To the Doctor - a Daughter!

I'm sorely tempted not to bother saying anything about The Doctor's Daughter, but instead just post a handful of spoof Doctor Who spin-offs. That seems both less painful for me and perfectly appropriate given the conclusion of this truly dire story.

But if I don't vent even a little then I'll end up with some kind of televisual reflux and be throwing up little bits of bad dialogue and snippets of wooden acting into my mouth for days.

So I'll try to think of some good points first...

1. I liked the scene with Donna's womanly wiles being downplayed. It made the Doctor look like a prat again by having him tell his mate she's a boiler and by having him happy to pimp his daughter to any passing soldier, but at least it brought a smile to my face.
2. Jenny saying the Sonic Screwdriver was a weapon and the Doctor denying it adds weight to my personal theory that the screwdriver/weapon debate is important this season (though since that point has been hammered home with all the subtlety of a Pro-Life placard it's hardly a boast to claim that as a 'personal theory')
3. The scene where Jenny's two hearts are discovered would have been quite nice had it not been for Murray 'Bleeding Obvious' Gold's score skittering all over it.
4. That's it for the positive.

Negatives, then. Hmm, where to start...

1. It looked awful. The Hath resembled nothing so much as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers baddies. The sets were cheap looking even by 1970s Who standards. But winner of worst non-acting and non-story moment is the shot of Martha and one of the Hath when they first go onto the planet surface - do you remember the matting shot in Caves of Androzani? The really crap one that the Restoration Team fixed for the dvd release? Yeah well, that original shot was WETA level cgi magic compared to the Knightmare standard seen here.
2. Freema Agyeman as Martha. At first I thought it was because she's playing alongside the majestic Catherine Tate, but now I just think she's rubbish. Her 'My name is Martha Jones and who the hell are you?' speech might be the worst bit of acting on Who since Joan Sims played Katryca in The Mysterious Planet.
3. The Doctor's journey (it 'changes everything' according to writer Stephen Greenhorn, but he created the River City so cannot be trusted with anything). Ah yes, that'll be the journey from here to just over there. Actually, maybe not as far as all the way over there. More like from here to the fridge (you have to be me, sitting in the kitchen as I am, reaching out to get a beer from the fridge to get the full impact of my withering sarcasm there).
4. The lazy-to-the-point-of-coma science. This doesn't usually bother me - the series is based on a near immortal man travelling through time in a police box after all - but when the clone isn't a clone at all but someone abit like the donor and appears fully clothed; when the terraforming machine appears to be a special gas that brings people back to life; and when a war lasting seven days is one which has gone on for 'generations' even though at least one person is clearly many years older than that - well, a line has to be drawn somewhere. And in this case that line is so far behind Greenhorn's script that I suspect he'll need the Very Large Telescope to see it.
5. Everything else which wasn't Catherine Tate (compare her delivery of the line about the
   'outrageous amount of running' involved in being with the Doctor with any line by Agyeman to remind yourself what genuine acting looks like.)
6. Especially the spin-off set-up which was Moffet's gung-ho, 'I'm off to the stars' final speech (Steven Moffat's idea seemingly, the complete arse).
   

Actually, for all that I don't like Gridlock I wasn't surprised (IIRC) that some people liked it. But I'm gobsmacked anyone thought that either the ludicrous 'GI Joe versus The Baddies from the Power Rangers' or Georgia Moffat as the Doctor's Spin-Off was anything above lacklustre, shoddy and shit.

Oh - and some suggested spin-offs for Cardiff to consider, as promised back at the top of the page.

Doctor Who Kids: A seven year old Doctor and his team of Gallifreyan Rug Rats solve a series of mysteries involving dodgy Castellans pretending to be ghosts and projecting giant pirates onto the river to hide their smuggling activites. Cartoon, 2 x 15 minute per episode.

Dixon of Doctor Green: The TARDIS turns into a normal police box and, through a series of unlikely co-incidences including his ability to survive death, the Doctor is mistaken for PC George Dixon, a job he fills for many, many years of pretty dull crime fighting. Black and White. 30 minute episodes.

