Time Lord Fairy Tales

"When I was your age — about, ooh, a thousand years ago — I loved a good bedtime story. The Three Little Sontarans. The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes. Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday, eh? All the classics."- The Eleventh Doctor. 

The idea of fairy tales with a Doctor Who twist seems a ridiculous idea at first but the brilliant Justin Richards makes it wonderful. In this collection are fifteen fairy tales that are mostly based on our traditional fairy tales, only with a sci-fi twist and a Doctor Who alien as the villain. 

The Garden of Statues: The least fairytale like story of the lot, this is a creepy Weeping Angel story which is great. 

Frozen Beauty: Sleeping Beauty except with space travel cryogenesis and the Wirrn. A particularly clever idea. 

Cinderella and the Magic Box: This one is closer to the original fairy tale than most here. The big difference is that the role of the fairy godmother is filled by the Eleventh Doctor. Oh, and there's vampires too. It works very well. 

The Twins in the Wood: An odd one this where two royal twins escape execution from a rival to the throne and hide in the woods on Gallifrey. It managed to have a real fairy tale feel to it despite not being based on an actual fairy tale. 

The Three Little Sontarans: It's the Three Little Pigs only with sontarans. A rutan plays the role of the big bad wolf. It's quite silly but it's a lot of fun. 

Jak and the Wormhole: A wormhole instead of a beanstalk and Nimon instead of a giant. It strays a little far from the original tale but just about gets away with it. 

Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday: Clearly only existing because of the quote above, this was my least favorite of the collection. It had to somehow get that title to actually work within the Snow White story and what we're left with is a story that isn't really much like Snow White at all. 

Little Rose Riding Hood: A young girl called Rose visits her Grandmother only to find she has been replaced by a zygon. The Ninth Doctor plays the role of the woodcutter. It makes excellent sense for the wolf to be a zygon. It's hinted that this is meant to be a young Rose Tyler but if so it conflicts with the history of the character on the show. 

The Gingerbread Trap: Hansel and Gretel, with the witch being a Krillitane. Another excellent use of a Doctor Who alien. 

The Scruffy Piper: My favorite of the collection, it's the Pied Piper with the Second Doctor and his recorder and the rates being cybermats. So ridiculous but so good.

Helana and the Beast: A Beauty and the Beast-esque story where the Twelfth Doctor makes an appearance. It loses the magic of the original tale. 

Andiba and the Four Slitheen: Another that isn't based on a traditional tale, this is set in the fairy tale feeling location of a distillery. A decent story. 

The Grief Collector: A take on the rumpelstiltskin story, with the Tenth Doctor helping sort things out. One of the best stories of the collection. 

The Three Brothers Gruff: The billy-goats are made to be humans and the troll is a sontaran on this take on the classic. It sort of loses the wit of the original tale but worth reading just for the idea of a sontaran being confused for a troll. 

Sirgwain and the Green Knight: Presumably based on the Arthurian story, one I am not familiar with, this sees the role of the green knight taken by an Ice Warrior. The Ice Warrior is less villainous than we often see.

All in all, this works excellently. Doctor Who often has a feel of fairy tale about it and here Richards takes that further than ever. They are written in the style of fairy tales and the book itself is beautiful, with a great cover, thick pages and lovely illustrations. It all comes together to be a wonderful thing

Tales of Trenzalore

Tales of Trenzalore tells some of the stories of the Doctor defending the town of Christmas on the planet Trenzalore during his long stint there. You really need to have seen the Eleventh Doctor's final story "The Time of the Doctor" for the context.

Let it Snow by Justin Richards: This is a decent story featuring the Ice Warriors as the aggressors. It's great that we get a well characterised Ice Lord and they have a decent plan but it does feel like any alien race could have taken their place, like the Cybermen. Seeing the Doctor's relationship with the people of Christmas also works really well in this story. It's a strong start to the collection.

An Apple a Day by George Mann: Having the Krynoids is an interesting choice for this story. They are the least well known of the aliens to feature here, having appeared in just one TV story, and the seed pods can't germinate in the cold and Trenzalore rarely reaches above freezing temperatures. Somehow though Mann manages to make it work wonderfully well and he just about gets away with his way round the temperature issues. My favorite of the stories.

Strangers in the Outland by Paul Finch: Perhaps the weakest of the stories, largely because it doesn't reach it's potential. It's an Auton story and the Nestene Consciousness' plan is to send in Auton replicas of the Doctor. Strangely though the author decides to make the plan not really work- barely any Autons survive and the replica side of things never comes into play, and that's really the main reason for having the Autons around outside of an environment when there are shop dummies.

