Twice Upon A Time: The Novel

For the third time in my life, Paul Cornell has written exactly the words I needed to read.

The first time was early in 1992, when the blazing hot prose of Timewyrm: Revelation kept me awake — sitting in a hotel bathroom to finish devouring the book long after my roommate had wanted to go to sleep, compelled to keep reading by the feeling that a flower was opening in my head, a first glimpse of just how layered and human and emotionally true one of these Doctor Who adventures could be.  That the same crafting of words and motifs that I'd been learning to appreciate in Steinbeck could be turned to flesh out the characters at the heart of my own personal mental landscape, and find something rich and real to say with them.  It's one of the many moments where I think I learned how to write.

The second was the summer of 1995.  The girl I'd thought I was going to marry had just dumped me, and I was adrift.  Out of college, working an entry-level job, seemingly cut off from most of the life I'd built up at school — I had no idea how I was going to manage to get from where I was to a place where I'd be happy again, and not alone.  But then, while curled up and recovering, I settled down with a good book:  Human Nature.  And Paul's deft painting of those moments as John Smith and Joan Redfern were drawn together — that sense of heart-opening possibility, the realisation that once in a while the stars could align and the most romantic thing you could imagine actually could happen — filled my heart with the knowledge that everything actually was all right.  That even the wrong bits wouldn't have to stay wrong forever.

(Just a couple of months later, it happened to me and Kate.)

Fast forward: it's 2018, and we're bloody exhausted on every level.  Kate and I are holding on to each other for dear life, as two years of ever-escalating political horrors are now coming pretty much daily: a wave showing no sign of breaking.  Surely stealing children from their parents will be the last straw.  Surely when I point out that seeking asylum is perfectly legal, and that innocent refugee families who have followed all the rules and committed no crime at all are having their children taken from them, and being told that the best way to see them again is to confess to a crime and go back to where they're likely to be killed — people will realise the pure Kafka madness of America's new policy.  Surely my own mother won't ignore it when I tell her about this...  Surely my heart won't break.  Surely I won't despair.

And in the depths of this soul-weariness, Paul Cornell comes back to Doctor Who for one last time, to novelise the farewell of a Doctor I loved.  A story which, onscreen, left me cold — simultaneously glib and wordy, with shrugged-off sentimentality in place of the genuine hard-won triumph which characterised Peter Capaldi's Doctor for me.  (Neither Doctor's motivation for refusing to regenerate rang true for me on-screen.)  But Paul Cornell had been finding depth in dashed-off raw material ever since he took a brief Terrance Dicks description of the Doctor and turned it into a heartfelt principle worth clinging to.  Perhaps he might just pull it off again.

Twice Upon A Time starts out fairly ordinary, as Paul once again channels his lifelong ambition to be Terrance Dicks — which is all well and good, but I'd really much rather he be Paul Cornell.  He does a polished, swift job of leading us through the setup of the story... but it's got none of the showy packedfullness of those early novels, which were bursting with ideas and imagery in every moment.  Not even a "long ago in an Antarctic winter".  Paul's in a different place now, as are we all.  He's slower, he's older, he's writing this book for his son (to whom it's dedicated) at least as much as for his peers — it's got none of the raw "adolescent energy" (as Paul once referred to it) which powerd his first novels.

But what he has — in common with the Doctor he's writing for — is grown-up insight.

And gradually, through the course of the book, he gets further into the heads of the characters...  and that's where the book comes to life, as he fleshes out the Doctor and his reactions, twice over.  To start with, he finesses the meaning of the Doctors refusing to regenerate, in a way that's never explained in the script:  they're not seeing it as an immediate death sentence, but that eventually the regeneration energy will stop surging and fade away, leaving them to live the remainder of their life and die naturally as themselves.  Not so much suicide as refusing to be reincarnated.  (Hartnell's parting line of "It's far from being all over" becomes an expression not of his impending regeneration, but of his defiance of it.)  The first Doctor's reaction in refusing to change is a combination of classic Hartnell-style stubbornness, and fear of the unknown — fears which are exacerbated by the sight he gets of his future.  And the further we get into the story, the more different layers to the twelfth Doctor's motivations we see.

