Bad Therapy

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I very much enjoyed Beyond the Sun, Jones' contribution to the Bernice Summerfield range, and I enjoyed this book too: the Seventh Doctor and Chris, still grieving the loss of Roz, land in 1950s Soho, and are involved in a series of murders taking them through the hidden worlds of organised crime and homosexuality, and rather unexpectedly reuniting the Doctor with Peri Brown. Chris gets some very good bits of story for a change, and this is one of the better of the various confusing endings for Peri.

This New Doctor Who Adventure takes place in the aftermath of the devastating events of So Vile a Sin, which casts its shadow over the seventh Doctor and Chris for the duration of the novel. The story itself is fairly generic Doctor Who, but the ideas behind it-- tailor-made people as a method of therapy-- are intriguing enough. The evocation of 1950s London is also good (well, I suppose it is, having never been there then myself). A solid story, quite enjoyable. Peri returns in this one, but not for any readily explicable reason, as it adds nothing to the book's ideas or themes, and it could have been almost any character. Still, even that's well executed, aside from lame attempt to hide her identity from the reader. It's nice to see show more her-- and nice to see her get a word in at the Doctor for once. One of the strong points of the book is the effective emotional followup to the events of So Vile a Sin, which I really must find/read someday. Overall: good, but not great, perfunctory, but well-executed (and creepy in all the right spots). show less

This is one of many books in the 'New Doctor Who' series which was published by Virgin Publishing between the years 1991 and 1997. The idea was that the books continued the story of Doctor Who from the final episode of the television series. Basically, the television series have pretty much entered a hole from which it wasn't to recover until about fifteen years later, and these books were written to give Doctor Who fans their monthly dose of Doctor Who. Now, I like Doctor Who, but I found the challenge of reading each of these books, and in order as well, along with all the other rubbish that I read, too much so I ended up picking and choosing the ones that I read.
Now, books are a lot more flexible than television shows in that they show more are not constrained by budgets and limitations of technology. The author (remembering that they do have time constraints) is free to develop the story however they see fit. Now, the original Doctor Who's were hardly children's shows, though as the series developed, it began to drift that way a little. However it is clear that these books are targeted at the young adult market. This, once again, is not surprising as many of the young adults reading these books grew up with Doctor Who.
This book is set in the 1950s and, as can be expected, involves aliens and a mystery. The Doctor stumbles across a murder, but this is no ordinary murder, but somebody who turns out to have little, in fact nothing, of a background. Not only that, but there is a driverless black cab haunting the streets of London. After a bit of digging around the Doctor works out who the aliens are, though they claim to be refugees.
Once again, as can be expected with Doctor Who, all of the elements tie up together and the mystery surrounding the murders is revealed. In a way I found it quite clever in that the victims were actually artificial humans with emphatic abilities who read the emotions and desires of their 'patients' (they were used in therapy) and morph into what those desires reveal. However, as can be expected, something goes wrong and the creatures are being hunted down one by one. As is typical with the Doctor, all intelligent life is sacred, and despite them being a failed experiment, they still deserve to live.
I guess in a way this book tries to address the ideas of discrimination and the morality of killing an intelligent being if it has ceased to be of use. However, while we are not yet at the stage were we can create life (beyond the natural ways obviously) it is still something to mull over. However, we still must remember that this is a book that has been churned out by a publisher to satisfy a niche market. It was never meant to be a work of literature. show less