Image of the Fendahl (The Black Archive, #5) by Simon Bucher-Jones

Image of the Fendahl (The Black Archive, #5) Reviews

• 
  Murray Ewing

  This is the first of the Black Archive series I’ve read, and it certainly won’t be the last. I wasn’t sure, at first, that you could write a book-length examination of a single Doctor Who adventure, but Simon Bucher-Jones proves you can, going into the Gothic roots of Image of the Fendahl, the actual and fictional histories of the ‘Fifth Planet’, an examination of the ultimate implications of what the Fendahl’s evil really leads to, and a look at both the good and the bad points of the story itself.
  
  It was only halfway through the book that I realised I’d never thought about the title of this particular story before. Why Image of the Fendahl? And right along comes a section exploring the different possible meanings of that word, ‘image’. Bucher-Jones has certainly deepened my appreciation of this Tom Baker adventure. Good job.
• 
  Alex Sarll

  There remain some hints of the over-earnest fanzine essay early on, and a few frightful editing glitches (once the fifth planet moves between Earth and Mars; weird fiction author Ambrose Blackwood is the sort of composite anyone might birth when pissed, but shouldn't make it into print). Still, this is much more the personal, idiosyncratic exploration of a single Who story that I expected from the Black Archive series than the Dark Water volume was. Of course, it may help that the source story is so much better, though the section where Bucher-Jones lists ten flaws in something he clearly loves is one of the highlights. He's dead right about it being post-gothic, rather than the frequent and lazy summary as just gothic, and I think he may be on to something when he suggests Amicus had more influence than Hammer. My favourite section comes when he addresses his own prior engagement with the story, having co-authored the excellent not-quite-sequel The Taking of Planet 5:
  "I asked one of the authors (Simon Bucher-Jones, that is, me) in a private interview, what he liked about Image. Recursively he referred me to this whole book as his answer."
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  
  https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3816574.html
  
  I generally enjoyed this, but I am going to start with a serious imperfection in the .epub version which I bought: endnotes and references to them are wrongly joined up, with individual endnote references sometimes taking you to the start of that chapter’s notes section, rather than to the specific note, and sometimes instead to the start of the bibliography for the book as a whole; meanwhile if you do find your endnote, read it, and then want to return to the main text, clicking on the reference instead brings you to the start of the chapter you were in, rather than to the place where you left off. Other books in the Black Archive series have got this right, as most ebooks do, and you would have thought it a fairly straightforward technical tweak, even with 180 notes to a text with rather fewer pages. This may seem like petty whining, but in a book like this where there is a lot of good stuff in the endnotes, the publisher's failure to hyperlink them correctly is a real barrier to reading pleasure.
  
  Which is a shame, because otherwise more than any other book in the series so far, this gave new depths to my enjoyment of something I already really liked. As usual, it is neatly divided into thematic chapters, and as usual, I’ll quickly summarise them in order.
  
  * Looking at the context framed as “audience expectations”, both from the Hinchcliffe era of Who and from wider concerns about TV horror;
  a deep dive into the Gothic, especially the 1965 film The Skull;
  * the origins of humanity and evolution, as depicted in fiction;
  * H.P. Lovecraft, the missing fifth planet and the devastation of Mars;
  * ten problems with the script (eg who lets the Doctor out of the cupboard?) and six great things about the story;
  * an appendix looking at the novelisation, and at other appearances of the Fendahl;
  * another appendix with a carefully argued continuity theory that the destroyed Fifth Planet is actually Minyos from Underworld, the story after next.
  
  This is meaty stuff, all done in tremendous, affectionate and often convincing detail. Recommended.
  
• 
  Craig Fisher

  One of my all time favourite Dr Who stand alone stories.
  Delved into by the best of the NA and EDA authors when it comes to elder beings and the attendant mythos.
  Just a digital package of nerd heaven. I watch Image of the Fendahl before reading this, then again a few months afterwards. It added so much, in clear, obviously affectionate terms. This is not a lecture by someone explaining this world to us, but a missive from someone sharing their own joy and deep understanding.
  
  The is most highly recommended Black Archive I have read yet.
• 
  Lawrence

  
  http://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2018/07...