June 27th, 2016 no comments

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The Black Archive Dark 4 Water / Death in Heaven

Available to order in the UK from www.amazon.co.uk

Available to order in the USA from www.amazon.com #ad

Also available to order direct from www.obversebooks.co.uk

The army of the dead will save the land of the living.’

Dark Water and Death in Heaven (2014), the last two episodes of Peter Capaldi’s first season as Doctor Who’s 12th Doctor, took the programme further than ever before into the realms of the metaphysical.

Head Writer and Executive Producer Steven Moffat followed the continuity pyrotechnics of the previous year’s 50th anniversary celebrations with a quieter, yet still complex and multi-stranded, Doctor Who series finale exploring themes of death, bereavement, remembrance and the afterlife.

The two-part story gave the most radical twist yet to a much-reinvented villain, yet faithfully recreated a single iconic shot from a black-and-white 1960s episode. It functioned as a seasonal ‘special,’ drawing inspiration from its broadcast between Halloween and Remembrance Day. As a story featuring ‘Cybermen from cyberspace,’ it may also be TV Doctor Who’s closest approach to the science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk.

Launched in March 2016 from Obverse Books, The Black Archive is a series of book-length looks at single Doctor Who stories from 1963 to the present day.

The Archive will publish six titles each year, in simultaneous digital and print editions. Each title is a twenty to forty thousand word study of a single televised Doctor Who story, drawing on all eras of the series’ history.

Series editor Philip Purser-Hallard explains the premise of the series as follows:

‘Doctor Who is endlessly fascinating, a powerful storytelling engine about which many millions of words have been written over the years. There are certain stories, though, from all eras of the programme’s history, which are exceptionally deep and rewarding – whether because of their unusually powerful writing, rich symbolism or complex themes. Stories like The Massacre, Kinda, Ghost Light, Midnight or Vincent and the Doctor demand to be explored at greater length and in more depth than a website review or entry in an episode guide.

‘With this series of critical monographs, these Doctor Who stories can receive the detailed treatment that they so eminently deserve. Our primary emphasis is on the stories as stories, rather than the behind-the-scenes history which has been covered in admirable depth elsewhere. While we aim to make an authoritative and significant contribution to the overall critical conversation about Doctor Who, we intend each of these books to be entertaining as well as of academic interest.’

The Black Archive launched with four titles in March 2016, covering Doctor Who stories from William Hartnell’s tenure as the Doctor to that of current incumbent Peter Capaldi. Four further titles will follow in 2016, then six annually from 2017.

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