Even with the best intentions, keeping track of everything in a Doctor Who multi-media project like Circuit Breaker has been an exercise in dedication. I’ve avoided posting about Circuit Breaker until now because I don’t know much about comic books and I’m rubbish at video games. But when the first and only full-length Circuit Breaker novel The Kaleidoscope landed on my doorstep – a brand new Fugitive Doctor story, penned by actress Jo Martin – I knew it was time to talk about it.
For hopeless Tenth Doctor fans like myself, the big draw of this story will undoubtedly be the return of Martha Jones. While she’s appeared in plenty of comics and stories over the years – including Freema Agyeman reprising the role for Big Finish – this is the first time we’ve met Martha since she was briefly seen as an alien tracking freelancer in 2010’s The End of Time. With her former employer UNIT playing a sizable role in the modern era of Doctor Who, fans have been clamoring for the return of Dr Jones. Not least because this story sees her meet the Fugitive Doctor, an enigmatic incarnation from their lost history, who doesn’t necessarily share the same moral compass as the Time Lord we know…
…And their first meeting happens offscreen.
Well, strictly speaking, it happens in another story. I didn’t know this going in, but on the day I received my review copy was also the day that the reprint of 2015’s Time Lord Fairy Tales anthology was released, featuring a brand new story The Doctor and the Three Witches, written by Janelle McCurdy and tying into Circuit Breaker. That story sees the first encounter between Martha and the Fugitive Doctor, while The Kaleidoscope picks up with the pair recovering from the adventure with Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) and Andrew (Osgood’s assistant, played by Omari Douglas) at UNIT. I’ll be surprised if I’m the only person who made that assumption and isn’t a bit put out to learn the long-awaited return of Martha requires buying a book that – in my case – I already own, for the sake of one extra story.
That being said, my experience with Circuit Breaker is that the stories are more standalone than we had with previous projects like Time Lord Victorious and Doom’s Day. Objects from the Doctor’s past adventures (or future, in this Doctor’s case) have been randomly appearing in UNIT’s Black Archive, imbued with a strange energy that threatens the universe. Osgood calls on the earliest Doctor known to UNIT (thanks, Yaz!) to neutralise and return the items without risking the Doctor’s timeline.
The premise lends itself to episodic stories with connective tissue being fairly minimal, and creates a fascinating new angle for the Fugitive Doctor. While on the run from Division, the Doctor falls into the hands of another shadowy organisation who want her help and claims be working for the greater good. Not only that, the Doctor discovers she has this enormous heroic legacy to live up to, but one in which the person she is now and everything she’s done is forgotten, buried under the (mostly white and male) legend of THE Doctor. That drama has doubtless been plumbed in the ARG style introductory short stories on the Doctor Who website if you have the time and inclination to tunnel through the pages of transcripts, images and links, some of which involve guessing passwords from clues within the website. I wish I had the time.
Where The Kaleidoscope more directly deals with this character arc for the Doctor is where Martha presents the Doctor with her own sonic screwdriver. Something that was revealed by promotional Circuit Breaker material in the weeks leading up to it. Within the novel, this moment carries a lot more thematic weight than you’d expect as she grudgingly acknowledges its utility while balking at an attempt to force her into the image of her future self. It’s a great moment of introspection in Martin’s writing, not to mention unexpected since she was visibly thrilled to get her own sonic in the lead up to Circuit Breaker…
Indeed, in her debut novel there’s a distinct sense of Jo Martin taking ownership of the role she’s now been playing for six years. While the Doctor continues to experience gaps in her memory, this story is unapologetic in forging a distinct backstory for this incarnation of the Doctor. I’m loathe to give much away, but it’s an incredible character arc that goes places I never thought a Doctor Who story could with its protagonist. By weaving elements of her own life, family and cultural heritage into the story, Martin claims the Fugitive Doctor as her own and both character and story are richer for it.
There’s so much more I want to say about where this puts the Fugitive Doctor in Doctor Who lore, but I’ll save it for a spoilery follow-up post in the near future.
But it’s not just the Doctor’s memories that The Kaleidoscope has to deal with, since the novel features memory-mashing monsters The Silence, best known for their confrontations with the Eleventh Doctor. While it’s hard to pretend their appearance was a total surprise given the cover, the story keeps them at arm’s length for a long time, adding in little inconsistencies to the events that have you second-guessing what you just read (or, if you’re as obsessive as me, frantically flipping back through pages to check). It’s a neat meta-textual way to signal the presence of the Silence before they really join the plot, though it also creates a level of intricacy in the plot that goes a little overboard towards the end of the book. Characters frequently experience time jumps and have to piece together what happened, which creates a few too many plot cul-de-sacs for my taste and severely harms the pacing.
As a fan-favourite character whose return has been long-awaited, Martha’s role in the story unfortunately left me cold. She fills the standard companion functions and, save a few dreamy reminiscences about David Tennant, there’s nothing in Martin’s writing that makes her really feel like Martha. Time travel notwithstanding, Circuit Breaker explicitly takes place 2026, meaning it’s been almost two decades since Martha first met the Doctor. Since she’s now in her forties, I was hoping to get a sense of how Martha had developed as a person or at least know what she’s been up to since leaving UNIT but that’s mostly overlooked. Sorry to say, but Martha could be replaced with Mel or Ruby or Yaz – pretty much any Earthbound companion with UNIT connections – and little would change. That said, they bicker so brilliantly and I love that for a Doctor/Companion dynamic.
Martin has a strong sense of plot and character and, particularly in a story told from the Doctor’s perspective, that goes a long way in the construction of The Kaleidoscope. However, I found the prose rather overwritten. Martin is keen to give a detailed visual impression of the story’s settings but these descriptions are heavy and intricate in a way that sometimes makes it tough to read. Sensory details too, while obviously important, stand out in fast-paced moments, such as when the Doctor is reaching for the sonic screwdriver in a moment of desperation only to stop to tell us how warm her fingers are against its handle. Small moments like this don’t ruin the story by any means, but they break up the flow of the narration at unusual moments.
The Kaleidoscope is one of the final pieces of the Circuit Breaker story. Later this month, Big Finish has two releases coming out that will bring the story to a close. The first – a full cast audio Full Circuit – appears to be the true finale while Short Circuits (following two days later) is a pair of narrated short stories that may just be interstitial tales. Though if my theory on who The Conductor is turns out to be true, they may be the most consequential piece of the whole puzzle.
Doctor Who: Circuit Breaker – The Kaleidoscope is out now, published by BBC Books. With thanks to Penguin RH for the review copy.