The Nightmare Fair:

This would have brought back the Toy Maker if it
had been aired as it is based on one of the episodes from the "Missing Season".

Peri's an American so why does she use the
British term for Cotton Candy?

Maybe the Doctor's influence rubbed off on her?

It should be pointed out that The Nightmare Fair
was in fact to have been part of the "Lost Season"
that never aired.

Nightmare Fair was originally to be, the first story of Season 23, but the BBC cut the season length to 14 episodes, making the original Season 23 unviable. It's replacement was "Trial of a Timelord" !

The actual sequence of events is this:

1984-1985: Scripts and storylines are commissioned for season 23, to begin production in April 1985 for broadcast from January 1986. The initial lineup is 'The Nightmare Fair', 'The Ultimate Evil', 'Mission to Magnus' (despite the publication order, it's been suggested that 'M2M' would have been the second story of the season). A lot of other stories have been commissioned but the likeliest contenders for the later slots include Robert Holmes' 'Yellow Fever and How to Cure It', Christopher H. Bidmead's 'In the Hollows of Time' (not 'Pinacotheca', which came later), Michael Feeny Callan's 'The Children of January' and one other whose author's name I can't remember off the top of my head but was something like Bill Pritchard.

Late February 1985: Production of season 23 is suspended for a year. Work on all current scripts is put on hold.

March 1985: Pip and Jane Baker are commissioned to write 'Gallifray' (sic), a story of four 25-minute episodes (as opposed to the 45-minute format previously expected for season 23). Soon after, this story is also put on hold.

Summer 1985: All previously commissioned scripts and storylines are written off. The production team discuss the Trial format with prospective writers Robert Holmes and Philip Martin (who make it) and David Halliwell and Jack Trevor Story (who don't). It's only around this time that the episode cutback rumours begin to circulate but I would imagine that the 14 episode season had been settled on in the spring.

Mission to Magnus:

I was disappointed by this novelisation. Glad it didn't get made, as it would've sucked, upset it didn't get made, as we coulda seen the Ice Warriors again.

One sight of Aznar and the Doctor is cowering, trembling, sweating, shivering, crouching on the floor with his fingers in his ears chanting 'I'm not here, I'm not here'...and agreeing to be trapped in a forcefield for all eternity. Call me excessively nit-picky, but this does NOT strike me as particularly Doctorish.

And what's the point of Aznar, anyway? There are way too many characters, aliens, invaders, nasty guys, etc etc in the story as it is.

So now Gallifrey has a 'Council' - not a 'High Council' or 'Supreme Council'.

Wasn't there supposed to be a proposed Troughton story where women were in charge and Zoe got a good spanking...? Well, I could just about have understood that sort of thing in the Dark Age 60s, but this was the 80s for Christ's sake, what were they THINKING?! I always knew Philip Martin was sexist - that 'supporting their men' rubbish about female rebels on Varos - but I would never have dreamt of the full depths of his depravity.

Were all the boys in the manful Vion's cell on the 'sleep list' - i.e. due to be killed after Peri locked them back in...?

Vion tells Peri she'll be fine - 'You're of their kind, they'll forgive you' - and then brandishes a force stick 'to protect you with'. What a male chauvinist.

Where DO Magnus's children come from, anyway? Presumaby the women give birth to them using donated sperm? Couldn't they arrange to have a lot more girls than boys? And wouldn't some of the women be mildly fond of their own sons - at least, fond enough not to genocide them?

So the women are so cowardly - or Vion so manful - that with one force stick he can make an entire crowd of females let the Doctor grab the TARDIS keys (sic) and escape?

I don't give a toss whether Marshal(l) has one l or two, but I'd appreciate a bit of consistency (eg p70). There's also 'my' instead of 'may' (p104) and 'Thors' instead of 'Thoros' (p115) though frankly typos are the LEAST of this book's problems.

'The survival of our entire race depends on the success of your mission' - or the Ice Warriors could just go find another planet.

So the cutprice Sisterhood of Karn use a 'combination key' to open the TARDIS? They can't be as stupid as they look then.

If Ishka regards women as a bunch of mindless hysterics, why has he got a woman in his invasion team?

The Doctor keeps saying there's no time to disarm the detonators. Yet he feels there's plenty of time to find out the motivation behind the bombs?

Have to agree with the Ice Warriors: the Doctor is pathetic. I don't mind him failing to save the day sometimes (or, indeed, all the time: see Ninth Doctor) but if the best he can do is chuck a spent force stick at a monitor...it's WAY past time he started banging his head on the TARDIS console.