There are lovely extra exchanges (many presumably deleted bits from the original script) which flesh out both their attitudes:  both the twelfth Doctor as the older, more experienced self (First Doctor:  "I wish I'd thought of that." Twelfth Doctor:  "You will, Doctor, you will!"), and the first as the one who remembers crucial things his later self would forget.  The first also gets a wonderful internal monologue about his own Ghost of Christmas Future:  "In his case it merely meant several things of which he very much disapproved, including nonsense, frippery, and seemingly not being in possession of a comb."

Paul also gets to do a fair bit of what he said he always loved Terrance for in his novelizations — the plugging of plotholes and the subverting of weak bits.  You can see him enjoying his deft retcons, like his suggestion that the reason why the Doctor left the TARDIS interior as white for so long was because he simply hadn't worked out how to change it.  He suggests a bunch of reasons why the first Doctor is showing his most chauvinist side — the twelfth Doctor is appalled that his younger self had forgotten how Barbara would never stand for this, and wonders if he's just acting up to embarrass his future self.  Or this throwaway gem:

"Time and Relative Dimension In Space." Bill said it with him.  And she hadn't even gone for the plural on the D word, like he sometimes did when he decided to flirt with the translation circuits.

But a novel has to reach deeper than that.  And where the story really begins to come to life is when he starts letting us into the characters' heads:  giving the on-screen events context and resonance.  In the end we both get a rationalization for why Bill didn't remember her own fate (the Testimony wanted to judge the Doctor through her eyes, and that meant her eyes at the time when the Doctor was still fresh in her mind, so they blocked everything after that at first), and eventually the full story of her life with Heather.  The Doctor's reluctance to accept the reappearance of Bill — because she represents both a sense of hope and the possibility that that hope could be betrayed — gets fleshed out with more nuances; he can feel both the reasons to believe her and to resist her. ("She was like his conscience made flesh.")  Nardole gets his story too, and it's charming and eccentric and utterly in-character.  And Paul even just about manages to wring some poetry out of the vision of Clara at the end... rather than just an obligatory happy-ending of the sort I admired Russell T Davies for not giving to Donna, it becomes an explicit step which tips the balance towards convincing the Doctor to regenerate after all.

It was like she was dancing through his neurons.  The sound of her voice and the things they'd done together were in so many associations, so many connections to other things that he'd been shying away from lately, because they'd seemed so... dull.  They had been dull because they had been without her.  To see her again was to see hope.  Because after all wasn't the lesson of her story, the story he had been without, that there was always hope?

(Well, actually, the lesson of her story onscreen was that you could just shrug off any and all consequences of appallingly irresponsible actions, and head off to commit another one for a punchline, if the writer wanted you to have a happy ending regardless.  But Paul tells the lie so well that for this story I'll believe him.  Especially since he also indicates that this appearance means Clara did go back and face her raven in the end.)

He repeatedly focuses in on the fact that this is a Doctor who has finished his business; the straight-line human life he'd never understood, he's now had, both with River and in the fifty-odd years afterwards.  At last he has a sense of completeness... such that it's too hard to bear the thought of going on without it.  This is a Doctor who's lived his life, has felt its satisfaction, and simply doesn't want to be cut off from it and live it again.  "This time, if he allowed the regeneration to happen, he wouldn't just be sacrificing some iconic hero, he would be losing a life.  He would be losing it anyway."

(Ironically, that sense of completion works as a callback to Steven Moffat's very first broadcast Who story.  The fact that the Doctor has to go on beyond the point where he is ready to let go makes regeneration the curse of non-fatal death.  Appropriately, that story ended in much the same way as this one...!)

And his ambivalence about Bill's authenticity becomes central to his own crisis, because Bill is exactly what he fears becoming:  no more than a filed-away collection of memories to be viewed by someone else.  He refuses to hope that she could be really alive, because "in hope you are at your weakest"— the statement which the first Doctor reminds him he's been misquoting.  ("'In hope you are at your weakest...  In strength you are at your worst.' It wasn't weakness he was warning us about.")

