NA55: Damaged Goods

In which we enjoy the first official Doctor Who work of Mr Russell T. Davies.

Published: October 1996

Read: April-May 2021

Wow. Nineties vintage RTD had *issues*.

The plot structure, as with Warhead, is actually pretty simple: you could get all the plot beats in a four parter. The denouement begins about 60% of the way through the book: it’s deeper in terms of character motivation, and relies on effects you couldn’t do even in a Marvel movie now, but it’s not actually that complicated.

That structure is also clearly the one we’d come to know and love on RTD’s version of the TV show. Lovely cheeky salt of the earth supporting cast, who get lots of fun stuff in the first half, then get progressively bumped off in the second, in a finale that makes emotional sense even if it doesn’t make, well, actual sense.

That finale, though, is so gleefully horrible. The Doctor watches extras we’ve been given three line biographies of literally sliced in half, vertically. There’s a female doctor whose eyes we see through in one early scene and then forget about, who we flash back to - smoking in her married lover’s bed, thinking about dumping him - just so we can see her head explode. It’s like a Saw movie, or possibly - given Eva Jericho’s ascension, sort of absorbed by the N-form - like the end of Superman 3. (RTD lifts chunks of this for Miss Hartigan and the finale of the The Next Doctor. Also there’s a pointlessly-waving-a-gun bit that feels like The End of Time?)

There’s also something slightly misogynistic about the central story of Winnie Tyler and Eva Jericho, about the destructive force of maternal love. Maybe I wouldn’t be thinking of this so much if it hadn’t been the main criticism of It’s A Sin, that he reserves all his rage for bad mothers while letting bad fathers off the hook - I almost wonder if the epilogue bit about how Winnie’s husband escaped criticism was a note from Bex? [range editor, Rebecca Levene] - but he seems to treat their choices with real venom, while drug dealers and pimps are almost comedy characters. It reminds me of how Sylvia is absolutely toxic, but her husband/father just a lovable old duffer; how Martha’s dad gets to rail against fascists while banging a 20 something blonde, while her mother is seen as a traitor.

Other thoughts:

• God this is fankwanky. Not only part of an arc, but a sort of State of Decay sequel, with references to Blood Harvest and Goth Opera and a load of wibbling about TIme Lord colleges and UNIT. RTD’s fanboy leanings are all over it.

• It’s also quite... soap-y? In its approach to Doctor Who (see above) but also in its approach to its characters, everyone is motivated by dark secrets, often those involving sex, and those dominate the first half of the book.

• There’s a weird disconnect where the first half is mostly about internalised homophobia and the second about female rage. Oddly enough the latter is partly ameliorated by the ghost of the protagonist of the first half’s wife (???) saving him and his young gay lodger.

• The city the Quadrant is in is explicitly destroyed. I always assumed the book was set in Manchester (it’s on the M6, next to the moors) but there’s a reference to nothing standing between the city and the sea except moor which doesn’t fit. 

• There are twin towers in this city. They fall. Shiver.

• On, and the Doctor takes cocaine, and Chris cures AIDS. Sure.

Anyway, it’s great, it’s just quite typically NA - the story surprisingly simple, the sort of furniture of it more ornate and grown-up-but-sometimes-in-an-adolescent-way than you ever had on TV.