Scans around the planet confirm there's a famine...what, five minutes after the bombs went off?

Bit stupid of the Ice Warriors to design their sonic ice burners so that only human fingers could fire them.

Why do the Ice Warriors renege on their contracts if they're oh-so-honourable?

Why would Ishka want to marry a wildcat she-devil crosspatch anyway?

The Masters of Luxor:

They cause the crystal world to EXPLODE?! Is this presented as a hideous accident about which they're all wracked with guilt? Or as a small price to pay for their freedom, not worth getting worked up about?

It's an early story, so I don't think the writers saw the destruction of an alien world as anything to get worked up about.

Could have been a whole new tack... whack a caveman on the head in the first story, destroy a planet in the second... possibly a solar system in third, followed by a galaxy in the fourth, the Universe in the fifth - and then, in the sixth - oh... that's right, there's nothing left. End of series guys!

Yeah - The Daleks obviously helped to preserve the series in more ways than merely being mind-bogglingly popular. The Doctor only got to wipe out ONE species in that story.

Or so he thought...

'Oh God...oh God protect us' 'For God's sake' 'Thank God you're safe' 'God knows' 'Oh God! Oh God, make it stop' etc etc etc. They even sing Onward Christian Soldiers. No less authority than the Doctor himself tells us that science needs religion, otherwise we'll just start experimenting on ourselves to become robots (er...thanks for THOSE words of wisdom, Doc). He even starts...aaaghhh...kneeling to pray. And then, after six episodes of non-stop God-bothering...in which Barbara even starts rambling on about 'there is a perfection from which we came' and how life is unimportant and death is a great moment...Susan asks why you Earth people are afraid of the word 'God'!!!!!!!!!!!!

'Poor Grandfather. Soon he'll be begging you to leave us. Hit on the head by that awful Kal, tied up in a cave, threatened as a human sacrifice...nothing like this has ever happened to us before' - oh yeah? What about in Time and Relative and Frayed?

'There was never any plant life as we know it' - so where does the oxygen come from?

The TARDIS's power is taken from sunlight. Since when?!

'If we wait around we'll die for sure of starvation' - not if the TARDIS food machine is still working.

'He flushed them down the thing' - such flushing, er, things are not to be mentioned on Who!

And neither is Ian sympathising with the robots about the women setting up dangerous vibrations in their perceptor coils.

So scientists, criminals, AND rebels are invariably men? Thanks. I'll wipe such things off my career list.

Barbara is touchingly confident that Susan hasn't got an illegitimate kid stashed away somewhere.

If Luxor is obsessed by all new life being perfect, why let imperfect males survive, and breed?

And if all imperfect females are destroyed, it's REALLY surprising none of their mothers are rebelling.

'I wonder what the stronger, more resourceful sex is doing now?' - PLEASE tell me Susan is being sarcastic. I'm really not sure any more after all this 'Earth women are inferior creatures' stuff.

Why is the Perfect One suddenly suicidal? Though come to think of it, so am I. Were I to believe in the God being endlessly pushed at me by Masters of Luxor I would be on my knees thanking Him for making The Daleks instead of THIS.

The Ultimate Evil:

Not the best title in the world.

There's over a page of build-up until the line 'It is - the TARDIS'. The only problem being that the long-winded description is inaccurate - the TARDIS DOES 'sway and twirl' when travelling, the last thing it is in any circumstances is 'rock steady'.

OK, OK, we get the message. Evil Dwarf Mordant is...an evil dwarf. Perhaps he could just be referred to as 'Mordant' in future...? He even 'whispered to himself evilly'...we get the picture! HE'S EVIL! Thanks for spelling it out in words of one syllable! Repeatedly!

'A holiday - me?' says the 'suitably aghast' Doctor. No Doctor, let alone the Sixth, is ever aghast at the thought of a holiday (though they bloody well ought to be, given how their holidays invariably turn out).

Kareelya is a 'sweet and loving wife' who says things like 'your brain is so much more valuable than mine' to her husband, AND bakes a great chocolate biscuit. Excuse me while I kill myself.

Escoval is second only to Evil Dwarf Mordant when it comes to subtle villainy. He storms out slamming doors when told that a war is not necessary, and he's 'hardly able to contain his pleasure' when Locas is on trial.

OK, so if you think your love is so strong, so pure that you won't attack each other when the hate-wave hits...why not have a trial run? With chains? Just in case...

Why is the Doctor so determined to get good fishing? I thought he'd foresworn that sort of thing post-Two Doctors.

