Return of the Living Dad

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In Return of the Living Dad, Orman (with input from Paul Cornell) brings back Bernice Summerfield, several books on from her departure as a regular character, and tracks down her father, who apparently escaped the future Dalek war in which she thought he had been killed, and has settled in England in 1983 where he is involved in a convoluted alien plot. I suspect non-fans wouldn't get as much out of this, but I really liked both the fairly intricate plotting (involving a potential nuclear war), and what Orman does with the characters, taking most of the regulars (Seven, Chris, Roz, and Benny andd Jason) a little beyond where they had been before. Having said that, I see one reviewer complaining show more that nobody who wasn't a rec.arts.sf.drwho reader in the early 1990s could possibly enjoy the book; I propose myself as a counterexample. There's also some interesting treatment of the question of the Doctor's true name - nothing inconsistent with new Who, but coming at it from a different direction. show less

In this story, Berenice returns with her newlywed husband Jason to investigate what became of her father. It's long been believed that Admiral Isaac Summerfield turned coward in a space battle against the Daleks and died, but new evidence suggest otherwise. Berenice asks the Doctor to use the TARDIS to witness the battle and see that her father's ship is sucked into a wormhole. Following through, the TARDIS team arrives in a remote English village in 1983.

Isaac and his crew are not surprised to see the Doctor and Berenice, as they've been expecting them to arrive one day. Isaac's ship arrived 20 years earlier, and in the intervening years he's opened a cafe and taken up the duty of cleaning up the messes left behind by UNIT and the show more Doctor himself. With an Air Force base nearby with nuclear weapons, the village attracts a strange assortment of refugee aliens, paranormal investigators, and anti-nuclear protesters. Of course, once the Doctor arrives, strange things begin happening as the TARDIS and several people go missing. There's a mystery to be solved and a traitor or two in their midst.

Kate Orman is one of the best writers of Doctor Who and particularly good at getting at the humanity (or lack thereof) of her characters and their relationships. It's surprising that she's never written for the television series like other New Adventures writers, but perhaps she's just not keen on scriptwriting. Nevertheless, aspects of the book are familiar to what would be picked up ten years later in the new tv series, such as the need to clean up after the Doctor's adventures, and the nodding winks to fan culture.

Since this is an Orman novel, it also has approximately a gazillion characters and it does get hard to keep track of them all. I kept forgetting the Doctor's other companions, Roz & Chris, were even there, and their main plot is their getting romantically involved. Berenice, who had left the Doctor in Happy Endings, is front and center and this book is very much setting up her own series of New Adventures that would start in 1997. Indeed, in various media, Berenice Summerfield is still appearing in new stories through today. show less