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Damaged Goods (Doctor Who)

Damaged Goods (Doctor Who)

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Damaged As Folk
Review: Despite the continued release of massively restored old adventures onto DVD, over the course of the next twelve months DAMAGED GOODS will almost certainly be the Doctor Who story most revisited by fans. The reason is obvious. When author Russell T Davies wrote DAMAGED GOODS in 1996, he was simply a promising newcomer who had some relatively impressive television credits to his name. Since then, his career has done nothing but rise. He produced, created and wrote QUEER AS FOLK, TOUCHING EVIL, and THE SECOND COMING, was nominated for Sainthood, saved the humpbacked whale from extinction, caused the breakup of the Spice Girls, tricked a Martian invasion fleet to fly into the sun, and was named Producer of the still unseen Doctor Who TV revival. For Doctor Who fans, the last of these accomplishments is naturally the most important.

I never got around to reading DAMAGED GOODS when it was first published; as with many of the books of this era (through no fault of their own) I found myself simply far too busy to get around to it. I knew of its impressive reputation and was pleased when I eventually secured a copy. So when I finally opened the cover I already knew that this Davies guy would be The Producer, The Writer And Main Pooh-Bah Of Doctor Who. I found myself giving the book more scrutiny than I otherwise would have, simply to see if I could find clues as to what sort of series he will create based on what he had written here.

Upon completion of the book, I realized that this approach is, of course, absolute nonsense. What I didn't get out of the book was that the new series will feature two ex-cops as companions, or will take place in a London housing estate, or will feature big, evil monsters from Gallifrey's past. What I did take away was the book's fabulous attention to detail, Davies' ability to create sympathetic, flawed, interesting characters, and his talent for pulling them all into an engaging plot that gives each person an important part to play.

Doctor Who on television almost always worked when it had interesting and believable characters. Whether the characters were realistic was another matter entirely, and while the concepts sometimes dovetailed, this, I feel, was rare. Sharaz Jek (to pick an example totally at random) is a fascinating creation whose obsessive behavior is believably conveyed. But you couldn't imagine him at the far future's equivalent of a supermarket, because within the actual story of THE CAVES OF ANDROZANI it made more sense to have a collection of archetypes rather than someone you would expect to meet on the street (or in any place outside the confines of the story being told). Davies manages to express both in his only Doctor Who novel (so far), which is a fantastic bonus as far as I'm concerned. His characters are interesting, believable, and also realistic. This formula certainly wouldn't be appropriate (or possible) for every Doctor Who story, but here it works, and thanks to Davies' skills, it works extremely well. DAMAGED GOODS is fantasy grounded in realism, which can't be an easy thing to successfully pull off.

Getting to the book itself, one of the first wishes I have is that hopefully with the new series in production, Davies will find some spare time to write some more novels (or novelisations), because his prose is wonderful. His sense of timing, his ability to effectively pace the story, and his sense of setting the proper atmosphere is superb. A scene with a dead corpse returning to life is exactly the right amount of creepy and sinister. It's nicely evocative of those Hinchcliffe-era horror stories without containing anything that feels like a retread or a copy. Pieces of it reminded me at times of the psychological horror/thrillers that Stephen Gallagher wrote in his post-Doctor Who days.

Although the story is great from cover to cover, I found myself most enjoying the little things that the book did. Little moments of humanity liberally scattered through the sections of pure horror... and, of course, the novel's themes. In DAMAGED GOODS, the dead past never really leaves the living present. Apart from the obvious zombie rising-from-the-dead parallels, there's a depressed middle-aged man who talks to the voice of his dead wife in his head, and secrets from character's pasts that never quite seem to go away. Constant and subtle repetitions of the book's themes go a long ways towards making the book coherent and powerful. The "damaged goods" of the title conveys a theme that is shockingly horrific. The more I thought about the book's content, the more I appreciated it. Revelations towards the end echo subject matter introduced earlier, making me gasp not only at the twist, but also at how deviously it subverted and built upon the seemingly innocuous prior passages.

So, what can we take from DAMAGED GOODS to look towards how the new Doctor Who series will turn out? The subject matter, the number of continuity references, the balance of humor to drama? No. At the moment, we just can't make meaningful predictions without making them so general as to be worthless. The only important thing to take from DAMAGED GOODS is that Russell T Davies is a damn good writer, and if he writes half as well for Doctor Who today as he did eight years ago, then I expect to be very pleased with the results. If you had told me six months ago the new producer for TV Doctor Who was named "Russell", I think I would have been ill. But reading DAMAGED GOODS has given me a lot of hope that Davies is the right Russell for the job.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Tragedy, Depravity and Vampiric Waveforms in 1980's Britain.
Review: The Doctor is on the track of something alien which is hitching a lift with some cocaine heading for the Quadrant in Thatcher's Britain. When he finally catches up with it he discovers a wealth of human tragedy and a half-mad weapon about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting inhabitants. This book is one of the best of the series and is a continuation of the psi-powers arc. Characterisation is spot on with Chris getting involved with one of the natives, Roz champing at the bit to engage the enemy and the Doctor knowing more than he's letting on. There is also another dirty secret from Gallifrey's past lurking in the shadows. This is a brave experiment by the author - mixing real-life scenarios and characters with science fiction and ending up with an emotionally-charged action adventure which will leave you breathless at the sheer pace of the story.


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