Fonzie and the Doctor Who Gang: Arthur Fonzarelli from Happy Days is accidentally cryogenically frozen and is revived in the year Seven Apple Condom Fourteen. Soon he's involved in wacky high-jinks and motorcycle related mayhem alongside his henchcreatures, Cassandra and the Face of Boe. Color. 22 minutes episodes plus adverts.

Other reviews worth reading: Rob, Simon, Louise, Daniel, Kelly and Tim

Sex, Lies and the Potato Men

Does it count as actual praise to say that the 'Sontaran Strategy/Poison Sky' two parter was the best of the kid-friendly double episodes which traditionally fill this spot in a season of New Who? Is it praise of any type to say 'that was better than Rise of the Cybermen'? Should it simply be taken as read that anything - even a script written in his own faeces by a lobotomised Welshmen using his palm as a pen - is better than Evolution of the Daleks? No farting aliens and Scooby Doo chases? Automatically more interesting than any story featuring the Slitheen.

So I'm not really showering this latest Helen 'Daleks in Manhatten' Raynor script with garlands and bouquets by comparing it to its predecessors. It is a better stab at a pre-teen Who adventure than the three previous attempts in that it's not actually dreadful, but it's not really good either. The plot has just as many holes as usual, the resolution is nonsensical, Martha's clone is a tired idea handled badly, the kid genius is both poorly written and acted, his team of super clever kids seem tacked onto the plot just to fill in a couple of minutes of running time (as do some of the scenes of Donna in the Sontaran spaceship), the Sontaran weakness in the face of bullets suggests their armour is a bit crap, and Freema the Plank gets screen time which should rightfully be the mighty Ms Tate's.

But even with all of that there's a lot less wrong here than in the three preceeding early two part stories. More importantly though the script actually contains layers and a degree of subtlety that you would never previously have given Raynor credit for*.

On the surface level, the entire story can be summed up in a dozen words - Sontarans poison earth, get shot, Martha cloned, kid sacrifices himself, earth saved - and it's tempting to accept that that's all there is going on. After all, Raynor's script in an identical slot last year was the absolute low-point of New Who and would rank in the bottom half dozen Who stories ever.

But if you give the writer the benefit of the doubt, you can view the entire story as the point at which the show began moving towards the Doctor finally getting some payback for his overweening arrogance and hubris.

I can never remember a period in Doctor Who, even in Colin Baker's first year, in which the Doctor was so obviously a bit of an arsehole. Certainly I can think of no single story in which he was guilty of so much misplaced arrogance, inappropriate intellectual superiority, possible physical cowardice and sheer stupidity as here.

Most obviously, the Doctor spent all of the first episode and the first half of the second lambasting Colonel Mace and his troops, and battering on interminably about the fact that there was no way UNIT could fight the Sontarans. When Mace decides to ignore the Doctor, he successfully overcomes the Sontaran force, including killing the Sontar second in command personally. It's difficult to read this sequence of events as anything other than the writer rejecting the Doctor's arrogant assumption of superiority.

The other glaring, though less clearcut, example of the Doctor failing to live up to expectations comes right at the end of The Poison Sky. The Doctor is on the Sontaran battleship with a Prime Plot McGuffin Bomb in his hands and is threatening to blow up both the Sontarans and himself if they don't agree to his demands. The Sontarans (predictably) refuse and tell him to blow them all up, see if they care.

And the Doctor doesn't do it.

You can see Tennant bursting a blood vessel as he acts his little socks off trying to suggest that the Doctor's hesitation is because he doesn't want to kill the Sontarans, but to me at least it's obvious the Doctor's bluffing. The fact that Tennant fails to convince with his reading reinforces the belief that the writer intended the Doctor to seem too scared to kill himself and that's exactly what comes across on screen.

The clock ticks down and the Doctor appeals, more and more desperately, for Staal to surrender until - with only a couple of seconds left and the Doctor showing no sign of pressing the button - the badly acted genius kid redeems himself by beaming in in place of the Doctor and immediately pushing the button.

Redeemed kid dead but planet saved and everyone happy.

