Doctor Who worth remembering: St Anthony’s Fire by Mark Gatiss

We look back at St. Anthony’s Fire by writer and actor Mark Gatiss. What was his vision of a maturer Doctor Who? Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions

The Wilderness Years gave us so many great Doctor Who novels. So is St Anthony’s Fire one of them? Well it’s complicated.

What is the upper limit for how explicit a Doctor Who story for adults can be? What would you personally consider going too far?

Sexual content of any kind? Cursing? Violence beyond what you’d expect on a family TV show? Animal abuse? “NO, NOT THE MIND-“ break? Well if any of that is too much for you, let’s just say to stay away from the majority of the novels made after 1989 to… well, frankly some of the Ninth Doctor novels are just as questionable, so let’s just say the Tenth Doctor.

But what if it’s not? What if the nature of the adult science-fiction novel was something you always wanted to see applied to the fun happy characters of Doctor Who? Well consider yourself lucky because there are a lot of them, and the one I’ll go into today is St Anthony’s Fire by Mark Gatiss.

He said what?

Yes, the very same Mark Gatiss you may or may not be familiar with. The writer of the Doctor Who episodes Victory of the Daleks, Robot of Sherwood, and The Unquiet Dead, among many others. Also Sherlock.

Wikipedia, while linking to an archived link that does not even include the part it’s quoting (it’s on IMDb though), claims the novels Gatiss wrote for Virgin Publishing were his attempts to correct the problems which had caused the show to decline in the late 1980s.

Whether you agree with that statement or not is up to debate, but the quote in question is in regards to his first novel, Nightshade. While arguable more of a Quatermass love letter, Nightshade was rather good (Big Finish adapted it into an audio story while changing the ending slightly, if you’re interested). His second novel St Anthony’s Fire however is…

Well, it’s not bad! But like I said earlier, it’s complicated. And honestly, I’d rather read the novelization of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy or anything else from the Sylvester McCoy seasons than reread it anytime soon. So it flounders in his original mission statement a bit, but, it’s fine! Let’s get into it a bit, shall we?

This is the face of someone who would definitely write a novel like this. (Admittedly, this is actually him in character as the Master, but considering what you’re about to read, it just seemed appropriate.)

(Image Courtesy Big Finish Productions.)

A familiar story with some different Lizard people

At this point in time the Seventh Doctor is traveling with Ace (who had joined Spacefleet and fought Daleks for three years, this character development sometimes getting rolled back if the writer preferred the TV version) and Bernice Summerfield (infamous in her own right, but for basics, she’s a novel original archaeologist from the future). Having just spent an amount of time on one of those fabled “nothing bad happens this time” relaxation trips needed after the previous few novels, Ace decides to stay for a bit longer, letting the Doctor and Bernice continue in the TARDIS by themselves to inspect a ring system on a nearby jungle planet.

This is when things immediately go wrong for everyone. The Doctor and Bernice find themselves in the middle of a war between two paranoid ethnic groups of the same alien species known as the Betrushians (the setting basically just lizard aliens, but it’s Vietnam), both getting captured in quick succession by different sides of the conflict, just to make it more interesting.

Something else is wrong: the planet core is becoming unstable. The Doctor and Bernice only have a few days left before the entire planet explodes. If all of this wasn’t enough, a strange yellow ooze is lurking in the jungle, killing the Betrushians. Growing bigger, much bigger.

The Virgin Novels pulled no punches

Ace meanwhile arguably gets it worse, maybe worse than she’s ever gotten. After a horrific event happens on the planet she had decided to stay on, Ace (somewhat big spoilers from here on out) wakes up completely shaven, nude, and with no memory outside her devotion to the cult she has surely always been a part of, a cult that thinks the way to enlightenment is through pain and torture. Well I mean… if that’s what you thought the original show was lacking Mark…

Speaking of the cult, it’s being ran by what I would like to say is a parody of an extremely unnecessarily evil religious leader, although it doesn’t really come off as one. Eating pickled human baby cheeks by itself might make you think Mark is writing this all as a dark joke, but then it goes into extreme detail on the crucifixion of a kitten, with wires going into the poor thing’s head and arms pulling it back as far as possible. “The kitten opened its mouth and then closed it, not making a sound as it was in that much pain” and what not. And then he stabs it so he can go bathe in giraffe milk. It feels like the writer is working through something.

All of these plots running at the same time is a lot to take in, and for all intents and purposes, it works. The cult parts, while more grotesque, are frankly more interesting than the scenes from the Betrushian characters’ point of view, which there is a lot of, but as I said it works. The Doctor feels like the Doctor, Bernice like Bernice, and uh, Ace isn’t brainwashed for too long.

While radically different to St Anthony’s Fire, episodes like Robot of Sherwood and The Unquiet Dead would continue focusing on Gatiss’s desire for simple, straight forward storytelling in Doctor Who.

(Image obtained from: BBC Press.)

Not a step forward, but rather stepping in place

Despite what may or may not have been Mark Gatiss’s original mission statement about fixing what the 80s show did wrong, the further you read about what he said the more this novel makes sense. He said the original show towards the end refused to tell a straightforward story, which he found very frustrating. And well, both his stories are if nothing else straightforward Doctor Who, tropes and all.

The Doctor and his companion end up on a doomed alien planet and attempt to save as many people as they can while also having misunderstandings. The Doctor stands up to an evil human like character who must be stopped before the native race is destroyed. The Doctor encounters someone with dwarfism who is not the main villain but also in the same story and also bad (Russell T Davies both subverted and indulged in this trope). It’s all here.

More from Winter is Coming

Outside of the budget that would be needed for this story, the only things that make it different from the standard Doctor Who at the time are the horrific acts of cruelty and the state of Ace (also maybe cursing, all the Virgin Novels had cursing in them at this point, I just can’t recall any in this instance). Which, while not enough for me to say elevates the subject matter to become the mature science fiction novels of other Virgin Novels, fits what Mark was probably going for.

In the end though, St Anthony’s Fire is perfectly fine, and sometimes you do just want a standard Doctor Who story (in fact the following novel, Falls the Shadow, is so different and strange even just 192 pages into it, that it’s making me appreciate St Anthony’s Fire more and more), but in the context of what Mark was boasting and the Virgin New Adventures as a whole, one would think it would be capable of so much more.

Maybe it all comes down to me being bitter about what he said about one of my favorite eras, and who is to say if he even still feels the same way he did all those years ago in the first place, but like I said at the start, it’s complicated.

What do you think about Mark Gatiss and/or his novels? Do you think I was too hard on Mark and am missing what truly makes St Anthony’s Fire a classic? Let us know in the comments below.