Customer Reviews

Deep Blue (Doctor Who Series)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

To set a fifth Doctor story in a Third Doctor time period would seem a risky move, but Mark Morris successfully achieves this landing the Doctor in the 70's alongside his UNIT pals whilst the other Doctor is off planet somewhere else. Mark has written this with 4 chapters (episodes???) which has the cliffhangers at the end and plays just like the tv series would. Although the book is very violent in some places, with alien hybrids massacring nearly a whole town sending lots of blood and limbs flying. Characterisation is top notch from the Doctor's portrayal, brash Tegan, cowardly and self preserving Turlough to Mike Yates, Benton and the (younger) Brigadier. Overall, a fun, easily read book. RECOMMENDED!!!!

The best thing about this book is that it is just like a Doctor Who adventure, the worst thing about this book is... it's just like a Doctor Who adventure. A solid story, if not overly used, with some nice touches thrown in. The worst I can say about this book is that the cast is poorly realized, no advancement is made into the mindset or relationships between the principals or the supporting cast. These books should explore and expand on ideas and thoughts only hinted at in the series. Not looking for any earth shaking, but it would be nice if in the future authors take a moment to breath between rampages to get into what makes the cast tick... Beside that, solid story, if not rushed toward the end (just like a Doctor Who episode!), worth picking up for the read.

A very fast paced story. The Doctor,Tegan and Turlough land in a seaside resort for a holiday . They are resting after their adventues at Sea Base Four. This story takes place between the tv stories "warriors of the deep" and "the awakening". People are changing into monsters/aliens. Tegan falls in love with a local man who latter turns into a alien creature. I think they are Xanti(sp?) Tegan later on is taken over by the virus that is causing this to happen. All of UNIT is also taken over. Eventually the Doctor is taken over as well. The Doctor confronts the aliens queen and stops the virus from changing everyone into aliens. The story also links "Kinda" and "Snakedance" (other Doctor Who stories".Tegan mentions the Mara(another alien creature with mind control) After all that happened the doctor and his companions leave the resort. The story is fast paced , never dull , and is fun!!It is also has a great plot and storyline!!!

Well despite of many holes in the entire plot from the latest story of the fifth Doctor and his companions, Tegan and Trough, it was well written as the Doctor's Sci-fi Adeventures on the stage of 1970's.

Fundamentally, I like the character of the fifth Doctor described in this novel. I have thought he is one of the most volunerble characters among his incarnations. The Fifth one I believe may have been the younger Heroic version of the Original Doctor. I was bit suprised how strong, coniving character he could experess when he confronted with the Queen of the Alien Invaders into the small beach British town during 70's.

What grabed me most was the interaction between Tegan and Mike Yate in the second half of the story line. I love the characterization of Tegan in this novel. The author I believe really described best her strongest and weakest points of her characters I have seen on during 80's. Besides, he grasped well the character of Yate too. I really enjoyed reading our old characters interacting very well in the novel.

I felt unfortunate about a guest character of a pregant teenager. Charolotte. I was wondering how she would have been involved into the end plot though.... Well I would have loved her more gotten involved into the plot of the conclusion. Unfortunately she had disappeared in the second half of the plot till in the end.

The Doctor steers the TARDIS back to Earth, and arrives some ten years earlier than intended - in the 1970s. This was the time when his third incarnation had been exiled and later made his base of operations, and when many aliens sought to invade Earth. Now in his fifth incarnation, the Doctor find himself, along with companions Tegan and Turlough, drawn into the UNIT investigation of strange occurrences in the coastal resort of Tayborough Sands, which turns out to be quite gruesome...

Setting a Fifth Doctor story in the milieu more associated with is third incarnation is, perhaps, a little risky - on the printed page, the specific incarnation of the Doctor can be hard to maintain plainly in the mind of the reader, so surrounding him with events and characters that evoke a different incarnation can make this even more difficult. Then there are continuity problems: if this Doctor meets people he knows earlier in time than when he has otherwise met them, the writer has to include reasons why these encounters aren't remembered.

This is the problem I have with 'Deep Blue' - the story that Mark Morris is telling here gets swamped by all the things he needs to do to maintain continuity, and the reader has to keep reminding hi/herself that when the Doctor is talking to the Brigadier, Yates or Benton that this is the Fifth Doctor.

While Mr. Morris doesn't do a bad job at this, the book would have been better had it been a Third Doctor or if the UNIT elements had been from some time other than that strongly associated with the Third.

Also, the nature of the alien invasion depicted herein is, perhaps, not for those with weak stomachs...

I love the fifth doctor and I thought this book would be interesting, and it was. The storyline was great to me, you just have to be interested in the story. That is the problem. People will pick up a book like this one, and think oh, it will be just like a tv episode, and will be disappointed that there is more to it than that.

The Doctor takes Tegan and Turlough back to the seventies on vacation and strange things begin to happen to people, they are brutally murdered and the Doctor can feel this presence of something that has been killing these people that are on holiday and he meets up with someone from the past, actually two people from the past. Tegan has fun on her own getting dates with a police officer. The story is different from episodes, usually you don't see any dating or anything, this is what makes the story interesting to read. The Doctor takes Turlough with him to find out what this killer looks like. As I said, this is much different from the tv series, and you have to have a major interest and an open mind to anything to read this book. I liked it a lot, and I'm sure if you are a big Doctor fan as I am, you will like it too. Maybe not as much, but I guarantee you will like it.

This story is written in the same style of the television series and is one of the best in the series. Mark Morris captures the Fifth Doctor's personality quite well and it was nice to see UNIT back in action. This time with the fifth Doctor instead of the third. The story contains plenty of action, drama, and horror that made the book hard to put down.