So a notorious arms dealer gives various Time Lords some bugged and capable-of-being-tuned-to-take-over-minds crystal globes...and none of them ever suspect anything? Even the DOCTOR?

Gosh, EDM's own crystal ball tells the Doctor to go to Tranquela for his hols - the very place where EDM is working his fiendish plans! Oh, the irony!

'The ball had now been irrevocably switched on' - why now? Why not from the start, or at least from the first time the Doctor used it?

Given our utter failure to even consider giving up the motor car despite the imminent destruction of our planet, I find it surprising that the Tranquelans should ban their ultra-convenient (and utterly implausible, not to say magical) transport system just in case someone had a wrong thought. And what did they replace teleportation with?

'I've never known you to be quite so nonchalant about diving in to face the locals without testing the waters first' says Peri. Uh? When has ANY Doctor not dived headfirst into facing the locals?

'This is not the Doctor we have learnt to know and love' - speak for yourself! To be brutally honest, not only do I distinctly NOT love the Sixth Doctor, but I can see very little difference whether or not he's under the control of the hate-gun.

So the TARDIS is working utterly perfectly for the first time ever? So why doesn't the chameleon circuit work then? Even though the TARDIS is suddenly capable of invisibility AND the Doc has hitherto unsuspected new equipment.

So Peri looks just like Mariana? AND Louis XIII's Queen Anne (Church and the Crown)? I'm well aware of the TARDIS going a bit far.

How much of the population was killed in the initial - i.e. unchained - madness? Should be practically all of 'em. Yet I get the impression it's none.

Why not chain the Doctor before removing his helmet?

So the Doc goes mad, what, FOUR times in a row while with Ravlos and co. Change the record, why don't you.

If anyone entering the Armoury will break a fifty-year truce, cause a devastating war, AND get executed...wouldn't it be a good idea to a) LOCK THE BLOODY DOOR, and b) NOT go wandering in there?

'She knew she was indeed going to die' - hmm. So Peri's put on trial and sentenced to death. Big deal - she's a Companion, that sort of thing must happen every week without her actually shuffling off her mortal coil.

Why isn't Peri upset when the Doctor dematerialises instead of saving her from the mob which was stoning her to death?

'To take a gift from a Salakan is madness indeed' - the Doctor. Er...yes. So why did you, exactly?

If fleeing would be an admission of guilt, why doesn't Locas teleport poor innocent Peri out of the cell and then come back? And isn't a trial finding him guilty also a fairly clear indication of guilt? Not to mention the fact that he WAS guilty as hell of entering the Armoury AND was caught in the act.

Why does the Doctor think that jumping into the warmongering Amelierons (an action in itself likely to lead to a pre-emptive strike) is a better avoiding-war bet than staying where he is and exposing the traitor Escoval? Especially as they wouldn't have KNOWN about the opening of the Armoury if they weren't told.

Tranquela - yet another of those Mechanus-type names that were so inappropriate at the time (the Tranquelans being violent gits) yet luckily turned out to be just right.

The Doctor, 'knowing it was not his place to interfere'...yeah, right.

Peri describes the TARDIS as 'an old British police box'. Not terribly helpful, given that she was talking to an alien.

So the Doctor can set a TARDIS course with his eyes shut, yet needs to open them to find 'the starting button' (presumably the dematerialisation switch)?

And the point of the Amelieron trip is WHAT, precisely? There's just mist (see The Mind Robber), a computer-controlled society (see Keys of Marinus) and torture (see loads of stories).

Wow, isn't it lucky the Doctor and Peri happened to find that wave tracker at the beginning of the book! I never GUESSED it might come in useful later!!

How come EDM and Escovar doesn't hear the TARDIS when it materialises right behind them?

Why do the Amelierons just let Peri and Locas go?

'The traitor is dead. All that remains is to let the Amelierons know what has been going on here' - er...yes. And to deal with the hate-beam that leads your population into regular attempts to rip each other into pieces, of course.

So the Doctor sees EDM off the premesis. 'Still - there are plenty more planets to go and work on' as EDM says himself. Yeah, there are, aren't there Doctor - why aren't you defending THEM? And why is there no justice for the (presumably) thousands of Tranquelans he's just slaughtered? Where's Ecclesdoc when you need him?

Mariana's return to life is the most vomit-inducing thing since...EVER.

Seems as good a place to ask this as any.

Does anyone know who has the rights to the missing season stories, because I'm surprised BFA havn't tried to get hold of them.