It's a Who cliche, but the fact that the Doctor seemed so hesitant to make the sacrifice himself is new and something which it might be interesting to follow up on. Perhaps as last of the Time Lords, and having watched the Master die, the Doctor feels a new and added pressure to survive: as the only one of his species in the Universe, he has a duty to go on?

Or having apparently discovered the joy of sex in the past couple of years, he's realised that there's more to life than getting blown to smithereens for a load of ungrateful humans?

Other minor bits of Doctorly stupidity? Sending Donna to hide in the TARDIS for no reason other than plot convenience. Tortuously explaining the mobile phone to Donna whilst talking to Staal, when he intended to ring it later. The Doctor not noticing the hardly subliminal appearance of Rose on a UNIT monitor. Knowing about Martha's clone and happily leaving the real Martha in danger for no terribly convincing reason (nice to know that the Doctor doesn't consider clones to be real people either and so kills them without a second thought or any attempt to find a better solution).

All in all, the Tenth Doctor is becoming less and less appealing. With that in mind, his comeuppance is overdue and if this two parter is the beginning of his end then I'm not going to complain.

* No doubt someone will claim Saint Rusty wrote those bits.

Intermission: The Pottery Wheel*

In lieu of a review of this week's Doctor Who (I'm going to do it as a complete two-parter next week), some mini-music reviews, mainly consisting of comparisons to other bands and disparaging remarks about how the originals were much better.

The Age of the Understatement - The Last Shadow Puppets

A first solo(ish) project from Alex of the Arctic Monkeys, in collaboration with a guy from some band called The Rascals, this album is designed from the outset to distance itself from the Monkeys. What this means is that the killer riffs and clever lyrics of the first Monkeys' album is replaced by an almost lounge sound, full of acoustic guitar, piano and languid vocals. At first I was inclined to file it alongside Richard Hawley, then I shoved it up a grade or two to the realms of the mighty Scott Walker which, after a few more listens, is obviously insane.

Then, quite separately, both Mags and Scott pointed out the obvious - it's Marc Almond in his strings period, all lush backing and sub torch song vocals. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's an unexpected direction for the boy Alex to take and one where he's in danger of failing to live up to similar sounds from those who've come before.

Just a Little Lovin' - Shelby Lynne

A popular female country singer doing an album of Dusty Springfield covers. If ever an album had 'sure fire success' success stamped all over it, surely this was it? And in the hands of a Lucinda Williams it would have been - full of big, powerful vocals sung over countrified backing, with the pop sound of the Dusty originals replaced by steel guitars and a bit of funky banjo. Instead of that, however, we get Shelby Lynne turning some of the most energetic and vital melodies of the last fifty years into hushed, sepulchral ballads. All the passion and power has been removed along with every scrap of fun from Dusty's versions, and all that's left is spare, bare songs devoid of all purpose and impact and destined to be forever relegated to background music.

Disappointing.

Songs in A&E - Spiritualized

You like Spacemen 3?

You prefer the tracks which are actually songs as opposed to Sonic Boom recording the sound of water dripping in a metal basin and then taping down the B3 key on his Hammond organ, before looping the dripping water interminably?

You even have the first couple of Spiritualized albums and listen to them a lot?

Good, because that's fine, fine music.

Stick with that and forget Spiritualized still exist, though: unless you're a bigger fan of 13 period Blur than you ever were of Spacemen 3, you won't be interested in this album. Because that's exactly what it sounds like, even down to the whiny, effects distorted vocals. It's a decent enough record, but not what I expected from Spiritualized - give the single a listen before you buy, I'd recommend.

Replica Sun Machine - The Shortwave Set

Unassuming and pleasant pop sound which completely fails to grasp the attention in any meaningful way. This is exactly the kind of cd which will disappear as soon as you put it alongside the rest of your cds, and which you will never be listen to or think about ever again.

Safe Inside the Day - Baby Dee

Saving the best until last. Hard to describe but 'Tom Waits meets Ethel Merman' is the best attempt I've heard. 'Hymns, dirges and Shirley Temple songs', as Baby Dee puts it. Go out and buy this album now - the title track in particular is a contender for song of the year.

