London, 1864 — where any gentleman befitting the title ‘gentleman’ belongs to a gentlemen’s club: The Reform, The Athenaeum, The Carlton, The Garrick… and, of course, The Contingency. Newly established in St James’, The Contingency has quickly become the most exclusive enclave in town. A refuge for men of politics, men of science, men of letters. A place to escape. A place to think. A place to be free.
The first rule of the Contingency is to behave like a gentleman. The second is to pay no heed to its oddly identical servants. Or to the horror in its cellars. Or to the existence of the secret gallery on its upper floor… Rules that the Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan are all about to break.
THE CONTINGENCY CLUB
The second entry in the 2017-opening Peter Davison trilogy is “The Contingency Club” by Phil Mulryne, another trip back into the history of London. While there isn’t much to the story, it’s still entertaining enough to pass the time, and the characters once again make it worthwhile.
It’s 1864 in London, and as the blurb says, anyone calling himself a gentleman is a member of a gentlemen’s club. They’ve all got admission requirements – wealth, countries visited, and so forth – but the most desirable one is the Contingency Club, whose membership is nearly impossible to acquire. Naturally, the TARDIS lands inside the Contingency Club, and the TARDIS crew is thrown into a web of intrigue.
The script does a good job of building suspense – the Doctor and his companions slowly encounter stranger and stranger things inside the club before things get even more complicated – but there’s virtually no payoff. The entire first half of the story is consumed by the Doctor and his companions wandering from place to place and meeting vaguely threatening people without anything eventful happening. And when we finally learn what’s going on, it doesn’t feel rewarding. I understand that it’s trying to take the usual Doctor Who plot in an interesting new direction. There’s a scene where the Doctor confronts the villain, dismisses her as just another power-made megalomaniac, but she corrects him – she’s not like that at all, she’s just playing a game! But of course she is like that, because Lorelei King plays her like a megalomaniac when a much more dispassionate performance may have been more interesting.
Fortunately, the main cast is once again on top form. Mulryne uses the time-tested device of splitting the crew up and pairing them off with guest characters, and it works quite well. Tegan, in particular, is a great match for this time period – although I was surprised she didn’t get more irate. Adric and Nyssa also make a surprisingly good team. I like how the script distinguishes between their areas of expertise, with Adric handling the more abstract mathematical problems and Nyssa using her scientific knowledge to deal with the others. And much like in the previous story, Mulryne presents Adric as a likable, understandable character. He can be an obnoxious teenager, yes, but he’s also a rational, relatable look into the story that provides a counterpoint to Tegan and Nyssa.
Still, I don’t have much to say about the story itself. It doesn’t aspire to be anything greater than a pleasant runaround, and while it’s pleasant enough, and there’s certainly a lot of running around, it’s rather forgettable.
Not bad, on the whole.
6/10