Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Arguably Doctor Who is at its best when it steers clear of the stars and takes its rightful place in the Victorian folk horror and the melodrama which accompanies it. After all, the era itself lends itself perfectly to the idea of the supernatural investigation, the race memory of what the destructive pursuit of empire has wrought in the landscape and the name of progress, and the terrors that have been faced by the aspirational working class as lives were pushed to limit, and the soul of humanity forsaken in the grabbing hands of capitalism, and the quest for the new Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
In Tom Baker’s time the folk horror that had gained traction during Victoria’s reign was to be found in abundance, the gothic presented with ease and well as fear, and the allusions to the sense of damnations and mysteries at the time were incredibly well observed. Since then though there have been few journeys in the Tardis taken to that land of little fortune and seances, of the time when the macabre started to appeal in conjunction with the fully automated machine.
For Mark Gatiss, a lover of the genre himself, the time was ripe for picking, the disease of the industrial revolution the perfect place in which to seed the story of The Crimson Horror, and one that was undoubtedly a highlight in the annals of the eleventh incarnation of the Doctor, Matt Smith.
Such is the pleasure of the tale of Mrs Gillyflower’s rank hypocrisy and hatred of humanity that the novelisation of the adventure is one that sits well in the gothic horror genre, and with the sense of the segments and chapters being told from different character’s points of view, it adds a greater sense of inspection and observation to the televised script that first appeared in the seventh series since the return of the Gallifreyan hero to British television screens.
Where the book also adds extra intrigue is in the additional material which never made it on-screen. It is in this opening dialogue presented to the reader that the deranged and dangerous Mrs. Gillyflower makes her first appearance, and the small mystery of her origin as a villain becomes apparent. These extra touches in the Target novelisation make the tale a fully rounded experience, the warnings of a utopian society built on the creaking back of the poor and desperate is to be prepared and cautioned of what to expect when the next technological revolution asks the fraught and downbeat to be the sacrifice for the greater good.
A tale as old as Time, the burden of expectancy in the hope that what is promised in terms of equality and fairness by the captains of industry is all talk, that the destitute and poor will always pay a heavier price for their pay than was expected.
Ian D. Hall