does across season six, but that’s more a consequence of the re-writes than anything: Frazer Hines had originally intended to quit the story before this, but when that fell through and his dad died leaving (with his family needing his wage packet more than ever) he stuck around another few months, written both out and back in again across the different drafts. This is definitely one of my favourite Tardis teams and they know each other well by now, bouncing ideas off each other left and right; their friendship is clearly very real off set and on and the balance between Zoe’s intelligence but naivety, Jamie’s bravery but dimwittedness and the 2nd Dr’s habit of staying on the fringes and watching things unfold before suddenly taking charge is one of the best combinations Dr Who ever had. You really feel as if the 2nd Dr is up against a threat that’s the equal of him in this story too, one where he has to bring his best self to the table in order to win. Odd in retrospect that nobody comments on his second heart in his space ‘medical’ check though (especially as he has it just three stories later in ‘Spearhead From Space’; at this stage the production team keep changing their minds about what sort of background the Doctor is – he might well be from a future Earth in some stories).

It’s the supporting characters who shine though: perhaps in another dig at Star Trek (where the women were all nurses or glorified receptionists) Hayles puts Miss Kelly nominally in charge and she’s arguably the best, most three-dimensional female character in the series since Barbara. She’s not a giggly schoolgirl, she’s not an ice maiden,  but a level headed rational thinker who’s not afraid to take the hard decisions (and to be fair to him it was Terrance who made her a girl; she was a bloke in Hayles’ original script). Louise Pajo is clearly enjoying being given intelligent lines to speak for a change. Ronald Leigh Hunt (the Merlin to William Russell’s Lancelot back in the 1950s)  has great fun crossing swords with Phillip Ray as the retro Eldrad too, Hayles cleverly finding a way of continuing the Clent-Penley debate from ‘The Ice Warriors’ about whether technology and computers are our saviour or a big ol’ trap. There is no easy answer in this story ever: technology makes life easier and better in so many ways, but it comes at a price. Is it a price worth paying? That’s up to the audience.

In other words ‘The Seeds Of Death’ is a lot more intelligent than it’s ever given credit for. Okay so it’s not as clever as ‘The Ice Warriors’ or the Peladon stories to come and you can tell Terrance Dicks is itching to get his red pen out and add his own ideas to the plot to bring it more down to Earth, a sort of hybrid to the two approaches which is the TV equivalent of making a film about a crossword puzzle: spending time teasing out the answers is meant to be the whole enjoyment but the script keeps flipping to the solution page before we’re ready. I can’t help but feel that the story would have been a ot better if Dicks had simply left it alone to breathe (he was just a bit too eager to make an impact on his first job  – he has far more luck with next script ‘The Space Pirates’ which only works in the places he sped it up). Even so, this is far more than just another Troughton base under siege story as so many people dismiss this story as. If it’s all a bit slow and there’s still not quite enough story to stretch across six episodes even with the two plots, well, that’s a problem common with most 1960s stories that run this long. The Ice warriors plan also seems a bit, well complex. If they’d have sent their seed pods through the T-mat to all  countries at once then they’d have won inside five minutes, but because the plot can’t end that quickly they try sending them one at a time. Even as splintered as a world as we’re living in now, surely in the face of a common enemy our different countries would get their act together and fight back properly? Even more of a problem is that the resolution is almost kinda sorta like ‘The Ice Warriors’ - (spoilers) basically turning up the heating – just in a different location. It seems mighty easy too: a thermostat turns to the sort of temperatures even your Granny would find too hot to be comfortable, while the Ice Warriors plan basically depends on the fact that it won’t rain somewhere and destroy the seed pods before they’re ready (all that research and they didn’t learn about Earth’s changing weather?) For such a hippie 1960s story it’s uncomfortably bloodthirsty too and another side effect I think of being so heavily rewritten: to Hayles The Ice Warriors are a noble race taking over earth for pure survival,  but in the last episode Dicks has The Doctor become as bloodthirsty as we’ve seen him so far, committing genocide by sending the fleet of Ice warriors into the sun while poor Slaar is left watching his poor family and friends die horribly. I mean, yes they have to be stopped but not like this (what’s wrong with sending them  back to Mars and telling them they’ll be in trouble if they try this sort of thing again? But even that makes this story feel like a war movie: the good guys always have justice and victory by the end and the bad guys always die). They’re clearly running low on budget too: the main set and the Ice Warriors and even the Human costumes kind of work but everything else feels a bit grimy and secondhand, in need of a polish. Though it’s a thrill seeing more than one Ice Warrior at a time there are still   only three of them – hardly unbeatable army. There’s also the infamous scene where all the action happens…offstage, Slarr lumbering off to another room and an injured Radnor stumbling out telling us ‘they killed them all’ (for all we know, being a child of the 1960s he’s using slang to mean the Ice Warrior got out a guitar and played ‘Ice Ice Baby’ really really well).  

