Human Nature, 1995, Paul Cornell
I think it’s fairly safe to say that this is one of the more popular books in the “New Adventures” series. I remember a lot of people expressing enormous satisfaction when it was revealed that the story was going to be adapted into an episode during series three. And it really is one of the best books. I would even say that the book is far better than the actual episodes it was adapted into. There’s a key concept in the book, repeated often, that the Doctor is never “cowardly or cruel.” And that “cruel” bit is something you really can’t say about Tennant’s Doctor. He’s frequently a sadistic, petty, vengeful bastard. Yes, the alien and human bad guys in the book all meet deserved fates, but importantly it’s never the Doctor who leads them to them. Their own natures spell their doom. This is a pretty key distinction from the Doctor who condemns four beings to eternal torture just because they ticked him off. But, as I’ve argued before, the Seventh Doctor, while manipulative to a fault, is much more compassionate than Nine or Ten. Seven actually interrupts his mission to prevent intergalactic genocide to console a teenage girl who has had her heart broken in Delta and the Bannermen. Ten makes his companion into a servant because she’s not a blonde.
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Yeah, that was one of the things about the “reinvented” RTD-era of WHO that made me cringe a lot. Well, that and the farting aliens. And the burping trash can.
Anyway… it’s looking like “The Moff” may be taking the show back towards its roots, so we may find the new Doctor is more like the old one, and less like the new ones.
Fingers crossed.
I’d really like the BBC to do an audiobook of this one. Preferably read by Jessica Hynes.
The resolution of the book is so novelistic it’s hard to see how you’d do it on screen. On the page you can follow all the body swaps because its the characters you’re invested in – on screen it would be very hard to do the switching of actors without losing the viewers investment, or lapsing into impersonations rather than acting.
The television version is okay except for the ending, which is horrible. It’s overpraised by the same people who, ten years ago, wanted to give David Duchovny an Emmy every time Mulder cried on the X-Files. Playing a character different from the one you usually do isn’t incredible, folks. It’s “acting”.
“Ten makes his companion into a servant because she’s not a blonde.”
So true. Martha had to do way more grunt work than any companion on the series before or after.