It's surprising that it's taken so long
for a book like this to appear. We've had anthologies with unknown,
invented and alternative Doctors before (such as Unbound and
Walking in Eternity,
and even to an extent with the BBC's Short Trips and Side
Steps), but remarkably, no one
has ever sat down and put together a collection revolving around the
ever-controversial "Morbius Doctors" before.
Perhaps
it's the controversial nature of these mysterious pre-Doctors that
has prevented most fans from engaging with them. Fandom has had such
a rigidly defined idea of who the Doctor is for so long that versions
of the character that contradict this have been thrown out. Even
before the eight faces of the Doctor appeared in the mind battle with
Morbius, there were more versions of the Doctor than the official
four incarnations played by Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee and Tom
Baker. The introduction to Forgotten Lives chats
happily about these extra versions, from Peter Cushing's eccentric
inventor Dr. Who to Trevor Martin's theatrical incarnation, and goes
on to say:
"When
The Brain of Morbius episode
four showed us (and it did so deliberately and, whatever the more
conservative species of old-school Doctor Who fan
may tell you, with no significant ambiguity) that Hartnell's 'first'
Doctor had at least eight predecessors who'd never been on screen, it
was really nothing revolutionary – just part of Doctor
Who's long history of
reinvention and revelation."
This
is, of course, completely true. The eight faces seen in The
Brain of Morbius were always and
explicitly intended to be earlier faces of the Doctor, and while it's
possible to interpret them as faces of Morbius or something more
contrived, this requires deliberate misreading of the scene. Of
course, this contradicted pretty much everything else on screen up to
that point and beyond, besides very tiny hints at bits of the
Doctor's life we hadn't seen. It was one of those oddities that exist
in the series' continuity, which by 1976 was already full of
curiosities and contradictions.
Aside
from the lightest of touches and one inarguable cameo in Lance
Parkin's Missing Adventure Cold Fusion twenty
years later, these well-dressed gentlemen (being in actuality
production team members in fancy dress) were forgotten about and
dismissed by licensed fiction and mostly by fandom at large. Which was a crying shame, because the
idea that there were some secret lives before Hartnell's Doctor is
just so much fun that it's surely impossible not to want to play with
it. Finally, Chris Chibnall's latest season of the revived TV series
bombed continuity with the notion that the Doctor has had countless
lives before, and explicitly included the Morbius Doctors in this by
showing them in the Doctor's bombardment of memories. (Of course, if
you wanted to be a real stick in the mud you could insist she was
just remembering the mind battle and that they were still the faces
of Morbius, but really, where's the fun in that? And would Morbius
have such a fine selection of hats?)
So
it's now quite right that Obverse Books presents us with a collection
of full-fledged adventures for these Doctors, taking those tiny
glimpses and extrapolating them into eight new versions of the
character. These are timely children, indeed, and whether you're an
old-school fan who's been pondering their existence since 1976 or a
recent viewer who's desperate to know more about the Doctor's
mysterious and ever-contradictory backstory, Forgotten
Lives is a must. And nothing
here, in The Brain of Morbius or
The Timeless Children stops
Hartnell from being the First Doctor. He always will be, no matter
how many faces retroactively come before him.
Eight
authors bring to life eight Doctors, in this beautiful volume
illustrated by the uncomparable Paul Hanley, who I believe must have
depicted more incarnations of the Doctor than anyone in his artwork.
If there's one complaint to be had about the book it's that Hanley's
artwork isn't given enough prominence inside, but I understand this
is due to costs. Nonetheless, you're missing out if you only see the
cover versions and the black-and-white prints at the back of the
book, and must check out the full portraits on Hanely's Patreon.
However, each of the plates in the book includes a wonderfully silly
note on "The Changing Face of Doctor Who" which makes up
for the lack of colour and clarity.
The
collection kicks off with "The Knocking in the Mine Shaft,"
which puts the Christopher Barry Doctor, the earliest of these
incarnations, in an adventure in historic Cornwall that involves
spooky goings on down the tin mines. Drawing on the local folklore of
the Knockers – mining goblins with a perfectly sensible name –
who naturally turn out to be of a more extraterrestrial origin than
expected. The Doctor here is very much a medical doctor, a practising
one at that, who goes by the pseudonym of Doctor Medec and has very
much assimilated into the local community by the time this adventure
starts.
Each
story presents a distinct era of the Doctor's life, and the feeling,
in general, is that a very long time passes between each one.
Collection editor Philip Purser-Hallard presents the next Doctor,
portrayed by Robert Banks Stewart, who speaks with a distinct
Scottish accent (I had in my head the voice of Bill Paterson as I
read the dialogue). While still flitting about time, this Doctor has
a base in WWII London where he acts as an observer for his
superiors, while also being the most alchemical of this always
mercurial character. The story is told by his secretary, the charming
Miss Weston, who joins him on his investigation into what's
essentially a vintage take on Terror of the Autons,
but both funnier and more atmospheric than that implies. There's a
fair bit of The Avengers (Steed
and Peel, not Marvel) in there too. This Doctor has some of my
favourite characterisation in the book, really coming alive on the
page via the tellings of Miss Weston. His bow-tied far future self
would be very disappointed in his lack of knowledge when it comes to
silent comedy, though.