‘Seeds’ has always had a bit of a reputation amongst fandom for being disappointing, a reputation I think is a tad unfair; it didn’t help that, as one of the few Troughton stories that existed complete in the mid-1980s, it was chosen as his first video: it’s a slow tease rather than a big exciting adventure and is meant to be watched across six weeks, the layers building one level at a time, rather than all in one go with the cliffhangers removed (yes, it’s so early in the days of VHS the BBC worried fans would think the story was over and switch off if they put credits in partway through). It is, indeed, not the sort of thing you show a non-fan who will probably laugh at the slow speed of both the monsters and the plot. I wasn’t all that taken with it the first time I remember: it lacked the thoughtfulness of the other Troughton stories I’d seen ‘The Mind Robber’ and yes ‘The Krotons’. But this is a story that grows on you the older you get and the more you realise what this story is really about, the repeating cycles of mankind throughout history that progress doesn’t always come in a straight line and the way that today’s big success stories will be in tomorrow’s bargain bins. There’s always something interesting going on even when the plot’s in pause-mode too: Michael Ferguson might well be my favourite of all the ‘classic’ directors and there are lots of reallyclever unexpected shots. The first Ice warrior invasion, for instance, isn’t shot from the point of view of screaming panicked Humans but from their own point of view as they congratulate each other; even The Daleks have never really done that. We’re still early enough in the series’ history for them to do things they’ve never really done before, such as the Hampstead Heath location filming (which gets shorts shrift compared to the Daleks over London bridge or the Cybermen by St Paul’s but is nevertheless thrilling. To think that the creatures from space are…really here! Whether by design or coincidence it happened to be right round the corner from Terrance’s house). Even the soundtrack is perfect for filling in the thoughtful silences: Dudley Simpson considered his score – featuring military drums for the Ice Warriors, marimba and glockenspiel –to be his favourite and I’m not going to argue with the master. Besides, there’s never been such thing as a bad Ice Warrior story in my eyes and this story does all the sort of things most 2nd Dr stories do with more verve than most. A most under-rated sssssssssstory (darn it, that key’s stuck again…).

POSITIVES + There’s a great scene where Earth are trying to get hold of the Moonbase because they’ve heard there’s been some kind of commotion. They’re not really paying much attention because they think it’s just a normal breakdown or a rumour but then they hear the hissing and suddenly…THEY turn up, an Ice warrior suddenly looms on screen as if to say ‘hello’. No other series gives you scenes like this, none.

NEGATIVES – Then again few series have scenes as daft as the later one at the end of part four. Everyone is depending on Zoe. She’s the only one small enough to crawl through a ventilation shaft to mess with the heating (the first time one was ever central to a Dr Who plot?) and has to crawl behind the Ice Warriors in order to fix the thermostat. She needs to be both fast and small, lurking in the shadows. Only there’s a cliffhanger coming up, so what does she do? She walks in large exaggerated steps slowly, as if filling up the room and is making so much noise that of course The Ice Warriors are going to turn round and see her. For arguably the cleverest character Dr Who ever had Zoe isn’t half thick sometimes. Especially when the cliffhangers need her to be. Dr Who has never been more like a pantomime.

BEST QUOTE: ‘But don’t you see gentlemen? The invasion of Moonbase, the taking over of T-Mat, the seed pods, the arrival of the Ice Warrior – they’re all part of the same plan!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS:  A real proper sequel this time, as Ben ‘Remembrance’ Aaronovitch deals with what the aftermath of what happened to the base when the Doctor left it in disarray. ‘Transit’ (1992) is one of the real love-ir-or-hate-it ‘New Adventures’ books which sees the seed-pods as the first event in what turns out to be a thousand day stand-off between Earth and Mars. As the title suggests, the transmat and desperate attempts to find a workable alternative continue to be the focal point, but what we didn’t see on screen was that there are interstitial shuttle-trains everywhere across our solar system now. There’s a nice believable detail of everyone grumbling that it takes a whole forty minutes to get from Earth to Pluto nowadays compared to the instant travel of the T-mat! Though it’s nominally a 7^th Doctor  and Benny book, we really follow the supporting characters and the conflicts they feel as the Humans fight each other more than they do the Ice Warriors (all too believable a picture of a war they weren’t expecting to fight nor all that sure they’ll win). Ben makes them all interesting believable, but also can’t help throwing lots of big concepts our way that don’t always fit (there’s a lot of ‘Ghostlight’ type talk of evolution, for instance, which seems an odd book to put it in as it’s basically about the ins and outs of local transport on a cosmic Dr Who scale).  It’s a really good book but would have been better still had it come later in the run when a) Ben knew Benny better (he’s clearly been handed her as a fait accompli by the editor before a chance to see her in other books so gets her out the way early with another ‘killer virus’ subplot that’s the story’s weakest link and b) the range had stopped trying to be so edgy (the constant swearing is a bit off-putting: in some Dr Who novels swearing is a natural reaction to events but everyone seems to be swearing in this book. That’s nothing compared to the sex references though, which is weird given how prudish most of the Humans in ‘Seeds’ seem just three years earlier. Even allowing for Benny not being herself in this book, either, you’ll never look at her the same way again! The book also has perhaps the most notorious scene of any New Adventures book, a two page sex scene  that’s not for the squeamish and goes for sight, sound, smell and especially taste. We’re a long way from where we started and indeed where the show will be rebooted in 2005). We get yet another offspring of the Brigadier’s, Kadiatu,  presumably a descendent of Kate too not that the Whoniverse had invented her yet, though she’s, umm, not much like her mum or her Grandad. So did I love it or hate it?  Both. Usually in alternating pages. Ben’s grasp of Dr Who plots, characters and dialogues are second to none but this book feels at times as if it’s defying you to get to the end, throwing new character after character at us with more jumps in the plot than  Moffat series finale and with lots of scenes that feel as if they’re there to shock more than anything else.

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