I'm of two minds whether the Who authors should be trying to make the books more like the television experience or less like it. On the one hand, let's face it, we all grew up and fell in love with the television show and in the days when that wasn't on the air any longer this was the closest we were going to get to enjoying that "feel" of our favorite TV show.

But on the other hand the point of shifting things into a different medium is to be able to play with things that you wouldn't normally be able to do in the first medium. Television is a wonderful way to tell a story and there are techniques that can be done with it that can't be mimicked by any other form of entertainment. So trying to recreate that using prose, when there are plenty of things you can do in prose that can't be done in television (especially when it comes to narrative techniques) seems like trying to recreate a famous painting using only the colors that begin with the letter "b" . . . you might come close but it's not going to be the same thing at all and everyone is going to notice.

The Virgin New Adventure authors understood this to some extent, that without the television show around to do their job better than they could, they could explore all kinds of things. Granted, they sometimes went too far in the name of "We can do whatever we want ha ha ha!" and gave us some rather uneven experiences but, hey, all's fair with experimentation. I'd think less of them if they didn't try some of the weirder stuff.

Here, we're pretty much into standard Who territory. The Doctor and company (that being Tegan and Turlough) land on some pleasant English beach where a light was recently seen falling from the sky. It's not too long before it seems like the townspeople are getting too darn aggressive for their own good and what's worse, people are starting to change. And not "Not a moment too soon" change but more into hideous monsters. That are big on slaughtering everyone in sight. Oh, and UNIT shows up too just to spice things up/create more of a body count.

It all goes pretty much how you'd expect, with the aliens threatening to take over the entire town while the Doctor is initially mystified until he figures out what strange alien race he's dealing with (I do miss the days when the Doctor would tumble into a situation and instead of being a galactic almanac, would be honestly like "I have no idea who these people are"). Which is good as a race against time begins to stop the invasion before everyone turns into terrifying monsters that eat everyone in sight.

Morris gets good use out of the cast, with everyone hitting the right notes. The Doctor is his usual mix of knowledgable and vulnerable in this incarnation, Tegan is mouthy and for some reason I just enjoy Turlough, as it's not too often we get to see a bonafide coward travelling with the Doctor. We get quick sketches of the townspeople, just enough to feel sort of bad when they meet their inevitable doom . . . some of it is a bit too perfunctory (was Charlotte pregnant for any reason other than to automatically make us feel concern for her?) but if you're looking for a deft cross-sectional analysis of a small town's reaction to alien invasion that somehow reveals their deepest fears and petty insecurities, you're in with the wrong show. We're here for the monsters.

The problem is that it all feels taken from somewhere else. The people changing into monsters reeks of "Inferno", the overly fightin' mad townsfolk dates back to a Rani scheme, UNIT brings us back the good ol' days of the seventies and while this is all nice, if you're going to be doing a greatest hits you need to do something new with it to give us a reason to keep reading. And it hits all the notes spot-on without really igniting the fire that the best stories did. It's playing off our collective memories and really only seems fresh and new if you've never seen any of the show before.

The ending is a bit of a cheat as well, blown through absurdly quickly and boiling down to a technobabblish version of "I made a magic potion that will save the day!", which, fine, this is "Doctor Who" but if you're going to be all standard with the rest of it, at least give us a clever resolution. It all feels rather rushed, like he was running out of pages and needed to wrap it up.

With all that said, there's nothing really wrong with any of this. Morris does nothing embarrassing and the plot unfolds logically . . . the horror factor remains high throughout all of it, with the gore never seeming excessive. Everyone "sounds" right and things do become genuinely unsettling as the aliens start to take over. But once things really get into gear, we're left with a plot that's been done in many variations many times before. Those who want the classic feel will find this very satisfying while those of us who want a little more from our Who novels are going to be mildly entertained but not much else.

Firstly it was good to see a story making good use of Mike Yates probably the most underused of the UNIT regulars. It would have been a good idea to see more of the suggestion of his mental instability showing through in this story as a build up for Invasion of the Dinosaurs and yet he seems the most stable character around. There is some great character development in the book particularly of Tegan and Turlough, the latter obviously viewed by the author as nothing more than a complete and utter spineless coward. I was distraught for the character of Charlotte who seemed to have so much going against her not only with the monsterish goings on around her but also in her private life. But despite introducing Charlotte's own private story within the novel the author then seems to get bored with her and we never know the outcome of her personal problems. I think if the author had been granted more pages he could have developed a more satisfying conclusion for Charlotte. There is perhaps something of a Paradox in that this story also features the Brigadier who has not yet met the 5th Doctor in his time line but will eventually do so in Mawdryn Undead. The explanation for this adventure not making any difference to the time when the two do eventually meet is the Brigadier suffering memory loss as a result of the alien control over him and therefore forgetting this meeting with Doctor Five. But when the TARDIS crew rush off after a very brief and unsuspenseful conclusion it stands to reason that Mike Yates would have told him all about this new Doctor. I think the final scene between the Doctor and the Xaranti, who are a combination of Zombies and Alien with a Borg mentality, was perhaps not a satisfactory conclusion to a great story with real tension, suspense and rushes of adrenalin.

I'm sorry, but undersea-monsters-threaten-world-with-their-horrible-ugliness just isn't that creative or interesting.

Yes, the bit about psychological invasion (i'm trying not to give too much away here) is a bit creative, but since you don't find out about that until the end, it's only worth a couple of pages of good reading---not a whole book.

The author tries to do some development on the character of Tegan and Turlough, but didn't do so in a very realistic or convincing way.