The
Doctor's lives span long enough that we hear of multiple different
families, but only in Andrew Hickey's "The Cross of Venus"
do we actually see them. Featuring the Christopher Baker Doctor, this
story feels rather like one from an old World Distributors annual,
except that it's very good indeed. It's a clever extrapolation
backwards (a backstrapolation?) to the 1940s, imagining how Doctor
Who might have existed then, and
sees the characters travel to the distant space year 1975 and the
first manned mission to Venus. There's some clever playing with
expectations when it comes to the nature of the villain, but the most
striking element of the story is that the Doctor is travelling with
his two precocious children Jilly and Cedric. They're wonderfully
drawn characters, and I can't help but wonder... is one of them the
parent of John and Gillian?
Based
purely on the fleeting images of the Doctors, my favourite was always
the fourth (or fifth in the reverse-order they were shown): Phillip
Hinchcliffe's Cavalier incarnation. With so little to go on but their
fabulous outfits, it's not surprising that many of these Doctors make
a big deal of their clothes, and this flamboyant fancypants is no
exception. He's only just regenerated, allowing for an age spent in
the TARDIS fixing his look. This Doctor's wonderfully full of himself
and I love him for it, sashaying onto a planet and immediately
getting locked up, and naturally taking it upon himself to overturn
the entire civilisation's corrupt legal system. Kara Dennison's
"Gauntlet of Absolution" is a cracking adventure.
At the
halfway point comes the only Morbius Doctor to have appeared in
licenced print fiction before, the blond and bearded Douglas Camfield
incarnation. This version always looked like a real charmer, but
interestingly, Lance Parkin takes a darker, more serious view of him
in "Past Lives." Parkin, of course, is the one writer who
absolutely had to write for this collection without fail, and his
story, while the briefest, is one of the most fitting thematically.
Dealing with a Doctor seeking to secure justice against galactic war
criminals, this story says a lot about retribution and responsbility
with admirable restraint. I also feel that this is what Chibnall's
version of the forgotten Doctor was trying to be, rather than what we
got. However the Thirteenth Doctor complains about how harsh and
ruthless Jo Martin's Fugitive Doctor is, her actions are no different
to what we've seen various Doctors do before. The Camfield Doctor
seems like he could genuinely take a step too far.
Aditia
Bidikar has a unique voice within Obverse Books and Doctor
Who fiction and it's always
fascinating. "Valhalla Must Fall!" is a strange and
intriguing tale that covers things from millennia-old virtual lives
to a sentient mountain. In amongst these mind-bending concepts
(careful, your brain case might explode) is the Graeme Harper Doctor,
and the character has never seemed more otherwordly and mysterious.
Each of these Doctors has their own parallel story in Hanley's
illustrations, but with Harper's it's truly a whole adventure, as
Hanley not only discovered a remarkable truth about the director's
appearance in that odd costume but (with a nudge from Cody Schell)
made this Doctor less gender-specific than we might have thought.
Bidikar's story goes out of its way to never refer to the Doctor by
any pronoun – they're always "the Doctor" – and so
salt-of-the-earth bloke Harper becomes the face of a genderqueer
incarnation.
Jay
Eales provides the penultimate story, "The Other Side," and
it's one of the best in the book, a storming adventure story which
sees the Doctor land in a civilisation seemingly split in two by an
alien forcefield. A rather Orwellian story of abuse of power, it sees
the Robert Holmes Doctor, resplendent in his finery and chewing on
his pipe, acting as a rather unwilling agent for the Time Lords.
Rather like the Black Widow in The Avengers (Marvel,
not Steed and Peel), this Doctor has red in his ledger and is only
going along with these missions because he's trying to tip the
balance back in the right direction. Plus, he's kind of kept on a
lead. While he's perhaps the most troubled Doctor, he's also
tremendously charismatic, forcing his way through the story on sheer
personality. Things don't always go to plan for this incarnation
though, and an unexpected encounter with his own future sees him at
his most vulnerable.
Finally,
the eighth of the pre-Doctors stars in Paul Driscoll's "Doctor
Crocus and the Pages of Fear." George Gallaccio's Doctor always
looked like the most fun travel with out of the eight, based more on
the extra behind-the-scenes photos which showed him with a lovely,
twinkling smile. Driscoll's jumped on that, with this dimpled Doctor
revelling in his appearance as just "made for the 1880s."
However, he arrives in what would be a contemporary adventure for an
incarnation set before Hartnell and just starting out, so it's
predominantly in the 1950s. The story deals with the notorious moral
panic around comicbooks at that time, which is just like the moral
panic around heavy metal in the 1990s and violent video games in the
2000s. It's quite right that the Doctor would be repelled by the idea
that children can be warped by slightly dangerous adventure stories,
games or music, but this is just the doorway into a ripping sci-fi
adventure.
I
really can't praise this collection enough. Each of the eight stories
is a great success and each Doctor a bold and unique version of the
character. It's an excellent set of stories and I recommend it
heartily to any Doctor Who fan
who's looking to broaden their horizons within the show. My only
gripe is that I'm tremendously envious I wasn't involved.