* Worst blog post title ever?

Back to the bad old days

I'm not perfect, you know, and sometimes I change my mind about things. Mushrooms, for instance. Thought they tasted strongly of rot and mould as a boy, came to love them like an (edible) son when I grew up. Same goes for mobile phones - I always said they were utterly pointless, but nowadays I generally find my Razr quite useful.

And so it is with Planet of the Ood. When the episode finished I mentioned online that I thought it was a reasonable, if largely uninspired episode. On a second viewing though, I think that it only just clears the pole-in-the-dirt bar which is Gridlock.

It's actually a return to the bad old days of last year. Lazy, lazy plotting combined with a vague, blind man in a blindfold in a room with no windows stab at alien and the Doctor at his most annoyingly hyperactive yet curiously ineffective.

It was like the first part of the Eccleston season all over again, except without the cement of Eccleston's towering performance.

The Ood were cool, mind, which does raise the standard above such previous low-points as last year's Dalek two-parter. And Tate as Donna, even in a bad script, is better than plastic fantastic Martha, but other than that - nah, I have nothing positive to say.

However, I will say that...

• The alien planet was basically a backlot with some snow and a couple of dodgy bits of cgi.
  

• The supporting characters either existed

1. to be pricks and then satisfyingly die (the security team and the unpleasant yuppie business types)
2. to make it look as though the Doctor was doing something, be pricks and then die (that PR woman)
3. to make it look as though there were thematic layers (the Friends of the Ood guy - really, what was the point of him?) and then die or
4. to be pricks and then get turned into an Ood (Captain Darling).

• The biology of the Ood made neither evolutionary nor intuitive sense.

1. They've evolved hands and opposable thumbs (signs of a need to compete for available resources) but also brains on bits of string (a sign of not thinking your alien race through properly)?
2. They live on ice planet zebra, apparently, but have also evolved a species component which is an unprotected giant brain with a mouth on top, i.e. where it's not very easy to feed?
3. If you cut the whole brain in their hand off - 'lobotomise them' according to the dialogue - and then throw those brains in the bin four planetary systems away, it doesn't matter because as soon as you release the giant brain (by flicking a single switch in a shed) everything's OK - and, eh, they're not lobotomised any more?

Or something. Whatever. It doesn't matter - it's only Doctor Who after all.

Not that it really is Doctor Who either. For one episode only (hopefully) it's back to being someone else's show, not the Doctor's. Unlike the Eccleston season though, it's not even the companion's series - in fact, I have no idea who's supposed to he be the hero here. The Ood themselves I suppose. Certainly there was no need for the Doctor to be there. He contributes nothing to the Ood revolt and yet gets told at the end that the wind and the air and the snow and the husky shit will sing of him for ever and ever and ever, amen.

As someone wisely remarked on a mailing list I frequent, hopefully the song the various elements will sing is something along the lines of "thanks for nothing DoctorDonna: you came here, stood about, got locked up, then sodded off having nicked all the glory".

Why I watch Doctor Who - Other Views and Reviews

As promised last week, links to some other reviews of Fires of Pompeii that I enjoyed, some wisely agreeing with me that it was great, some exhibiting the effects of syphilitic infection by disagreeing.

Because I promised to do this...: "I did enjoy it, but I thought it could have been so much better"

Review: Doctor Who 4x2 - The Fires of Pompeii: "I'm feeling sort of 'myah' about The Fires of Pompeii. I liked it. It was definitely good. I'm just feeling a little underwhelmed and uninspired by it."

Fires of Pompei, the Doctor Who version, non spoilery: "I'm actually a bit stunned. this episode is probably the first that met my "up there with best Buffy/Angel episodes" standards"

Doctor Who: Fires of Pompeii: "The more I think about this episode the more I think it was actually very good indeed"

Resting On Caesar's Laurels: "Yes, of course, it's Asterix And The Laurel Wreath, by Goscinny and Uderzo"

Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii: "The series still feels a more childish, unsophisticated programme than it was in 2005, and the writers’ enthusiasm for writing it seems greater than their professional restraint, but this was still good entertainment."

