At the end of the previous story, Dominion, the Doctor announces that there's an anomaly in San Francisco, the site of his last regeneration, that must be investigated.
Unnatural History was a surprising tale for me and it has a rather complicated plot that I am not qualified to synopsize easily. It begins with the Doctor in London trying to convince Sam to come with him. But this is not our Sam, it's Dark Sam, the alternate version of the much-maligned companion that was first mentioned 16 books ago in Lawrence Miles' Alien Bodies. I don't know why no one investigated this avenue until Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman did here. Were the other authors not interested? Perhaps they figured Miles would take his own baton and run with it.
Then we find out that the events of the TV movie left a scar in the fabric of Time-Space that never fully healed. Various creatures are drawn to the portal such as Mandelbrot turtles and unicorns and a Kraken thingy which sleeps in the bay. Now let me see if I have this right. When our crew initially encounters the scar, the OG Sam falls into it and Dark Sam is created. The TARDIS seals the scar to keep it from getting ever more dangerous and preserve any possibility of getting blonde Sam back.
There's this unnatural historian, Griffin, who is trying to collect the odd creatures that have started to appear in San Francisco. He's a being from higher dimensions and quite mysterious. And he has these ominous henchmen. Griffin reminded me of Light in "Ghost Light" in that he wanted to collect and preserve. Light couldn't comprehend that beings changed and, similarly, Griffin is really big on taxonomy and seeks to simplify creatures so that they fit into but a single category.
Also, in perhaps a nod to "Remembrance of the Daleks", there's a boy running around who is not all that he seems. He is, in fact, with the Faction Paradox and he messes with the Doctor's head.
Griffin proves a very capable foe who is able to thwart the Doctor's plans pretty much up until the end. I liked that he was so enigmatic. We get some background but it's really a bunch of hints at this and possibilities of that. He collects his specimens and puts them into this transdimensional box. At the end, Sam opens the drawers of the box freeing the specimens who push Griffin into the scar. Will he survive? Boba Fett, after all, is supposed to have been able to escape the sarlacc.
With the TARDIS doing its bit as transdimensional duct tape to seal the scar, the Doctor is lost, not himself in certain ways. Detached from his anchor, he is not whole. At one point, he creates a pan-dimensional force field to contain Griffin, but it proves no match for the wiley collector who simply steps out from the field and kills a pagan hippie lady whom Fitz had enlisted to help the cause. In another scene, he sends one of those messenger cubes to the Time Lords only to discover later that the Faction Paradox kid has it. Blum and Orman really knock the Doctor off his pedastal here. Better than torturing him like the latter did in Seeing I, at least.
And then there's the mysterious professor at UC-Berkeley who says, "I’m Professor Daniel Joyce these days..." I thought he was a Time Lord at first, but he denies it at some point. He's obviously not human but I dunno what species he is a member of. And I was really thrown when he and Griffin have a little confab where Joyce seems to have some authority in a group that Griffin is ostensibly working for and so he can order the unnatural historian around. Or so he thinks, anyway.
Finally, there is biodata everywhere. Biodata are like DNA molecules but crossed with a computer program so you can modify it and thusly change the person - even their past. The events of the TV movie have spilled the Doctor's biodata all over San Francisco. The scar is full of it and there are whispy strands of the stuff dotting the cityscape. Joyce is tinkering with it, Griffin has some, the Faction Paradox...Well, if you're just going to leave your biodata lying around, you can't expect it to remain unmolested.
Unnatural History has a lot of threads running through it. There's the whole Sam vs. Dark Sam quandary, people tinkering with the Doctor's biodata, having to defeat Griffin, the Faction Paradox lurking in the background and occasionally making nebulous threats, etc. Lawrence Miles sowed the seeds in Alien Bodies and here Blum and Orman reap the harvest of twisty, paradoxical goodness.
While I appreciated all the timey-wimey uncertainties and wonder if it will be another 16 books before someone picks up on the threads here, the tone of Unnatural History put me off. It feels very 90s and has a slick casualness to it that doesn't do much for me. The tone is like what I think Joss Whedon's TV shows are like. The new Sam does drugs so she's "dark"; Griffin is more than a match for our hero but is he really all that interesting a villain? I really liked that he was such an enigma but he came across as rather a one note character.
I am having a hard time explaining it.
I won't say that I am against a flailing, helpless Doctor per se, but you have to do it right. Falls the Shadow felt like pure sadism to me. When you take away the Doctor's ability to help people and to overcome evil for too long, then the quirks and charm of the character tend to erode quickly. He just runs to point A where his plan fails so he drives his VW Beetle to point B where is next plain is foiled.
Perhaps the biggest contribution to Doctor Who lore and continuity is the way Blum and Orman tinker with the Doctor's identity. There's various chatter about our hero being half human and his biodata is littered around San Francisco with various groups tinkering with it. Are they changing his past? Are they modifying him? He was loomed yet had a human mother; he is The Other yet also just some Time Lord whose dissatisfaction with his society convinced him to bail on it just like a Gallifreyan Prince Harry. The book seems to take the whole concept of the origin story by the scruff of its neck and throws it out the window.
I should probably re-read Unnatural History at some point. Blum and Orman are fine writers with more neat ideas than you can shake a stick at. But there's just this ineffable problem I have with the tone. It feels American, it feels like the TV movie.
The fact that I have written much more about this story than I intended speaks to the fact that it is, at the very least, noteworthy - that it is worth considering and discussing.
I will end with this: Fitz gets into Dark Sam's pants in this story and I have to wonder how that's handled in the tales that follow.
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