Donald Cotton (1928–1999)

The Doctor is mistaken for Doc Holiday.

It could have been good. The script is unremarkable but a perfectly okay Western, and it doesn't take much to make something fun out of a perfectly okay Western script. Add to it the novelty of putting The Doctor in the old west, and you've got a lot of potential. Unfortunately, just about everything is done as horribly as humanly possible.

Concept: B
Story: C
Characters: C
Dialog: D
Pacing: D
Cinematography: D
Special effects/design: C
Acting: F
Music: F

Enjoyment: D

GPA: 1.3/4… (more)

Donald Cotton was chosen to novelise this story on the basis of the original author being dead, and his novelisations of his own comically inclined Hartnell stories. Cotton chooses to tell the story in an epistolary format, including delightfully ridiculous conceits such as Ian writing letters home. He plays up the absurd at every opportunity, from the Doctor’s delusions of his musical prowess to the farcical moments where characters just miss each other. Like the best comedies it has the benefit of brevity, giving us a short but sweet routine before getting off the stage.… (more)

A thoroughly silly First Doctor adventure, one of his "history" stories. This time he materializes on the plains outside of Troy and contributes in a minor way to the death of Hector at the hand of god-fearing Achilles, who is convinced that the Doctor is Zeus. Gotta love stories of mistaken identity and circumstances where the Doctor turns out to have played a part in making history (or myth, in the case of The Iliad).

The story actually differs significantly from the episode of the show as it aired on TV, but if you don't have access to the show -- and let's be honest, few people do at present because it was a First Doctor one and I'm not sure how much of it is still extant -- you won't notice. The gimmick here is that Homer, the creator of the Iliad, is our faithful narrator and actually had a hand in events himself. He's an amusing narrator and very observant, but some of his turns of phrase were a bit anachronistic in my mind, like when he talks about Odysseus caulking the bilges on his ship, or the Tardis bouncing around N-dimensional space (that was particularly odd). But I did like his descriptions of the stench of the Greek camp (it was the olden days and they didn't have soap, so yeah, B.O. and rotting animals/dead soldiers would be a problem) and his very good pacing. It was also neat how the author wrote the narration to allow for only one guy seeing the events unfold (although later on the poor guy didn't literally see anything...), with presumably either the Doctor filling in the blanks later with regard to names, or Homer himself making a few key deductions after the fact.

And I must say Vicki was a somewhat useless companion at points, or at least in this story she was. Poor Steven was a bit better, but still. Perhaps I need to see them in more stories to appreciate their personalities, but for a first outing it was rather bland on the companion front.

As for the actual historical/mythological characters, Odysseus was a hoot, all cunning and violent, and Prince Paris seemed very much a Wodehouse kind of upper-class twit. Priam also had a few good lines, like when Paris came in with the Tardis, which he captured -- Paris has a fanfare and crowd cheering him on, and Priam comes out going "What the hell's all this racket?!" Priam is a character to watch, for sure, and Cassandra also gets some good repartee with her brother Paris. And there was some excellent rationalization for how Homer became blind. Poor guy.

Overall, this is a very good story if you're in the mood for some light reading and like Dr Who and the Trojan War, and can forgive a few anachronisms in the narration.… (more)