But then Paul Cornell digs deeper.

What he does, is call back to some of the fiercest, most determined moments of this Doctor, and show us the weakness inside their strength. This Doctor's focus on virtue in extremis— a motif throughout series 10 from Extremis onwards — crucially depends on there being no hope, and yet doing the right thing anyway: as close as the show has gotten in recent years to a new angle on the Doctor's heroism, one well suited for those of us who have become more battered and cynical over the years but refuse to stop fighting.  

But what that idea has hidden in plain sight is, this is a Doctor who has given up on hope.

He believes he's won all the battles he's going to win, seen everything he wants to see, lived the life he always wanted to (his twenty-four years of married life with River), and that he has at last done enough.

And that rings all too true.  As Kate said the other day...  I've had a good run.  She and I have made it nearly fifty years without a profound disaster in our lives, and the temptation to just walk away from the things we fight for is ever present.  Because it only gets harder to believe that the big victories would ever come.  I've had more than one friend say lately that if not for their children, they'd retire from their fight and just look after themselves comfortably... and Kate and I don't even have that to keep us going.  We've had to rely on sheer cussedness to keep standing up.

By cutting himself off from hope, from his memories of Clara, from the possibility of something further — the Doctor has frozen himself.  Gone cold, in exactly the way Nardole fears the universe will without him.  As still as that frozen moment in the Antarctic wastes, or the battlefield when they return there.  He has kept fighting for what's right, but from a place of bleak determination rather than one of hope.

I have gone so cold over these past two years.

I've had my belief in people, in human empathy, in common sense, in the power of kindness, in law and fairness, battered almost beyond recognition.  I have not resigned myself to accepting the cruelties and profiteering of the powerful few — but I have become embittered.  I have fought on for the sake of continuing to fight, without feeling any belief that this week's battles can actually be won.  (Not until November, at least.  Vote, and get everyone you know voting.)

I have not let myself recognize hope, even in the small things.  I have survived just on strength, and thus been at my worst.

But in the succession of little turning points Paul has brought out in this book...  he's showed the ways hope can creep back in.  To start with, he actually lets us in on a moment Steven Moffat kept offscreen: the moment when the Doctor, resigned to having to return the Captain to his fate (and feeling compelled to do so, because otherwise he'd be a hypocrite for being ready to die himself), suddenly realises that there is a chance to avoid the Captain's end after all.  Then Paul underlines the sheer improbability of the fact that the Christmas armistice happened at all — lifting the date out of the realm of lucky coincidence, and into that of a statement of possibility:

What a fantasy.  What a fairy tale.  Lives saved by a story, by songs.

Crucially, he lets enough harsh reality into this picture that we don't see this as a magical cure for everything:  pointing out the reasons why such an armistice never happened again, how people were executed for it the following year.  Emphasizing that this moment's power is just that of a single moment of grace...  so those of us whose cynicism curdled over Clara's easy-out in Hell Bent get pulled back from the brink.

And he still allows the Doctor to see both sides of what he's presented with — through reinstated dialogue and new internal monologue, we see how the Doctor can both feel the hope around him and still want to resist it.  ("I can't do this forever.  There has to be an end." "But does it have to be today?" "Why not?  Why not right here, at the only war that ever turned into a Christmas party?  I could do worse.")  For every step towards acceptance, we get to see why he wants to not accept it as well:  the hope he gains from rediscovering his memories of Clara are played against the fact that he hasn't actually got her back, and he tells the memory ghosts of his friends that his life is "a battlefield where everyone has fallen."

All these overlapping elements move the Doctor's state of mind away from feeling glib and sketchily-defined, and into the murky realm of real human motivations.  As with many people facing depression, or resignation, or despair, it doesn't just take an epiphany to shift their mind, but a thousand and one little epiphanies, over and over again.

But what Paul does is give us enough of them that we can see what makes him hope again despite himself.  And thus keeps us standing beside the Doctor as he faces his final decision.