Doctor Who - The Fires Of Pompeii: "I'm pretty sure this was really good... wasn't it?"

Doctor Who: The Fires Of Pompeii: "did I mention HE TOTALLY LICKED THAT DUST!"

Why I Watch Doctor Who

In my fascinating online life I get asked one question many more times than is actually warranted, in my none too humble opinion.

Not, as you might expect, "would you like a contract to turn your insightful blog into a book?" or "what do you think of the Pixar movie The Incredibles?", but rather "Why do you keep watching Doctor Who, since you seem to dislike it so much?"

And the simple answer from now on will be "Fires of Pompeii".

Like last year's The Shakespeare Code this is far more the kind of thing I have in mind when I think of Doctor Who on telly. Intelligent and layered with - for the first time in the series since Barbara and Ian - an actual adult filling the companion role, Fires of Pompeii obviously benefited from using the fabulous sets from the HBO series Rome and an excellent guest cast, but the real strength was the script.

Donna in particular was given great line after great line - "I don't know what kids you've been flying around in space with, but you don't tell me to shut up", "You fought her off with a water pistol - I bloody love you !", the Welsh language/Latin running gag.

The best joke in the whole episode though was one that I only spotted when my boy was re-watching Fires: the Fawlty Towers reference where the Doctor is talking about an oracle named Sybil and then when asked where Donna comes from says "She's from Barcelona", as does Manuel in that classic sitcom. Someone please point out to Rusty - that's how you do those kind of things.

It wasn't all jokes though. The writer, James Moran (whose Torchwood episode, Sleeper, was only just above average at best) has Donna constantly questioning and provoking a reaction from the Doctor. Unlike previous attempts at this in earlier seasons where Martha was effectively brushed off if she asked any awkward questions (and Rose generally didn't bother asking unless it directly affected her) Donna wants to know why the Doctor acts as he does and won't accept the usual hand-waving as an answer. It's not new or innovative for the series as a whole (Barbara was asking the same questions as far back as The Aztecs in 1964) but for New Who both question and answer showed greater maturity than Russell T Davies' far more common ADD chattering.

It's a reasonable question though to ask whether there was any need for the aliens in this, a historical story about a genuine big exploding mountain. I thought the Pyroviles looked very effective when they were swimming about in the lava and less so when striding about inside the mountain, like someone had set some Ents on fire. And the whole idea of them blowing up the world to provide them with a new home doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, not exactly why they need to turn various humans into stone, nor finally how come they can see the future.

Still, the idea of the aliens requiring marble circuit boards - for all it's not a new one - is a nice one and new to Doctor Who, and without the Pyroviles we wouldn't have had the excellent and touching scene in the escape capsule where Catherine Tate out-acts David Tennant as she agrees to sacrifice herself for the good of the rest of the world. And I suppose you can't really have actual, genuine seers in Who, even under Davies, given that mediums are, you know, charlatans and frauds. And you need the seers to provide a bit of the in your face fore-shadowing for the rest of the season that Davies loves so much. 'She's coming back' is not the most cryptic clue ever, though I harbour very faint hopes that the thing on Donna's back is the Great One from Metebelis 3 :)

Negatives? Well, I'm not sure what the point of the comedy market seller was - it felt like a typically clumsy Rusty inclusion and is on a whole different level to the far cleverer humour of the rest of the episode, not to mention pointlessly taking up some of the episode's seemingly already stretched running time. Other than, all I can think of are some rotten lines about the God Vulcan spoken by Peter Capaldi as he stands with his family on the hillside and watches Pompeii being destroyed - and the coda which again felt like Rusty intervening, lest there should be someone in Doctor Who who isn't exactly like a 21st century person.

All told though, this was great stuff - far more like the Doctor Who I remember and love. Roll on next week, when all this positivity will probably all explode in my face like...well, like a volcano, actually.*

* I know, that's a weak ending but I'm knackered just now, what can I say...

