Doctor Who – One Night Only – Tade Thompson
Miss Sarah-Jane Smith has found herself in a curious kind of employment with an even stranger employer, serving as secretary for a man who wears “that ridiculous scarf” even in the heat of the summer of 1976, the three weeks she has been there having required her to do little other than take dictation for pointless letters and leave early while he entertains a visitor, the handsome but clumsy naval lieutenant.
Paid work it is, but frustrating when Miss Smith feels not only that she is capable of considerably more but also that “the Doctor,” as he calls himself, is behaving like someone who is keeping secrets, thoughts which begin to gather in her mind to form memories of another life, of travel to distant worlds and the realisation that she herself has been a victim of an alien attack on her home planet of Earth, fortunately only her memory lost while others have died.
Released in tandem with the three other novels which form the Doctor Who Icons collection, detailing encounters with the English naturalist Charles Darwin, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the American writer Shirley Jackson, Tade Thompson’s One Night Only is subtitled A Fela Kuti Story, detailing the final encounter between the Fourth Doctor and his friend since the late sixties, the Nigerian musician and activist Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti.
The initial threat the floating stingers who injured Sarah-Jane, the Harvesters, they are only the vanguard of the Anthophillae, plans for invasion about to be executed, the Doctor hoping he can instead negotiate a truce and a return to their homeworld but Sarah-Jane’s experience with them colouring her opinion on whether they can be trusted to the point where she challenges the intentions of the Doctor as seemingly naive, willfully obtuse as he refuses to listen to his friends as they urge caution.
The Doctor typically quirky, abrupt, confusing, enigmatic and wishing to always seem one step ahead but never fully explaining himself, it is largely Sarah-Jane’s story, independent, capable and frustrated with the boys and their games, and Thompson has captured the characters well, even Harry Sullivan, eager to be of use but always stumbling in the background, while as much as Sarah-Jane loves her amazing life she questions what is to come next.
Running to less than a hundred pages, a “quick read” to appeal to younger fans, One Night Only is necessarily simplistic, the opening section focused on the oblivious Sarah-Jane the most interesting even as it inverts Human Nature with an identity overwritten and requiring coaxing in order to feel safe enough to emerge but the plot immediately jumping ahead to “business as usual,” frustrating for what it is not but an indication that if Thompson were allowed to expand to a deeper narrative akin to the New Adventures it would be a trip worth taking.
Doctor Who – One Night Only is available now from Puffin
