The Corpses With the Dragon Tattoos

The man with the masterplan takes on the challenge of writing a Second Doctor tale.

It is 1800. Canton, China. An Englishman named Roderick Upcott is paying a visit to a merchant who has indicated he'd be happy to take a bunch of that opium that Upcott has for sale. The smuggler and his empty stomach are enticed by the smell of pork roasting in the kitchen. He then notices a tapestry depicting a green dragon on a wall and is surprised that it has an uncanny resemblance to the one he has tattooed on his own body.

To Upcott's horror, it turns out that the man he is dealing with is not the opium pusher he was expecting but rather the Emperor's Chief Astrologer who is a bit like the Harry J. Anslinger of the Qing dynasty. His task is to end the opium trade, a blight on the Chinese people. At one point, Upcott notices that the dragon tapestry has gone from green to red. And that smell that Upcott thinks is roasting pork is, in fact, long pig...

Upcott is allowed to escape and, not long after this, the Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie meet him when the TARDIS lands at the British Trade Concession. On the grounds is a stone gate, a "spirit gate", and it whisks Jamie off when he steps through it. The same happens to Zoe. Seeing his companions disappear into the aether, the Doctor deduces that the gate is some kind of alien transmat. A few calculations later, the TARDIS is off in pursuit of the misplaced companions.

It lands 100 years later in the Kent countryside at the Upcott family estate. The Doctor sees that Roderick brought the spirit gate back to England with him and is standing in the estate's back 40. Zoe is in the family's employ as a maid (echoes of the TV version of "Human Nature" here) and she is none too happy with the rampant misogyny, amongst other gripes. However, Jamie is still nowhere to be seen.

What follows is something of an Agatha Christie story with Roderick Upcott's descendants being killed one by one with no obvious cause of death. Mysteriously, each victim has the red dragon from that tapestry tattooed on their face.

All of this transpires during a party thrown by Roderick Upcott's great-grandson, Pemberton Upcott. The Doctor cons his way in, of course, and finds that entertainment is to be provided by Celandine Gilbert, a beautiful young woman who is a spirit medium. She is to perform a seance with the aid of her companion, Thomas Carnacki, a "student of supernatural phenomena" and literary character in his own right. Carnacki is a Holmesian detective of the occult created by William Hope Hodgson and lovingly appropriated by Cartmel.

The seance goes a bit haywire and Ms. Gilbert ends up in a coma. Then the murders begin.

It's a fun who dunnit. When the Doctor learns that the victims are all blood relatives of Roderick Upcott, it becomes clear that this is the revenge of the Chief Astrologer. As events begin to hasten to a conclusion, the Upcott estate is transported to somewhere out in space with the grounds suddenly ending in a sharp decline that leads only to a star-filled void.

The spirit gate is the key here and its destruction comes at the hands of fireworks. The Upcotts have a whole room in their cellar full of them. This seems like a rather cheesy way to destroy a big, mysterious, supernatural, stone gateway.

Jamie is M.I.A. for the most of this story and is found only near the end. Zoe spends much of her time complaining about the primitive Victorian mores and the depravity of Thor Upcott, Pemberton's brother. Thor has, shall we say, a healthy sexual appetite, and he enjoys having the butler watch his escapades in bed through a two-way mirror. He attempts to lure Zoe into his web but fails utterly. While Zoe gets points for rebuking the entreaties of the lecherous Thor in the best spirit of #metoo, the companions here take a back seat. The Doctor is front and center with his investigations. He is aided by Carnacki who is the companion stand-in.

It's not surprising to get an indictment of the British aristocracy from Cartmel, the man who famously said he'd like to use Doctor Who "to overthrow the government". The Upcott's are quite unlikable. 

While there are no boundaries broken here and the story adheres to convention by-and-large, I liked it. The murder mystery is enjoyable and witnessing the rich get their comeuppance is always satisfying.

New, New Moonbeam Blues

Telos Publishing released a series of Doctor Who novellas starting in 2001 and continued until 2004. This was my first Telos novella and I had no idea what to expect going in. I am very ambivalent about the Doctor Who short stories as I prefer letting adventures take their time. Still, a good tale can be had in fewer pages.

I figured 90-odd pages would be more a meal than a snack but what kind of stories did Telos want? Was the remit for authors to keep to conventions or were they free to do their own thing?

The basic story here revolves around a hippie chick, well, a young woman who became a hippie and adopted the name Summer. She is in the Haight-Ashbury area seeking out her boyfriend, Denny, and encounters the TARDIS crew of the Doctor, Ben, and Polly.  At one point, a boy appears to them and he pulls a Cyberman head out of a bag. This starts a short series of weird events that indicates that someone or something is trying to communicate with the Doctor.

Meanwhile, Summer's attempts to track down her old man reveal that there's a nasty drug out there called Blue Moonbeams that is rumored to make those who take it disappear. As in literally blink out of existence.

The story is told from Summer's point of view and author Mark Chadbourn takes an interesting tack here as there are several times she bitterly complains that the Doctor is indifferent to her situation. Normally our hero is a real Johnny-on-the-spot but he seems lost in his own world for most of the story. While he offers Ben and Polly to assist Summer, he is usually off pursuing the answer to his own mystery.

Of course, Denny's disappearance, the Blue Moonbeams, and the strange appearance of figures from the Doctor's past (Menoptera!) are all related and, in classic Doctor Who style, everything is revealed at the end and the Doctor makes everything alright.

What I didn't expect were the asides that pepper the story from an older, more cynical Summer. At the beginning, she is young and full of hope. She thinks the communal vibe of Haight-Ashbury can spread and affect real, systemic change in American society. All you need is love, right? But in these reminisces of the more mature Summer, she has her Oliver Stone moment of looking back at the JFK assassination as being the start of the ascendancy of the Deep State. Paranoid and gone into hiding, Summer muses about the futility of her youthful optimism and admits that They have won.

"Wonderland" is a neat little story. There's a few very dark, grotesque scenes along with several where youthful idealism and weary pragmatism clash giving the reader some food for thought. Plus, it's simply funny envisioning the Doctor wandering around the Haight-Ashbury area. I envisioned one of those slow motion scenes where he's walking along and a young Jerry Garcia passes him going the other way. Far out, man.

"A Gathering Of The Tribes For A Human Be-In", a rock concert, essentially, that took place on 14 January 1967 in San Francisco is part of the story. Here's some footage shot at the event.