A Tale of Two Novels (a review in two parts)

The Many Hands: Book the First
In which the Doctor runs around a great deal and a soldier is hit by stone chips at a surprising distance

Well I'm exactly 100 pages into Paul Dale Smith's new NSA, The Many Hands and so far it suffers from some of the issues which have affected other books in the range.

Before I go any further I should point out that I think Smith is one of the top 2 or 3 writers to come out of Doctor Who - Heritage is one of my favourite books in the BBC range, his two short stories for the Enlightenment fanzine are up with Magrs and Moffat in terms of quality, and The Albino's Dancer, his Time Hunter novella, is excellent.

As a result The Many Hands is very readable - the characterisation of the two leads rings true, and when the author takes the time there's some really lovely writing in it. But the problem is that there's not a lot of time given over to anything other than moving the story on via one action scene after another.

The story starts in the middle of one such scene, with a stagecoach careening through the Old Town of Edinburgh (or as the Doctor amusingly points out, just 'The Town' at this stage in the city's life) with the Doctor on top battling a dead man and Martha elsewhere running through the
streets to get in front of the coach and stop it, new series style, with yet another handy sonic screwdriver function. From there, the next hundred pages are a series of run/get captured/run/get captured escapades - and it's not even the cliche of a series of set pieces joined together by linking narrative, as each breathless bit of running away blends into the next with barely a space for a linking sentence or two between.

To add to this, even the Doctor/Martha's escapes are simplistic to the point of non-existence. There's rarely a clever escape plan - they simply run away in a manner reminiscent of things of the Pertwee years, or some fortuitous distraction appears to distract their capturers' attention. Again, it's all exciting stuff on one basic level and if that's the audience it's aimed at then The Many Hands works perfectly, but there's little to engage the brain or cause the reader to mentally applaud authorial/Doctoral ingenuity (in which, of course, the books are just mimicking the TV series pretty closely).

It takes all of 100 pages in fact, for something original to occur, with the appearance of the titular hands. That's more than a third of the way through the book.

Smith knows his trade though and he can invest even this kind of thing with a degree of talent lacking in real journeymen writers like Justin Richards or Trevor Baxendale when he takes the time to do so. As it stands the majority of the book would never have held my attention when I was one of the famed intelligent 12 year olds that Who fiction likes to think of as its intended audience, but there are moments when you can see that there is such a book hiding beneath the 100 mile an hour romp.

The problem is that there's no time given over to thought or introspection - nobody except (occasionally) the Doctor and Martha seem to think about anything, with the result that everyone bar the two leads comes across as fairly cardboard. When someone does think about something other than what's going on around them, the results are excellent - Martha's musing that certain characters were exhibiting 'rather more ambition than humans were comfortable with from their corpses' is a great line, as is the Doctor's subtle manner of manipulating the soldier, McAllister. It's just that there's not enough time spent on this kind of thing, as all the available word count is spent on pushing the Doctor round Edinburgh with sundry baddies on his tail.

Perhaps it's a symptom of this that there's at least on key moment in the first part of the book which appears to make no sense. The scene in question, involves a soldier, apparently beyond rifle range of Doctor, taking a potshot at him anyway. The shot only misses by 'a few feet' (making the claim that the shot was a sign of a stupid, inexperienced soldier a bit strange) - and yet another solider manages to get himself hit in the face by splinters from the rock the bullet hits, even though he's also presumably behind or in line with the initial shooter. I might be being dense here, but it seemed a curiously inexplicable incident to me, and all I can think is that the frantic pace of the prose means that little mistakes like that are more likely to slip through unnoticed.

The whole thing is, to be honest, a little odd. Smith is a very good writer and he's a very, very good Who writer. He's shown this repeatedly in the past in other books and stories and he shows it in flashes even here. And if the guidelines for an NSA are the exact same - as is reputedly the case - then why is this book lacking the layers of Heritage, the poetry of 'Blossom' or the razorsharp cleverness of the plotting of 'Recursion'? The Many Hands is an enjoyable if somewhat brainless read and I doubt if Smith is capable of writing something not worth reading, but on the basis of the first 100 pages or so it's simply not in the same class as his earlier work. My nine year old son would probably enjoy it, but my 12 year old daughter who reads Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz and the like would, I suspect, find it a bit frenetic and lacking in depth.

