Liverpool Sound and Visio Rating * * * *

A writer’s experience will always bleed into the story or the article they are engraving into the scene they are creating; nothing happens on paper by accident, each world is chewed over, fought for, and it is with a sense of occasion, of delight, that The Good Doctor, the second of B.B.C. tie-in novels in this particular series of Doctor Who, has been impressed upon the fans by Juno Dawson.

If the television series down played the effects throughout the series, with the exception of the episode written by Joy Wilkinson, The Witchfinders, of the fallout of the Doctor’s change of gender, then The Good Doctor more than makes up for it. In age of sexual politics and rightful questions on how the body and mind correlate in the transgendered person, it takes the skilled pen of someone such as Juno Dawson to add social awareness to a tale of slavery and the wrongs of religious dogma when left unchecked and in the hands of a narrow-minded man.

Religion has always been a subject that people shied away from, it was the same with the complex emotions attached to being transgender, of being the same person but with a new set of mechanics to deal with in the brain. In this modern age it should not matter, that people are comfortable in the skin they are in and all that be of concern should be is that they are happy. It is the same with religion, if a person receives comfort from their faith then what does it have to do with others, it is when religion and its dogma starts creating myth and legend and warping it to the point where it leaves a race, a gender, a species, as outcast, as slaves, then that is where the line should, and must, be drawn.

Juno Dawson ties religion and gender in perfectly to this tale of a planet beset with the corruption of a past event and the presumption of one of the Doctor’s friends, Graham, being treated as deity, a god-like symbol of the planet’s human faith and its foundation in decrying the planet’s original dwellers canine hosts and women in general as second-class citizens.

A story that captures the heart of the times we live in, that recognises the fact that the Doctor is an idea, not a man, or indeed a woman, just someone who tries to do good; perhaps arguably a lesson we can all respect.

Ian D. Hall