DW: A big hand for the Doctor by Eoin Colfer Review Thread (Spoilers!)

[JoeZhang]

The first of the anniversary books:

Eleven Doctors, eleven months, eleven stories: a year-long celebration of Doctor Who! The most exciting names in children's fiction each create their own unique adventure about the time-travelling Time Lord.

London, 1900. The First Doctor is missing both his hand and his granddaughter, Susan. Faced with the search for Susan, a strange beam of soporific light, and a host of marauding Soul Pirates intent on harvesting human limbs, the Doctor is promised a dangerous journey into a land he may never forget...

[Allyn Gibson]

Decent story. Wrong format.

A Big Hand for the Doctor is a book written for the 8-10 range, but it's targeted at eBook readers which skew older. This book would have been perfect as a small hardcover with spot illustrations.

For what it is -- the first Doctor battles a cross between the Pakled and the Vidiians, by way of Peter Pan -- it's fun. It doesn't mesh with Doctor Who history (the first Doctor doesn't have two hearts contrary to what A Big Hand says, and if the Time Destructor didn't bring the Doctor to the brink of regeneration I'm skeptical that this adventure and its much lower stakes would), but once you get into it and accept its whimsey and its tone that doesn't matter.

I liked the characterization of the first Doctor, especially his tendency to talk to himself and narrate his adventures. Once I got my mind in the right frame for the prose, it didn't bother me the way the Guardian excerpt (which comes from the third chapter) did.

Will I read it again? Probably not. For a boring morning commute, though, it was fine.

I may wait for the omnibus dead tree edition to read the rest of the series.

[diankra]

The first Doctor only having one heart is very much fanon - it might have been an assumption of the Virgin books, but it's just a theory, and you can take the onscreen evidence either way. For instance, when Ian says 'His heart's beating,', that could just be that he only checked for one heart, on the left, because it didn't occur to him to check that the Doctor might have another one on the right.

[Sindatur]

diankra wrote:

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The first Doctor only having one heart is very much fanon - it might have been an assumption of the Virgin books, but it's just a theory, and you can take the onscreen evidence either way. For instance, when Ian says 'His heart's beating,', that could just be that he only checked for one heart, on the left, because it didn't occur to him to check that the Doctor might have another one on the right.

Yea, regardless what onscreen evidence there is, because it hadn't been thought of yet, it makes no sense not to retcon The First Doctor as having 2 hearts. Time Lords have two hearts, we later find out The Doctor is a Timelord, therefore, The First Doctor must have 2 hearts

[Andrew_Kearley]

The way I look at it is, in some stories the Doctor has one heart, and in some he has two. In some stories he's human and in some he's a Time Lord.

[diankra]

You can take things either way - there's moments during the 1st and 2nd Doctor periods where it's a strain to do the retcon and assume he does have two hearts and it didn't get noticed (the hi-tech medical checks in Wheel in Space and Seeds of Death, for instance). But there are occasional moments after Spearhead from Space when people check the Doctor's health and don't remark on anything odd.
One simple answer is that if a Time Lord can temporarily shut down both hearts to feign death (Destiny of the Daleks), they can also shut down one of them to avoid awkward questions (and that this sometimes happens by accident while in a coma). Aside from anything else, this could make Harry seem less of an idiot in Robot: he's not surprised that the Doctor's got two hearts, but is puzzled that it's now starting working, after being out of action while the Doctor was unconscious.
But anyway, the on-topic point is that Coifer hasn't got it wrong - he's ignored (or never heard of) a fan theory, and gone for the lore that modern kids know.