So why is this so? Paul Magrs Sick Building made me laugh a lot, but even I wouldn't claim it inhabited the same universe as Verdigris or even his own Young Adult novels. Wetworld is a contender along with Sick Building for my favourite NSA, but Relative Dementias is the Mark Michalowski novel I'd take to a desert island with me. Steven Cole's Sting of the Zygons is more of a romp than The Many Hands (though The Many Hands is the better written book) but even Cole's most rompy PDA/MAs contain far more considered writing than Sting of the Zygons. And people whose opinion I trust have said similar things about Simon Guerrier and other writers' NSAs in comparison to their earlier work.

And yet all of these books are supposedly written with the same audience in mind and using the same guidelines - is everybody simply turning in lesser books co-incidentally? Or did the earlier books end up skewing far older than the guidelines strictly intended?

The Many Hands: Book the Second
In which a sinister creature is born, an underground street is explored and the Monro family tree turns out more complicated than expected

And now it gets even odder.

Having described the first 100 pages of The Many Hands as one single continuous chase sequence, involving a series of featureless supporting acts following the Doctor and Martha through Edinburgh, I now find myself viewing the remaining 141 pages as anything but.

It's almost like two completely different novels: the first suffering from the usual NSA issues and the second an excellent Gothic horror/cool steampunk (sort of) sf novel.

It really is as abrupt as that - simplistic run around shenanigans with pretty flat characters for the younger kiddies until page 100, atmospheric and creepy grown up novel filled with fully rounded individuals from page 101 onwards.

Suddenly the book is peppered with believable characters acting in an intelligent manner. McAllister, rather than simply reacting to whatever the Doctor does, becomes a far more rounded individual, capable of thinking and acting for himself. The Monro men make a substantive appearance in the story for the first time and add immeasurably to the mix. Even the Doctor stops rushing about and begins to act in a more Doctoral fashion.

The jokes also get better - Martha's confusion about whether Monro's description of himself ("we are the Chair of Anatomy") is the name of his species is both a a great joke at the expense of Russell T Davies' naming conventions for alien races and a subtle and neat plot point, for instance.

The setting too is more interesting after a round century's worth of pages. Previously everything had been set in and around a generic Royal Mile, so blandly described that even I, a lifelong Edinburgh Man, was often confused as to where the TARDIS crew were supposed to be unless a street name was provided. Now the action moves into a well-described Surgeons' Hall, about a blockaded church and down into Mary King's Close, all places filled with oppressive darknesses and creepy and cobweb filled rooms and corridors in which Smith allows his descriptive powers full range. There's no doubting where anyone is at any time by this point in the book and as the actual action (as opposed to the earlier page-filling action) takes place, the book continues to open out, with an intriguing and unusual set of villains and a reasonably well thought out conclusion (the final epilogue chapter though is a real disappointment, returning to the realm of cliche for no obvious reason).

I'm no nearer after reading The Many Hands to figuring out why the NSAs are comparatively unsatisfying when compared to earlier Who ranges. Indeed, I'm more confused if anything than before. The first part of this novel almost exactly exemplifies the definition of traditional tie-in prose - frantic running about, interchangeable supporting characters and little by way of subtlety or cleverness. The second part though is reminiscent of the better type of EDA or even the old TV series - spooky and scary in equal measure with a rich cast of extras and a distinct and lovingly recreated Gothic sensibility.

Why there's such a marked disparity I have no idea, ultimately. But hopefully if Smith does another book in the NSA range (and I hope he does) then it will be more like the later half of this particular work.

Oh, and one unrelated minor thing about the book which bears mentioning. At one point the Doctor explicitly says that the Sonic Screwdriver is not a gun, which apart from anything else demonstrates what a big fibber he is. Given that the new series constantly features David Tennant using the screwdriver exactly like a gun, it does make me wonder if that line was inserted as a request from Cardiff?