The Dreaming by Mark Morris: Morris shows his horror credentials in this story featuring the Mara. It's genuinely creepy and I felt the story really got into the Eleventh Doctor's character and his thoughts about being stuck on Trenzalore better than the other stories here. My one issue with it though is that it feels like it drifts a little from the character of the Mara shown on TV in the 80s.

Overall this is a good collection and I'm really pleased that Justin Richards and BBC Books have been coming up with lots of clever ideas for e-books which tie more directly into the TV series than most Doctor Who books. A great idea with four decent stories which make it work.

Cold War

It issss once again time to analysssse another epissssode of Doctor Who! Thissss week it’ssss time to board a sssubmarine with an Ice Warrior! OK, enough of speaking like an Ice Warrior, it’ll soon get boring and I’ll wear out by “s” key. As usual there’ll be spoilers so if you haven't seen the episode yet I suggest you don’t read on!

Before anything else, I feel a little bit of history on the Ice Warriors is necessary. They first appeared in 1967 when the Doctor Who team weren’t allowed to use daleks as the pepperpots were being used in films. Various monsters were created and Ice Warriors were quite possible the best. In The Ice Warriors the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Victoria found the Ice Warriors frozen in ice in the Earth’s future where a new Ice Age had occurred. It was actually Victoria that named them Ice Warriors and the Martians don’t seem to mind. The trio faced them again in The Seeds of Death when they tried to use the trans-mat system to take over the Earth and then the Third Doctor bumped into them in The Curse of Peladon where they had renounced their old ways. In The Monster of Peladon though a rogue faction of Ice Warriors had gone back to the old ways.

That was in 1974 and the Ice Warriors haven’t been seen on screen since. Until now that is. Mark Gatiss had been desperate to bring the Icw Warriors back in the new series but showrunner and friend Steven Moffat wasn’t so sure. Then Gatiss came up with the idea that made the Ice Warriors scarier- they can come out of their armour. Yep, here Skaldak leaves his armour and runs around the Soviet submarine finding out about humans by killing them. The master-stroke was the creepy hands hanging over people’s heads. Suddenly the Ice Warriors have become a whole lot scarier!

I’ve been scratching my head trying to work out a timeline for the Ice Warriors. This is technically the earliest in time we’ve ever seen them and Skaldak had been in the ice 5,000 years. All the other episodes were set far in the future, though Varga and co in The Ice Warriors had been there for “centuries”. Maybe Varga and Skaldak come from a similar time? All we know is that they were once a great empire, they weren’t for a huge proportion of humanity’s life and then they were again. There’s still plenty of room for expansion of their story and I hope we get some of that in the not so distant future.

This episode is the first one where Clara was in real danger. It’s the first episode of Series 7 Part 2 where we actually had some deaths, and even then there were only three, a relatively low body count for the show. It was great to see how terrified by it all she was and how much she enjoyed the whole saving the world thing. There is pretty much no further clues to help solve her mystery. The only thing I picked up on was when the Professor asked her what hobbies she had and she couldn’t come up with an answer. Clara’s life before the Doctor seems disturbingly empty. She was quite scared at the time though so it could mean nothing!

I have noticed something which may be vitally important to the series arc or might be a coincidence. In this episode there is a direct quote from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”:

“What do you want from me?”

“Much”

In The Rings of Akhaten there was a quote from “Alice in Wonderland” and someone I was watching with reckoned there was a quote from “The Woman in Black” in the preview for next week’s episode, Hide. I don’t remember any book quotes in The Bells of Saint John although there was the obvious mention of the book by Amelia Williams. Are these book links a clue? Or is this just another Doctor Who coincidence?

For me the highlight of Cold War, apart from Skaldak of course, was David Warner’s professor. Most of the submarine crew weren’t particularly fascinating characters but the professor was great. He was good fun what with being an old Russian man who loved Ultravox and Duran Duran but he was also a caring character who was really sweet. The two-hander with him and Clara was brilliant! Definitely guest star of the week!

One final thing is when the Doctor talks about resetting HADS on the TARDIS he pretty much repeats what he said way back in the 1969 story The Krotons! Few other shows can do continuity like Doctor Who does!

That is it for this week but do join us next week for the creepy ghost story, Hide!