Surely even Big Finish wouldn't stoop THAT low...

Hmm, interesting question. I would assume that, since the BBC paid for the script, they would be the owners. I'm not sure how it works in the UK, though.

Does anyone have any of the books to check up on the copyright?

Talking of which, have there been any ideas for reissuing the Target novels?

I'm not sure who now owns the rights to them, as Virgin lost the right to release any other DW books, but did that cover any previously released novels?

It says "original script copyright Graham Williams." So Big Finish would have to negotiate with both the BBC (for the Doctor Who rights) and Williams (for the script rights) to use it for a radio play.

Somehow the BBC must have rights to them, because I could swear I read some of them online at bbb.co.uk

---
Surely even Big Finish wouldn't stoop THAT low...
---
They're worthy of Nobel Prizes for literature compared to some of BFA's output. ;)

Could have been a whole new tack... whack a caveman on the head in the first story, destroy a planet in the second... possibly a solar system in third, followed by a galaxy in the fourth, the Universe in the fifth - and then, in the sixth - oh... that's right, there's nothing left. End of series guys!

Nonsense! Moffat wiped out the universe in The Pandorica Opens (in what looks SUSPICIOUSLY like an attempt to top RTG's previous season finales - HE starts by destroying Earth and works His way up to almost-destroying EVERY UNIVERSE EVER, followed by TIME ITSELF) but Who isn't gonna let a little thing like THAT get in its way...

'Poor Grandfather. Soon he'll be begging you to leave us. Hit on the head by that awful Kal, tied up in a cave, threatened as a human sacrifice...nothing like this has ever happened to us before' - oh yeah? What about in Time and Relative and Frayed?

And, indeed, what about Sexy telling you she ALWAYS took you where you NEEDED to go? Not to mention the claims you'd been together 700 years, giving Hartnell well over over 200 years exploring the universe and NEVER getting into trouble. A likely story.

The TARDIS's power is taken from sunlight. Since when?!

Though to be honest it makes more sense than a human-eyeball-powered Eye of Harmony. Hell, I've never even been enormously convinced by 'Rift Energy'.

'He flushed them down the thing' - such flushing, er, things are not to be mentioned on Who!

Well, unless a Slitheen is sitting on one, obviously.

Graham Williams totally lost the point of the Toymaker with The Nightmare Fair. (In fairness, Brian Hayles' own pitched sequel - for the fourth Doctor and Sarah, as recounted in Nothing at the End of the Lane Vol. 3 - is absolute ••••, too.)

As is the Queen of Time, the Lost Story featuring the Toymaker's sister.

As, of course, is the original story.

And obviously Divided Loyalties, the novel starring the dear old chap, fought a valiant (if obviously failed due to the existence of Mick Lewis) battle to be the Worst PDA Ever.

Who SHOULD be able to stretch its boundaries enough to embrace such a creature (it just about got away with Mind Robber and the Black and White Guardians, after all) so maybe it's just a misfortunate coincidence.

Anymore unmade stories out there?

Yeah, Big Finish squeezed four seasons-worth out of 'em...

Nice that this material is finally getting to see the light of day.

Why don't YOU try squandering hundreds of pounds of your money and hundreds of hours of your life on these festering piles of •••• and THEN make this judgement?

Not that I'm BITTER or anything...

(And to be fair, two or three of 'em are perfectly OK and Farewell Great Macedon is great.)

Why don't YOU try squandering hundreds of pounds of your money and hundreds of hours of your life on these festering piles of •••• and THEN make this judgement?

With respect, Emily, no one pointed a gun at your head and made you buy all this stuff.

Besides, as you said, some of them are good, so it's not a total loss.

no one pointed a gun at your head and made you buy all this stuff

Ah, someone obviously hasn't noticed the new laws on coercive control...

;)

Nice that this material is finally getting to see the light of day.

In the process, often revealing why it didn't get to see the light of day in the first place.

And yet the Abomination With The Trees got made.

If anything Who that never should have seen the light of day...

Better That Abomination With The Trees than The Ultimate Evil. Well, probably. It has a tiger, at least...

Time's Mosaic argues that The Nightmare Fair isn't THAT bad - 'it suffers by association, given...that as a three-book set, they're radioactive...the Missing Season 23 stories merge together in your memory into a blur of awfulness.' OK, I'll TRY to bear that in mind when I...*shudders*...

Oh, and in Mission to Magnus there's 'a planet where you can walk from a temperate zone to the North Pole' and Sil's 'most evil deed is to try to sell pullovers'...