He felt so... old.  So completed.  He had wondered, in this incarnation, about every aspect of himself, about his worth, his beliefs, his meaning in a universe that seemed to have forgotten everything he'd learned and didn't see the need to consult him as it was learning those harsh lessons for itself, over and over.

I'm right there with you, Doctor.

He had known lasting love, he had found peace, he had died a good death, to save others, already.  What more could there be for him to learn?  He would not be merely the sum of his memories, something to be collected in the Matrix, he would put a proper full stop at the end of his life, like...  well, he'd been about to think 'like humans did', but... but he'd just discovered they didn't do that, hadn't he?  He'd just discovered something...  new.

This damned universe, mocking him at his moment of greatest fear.

But what finally tips the balance at last, in Paul's telling, is a new moment that's simultaneously in character as one of those Terrance-Dicks-style slipped in retcons, a Steven Moffat bit of timey-wimey cleverness, and a pure Paul Cornell piece of heart: the Doctor finally remembers the words we've only just see Bill tell him, a few hours and twelve lifetimes ago.  A gift which makes its way through the fog of forgetting which has previously hidden his first self's encounter with him.  "Perhaps there's just some bloke, wandering around, putting everything right when it goes wrong."

He almost laughed.  He almost laughed a laugh so big it nearly brought on the change on its own.  Oh.  Oh!  He had learned another new thing, although really he had already known it.  He was such... an idiot.  A complete idiot — or at least, an idiot who had been completed by this realisation of his own stupidity.  Because he had learned new things, had changed twice, in the space of the last few minutes.

Testimony was a human system.  It would not save them all.  It would not save them from pain and horror.  It would not see where lives did not have to end, where change was possible.  It was just something else instead of death.  Someone still had to save people.  Someone still had to help them.  But...  not someone who was pleased with the life he had completed.

He was satisfied.  He had done the best he could.  Change was required, because it always was.

Where the episode on screen failed to bring me to that point of acceptance, except with a sort of shrug, the novel makes me believe both in the Doctor's despair and finally in his release.

And the way he does this is sort of the antithesis of young Paul's heart-on-his-sleeve prose...  he lets the idea sneak up on you.  It's only when looking back through the book that you realise just how many different contexts the word hope has appeared in.  (From the opening sentence of chapter 1 — "It was hopeless, to begin with"— up through "In hope you are at your weakest," all the way to the battlefield and beyond.)  What Paul has done here is take one more thought from Letts and Dicks — "while there's life, there's hope"— and weave a whole tapestry around it to show us, while never once telling us that specific phrase.

And all those other words are the words I needed to hear, to take that thought out of the realm of cliche and into inspiration.  There is still hope, even if you've stopped listening to it.

And as the perfect capper, Paul even brings subversive little shadings to the Doctor's final oration to himself.  Onscreen, this speech sat really wrong with me — not only was it interminable, but the image of the Doctor mansplaining himself to his next self rankled.  But Paul, elegantly, keeps the words of the monologue while shifting its flavour — making the Doctor determined to finish his sentences because they're the final statements on his life, the life he's been so proud of.  And then wonderfully, towards the end, he realises that this whole my-house-my-rules attitude is exactly what he's supposed to be letting go of.

And what finally gets him to let go, is a glimpse of who he's going to turn into.

He stood there.  He adjusted his cuffs.  It was all going to be all right.  Of course it was.  Seeing who he was going to be, he was suddenly filled with... hope.

But an even better punchline — when she finally takes his place, she shrugs the whole monologue off!

Change was possible.  Change was here.  What had she been worrying about just now?  No idea.

And that, that moment, is where Paul Cornell most clearly achieves his dream of being more Terrance than Terrance.  Again, by finding the depth.  By elegantly layering his own meaning atop the original author's — but doing so in a way which isn't a jab at the original, but an enrichment of it.  A way that is kind.

After two relentless years on the battlements, I needed all of this.  I needed the acknowledgement of despair and the myriad little reasons to hope.  These words reminded me that we don't have to win every battle, or even the big ones; any battle we win is a victory. Even after a loss, there is always a chance to win something else.  Any moment of decency can be the one to come back to save you.

Somewhere in the distance, I can still hear TARDIS music.