Frayed by Tara Samms (Stephen Cole)

Telos Novella #11
Frayed
Written by Tara Samms (Stephen Cole)
Published: 20th November 2003

Frayed

I didn't quite know what to expect when I went into Frayed, my first experience of the Telos novellas and only the second novel I've read (and finished) as part of these marathon attempts. A story set before An Unearthly Child has a lot resting on its shoulders as it can't show the Doctor as being too heroic and certainly not being interested in meddling and interfering just for the sake of doing so, he has to do it because he has no other choice, either to safeguard his own life or Susan's. So, it's with interest that I started on an adventure which featured the Doctor and Susan's first encounter with humanity. What I wasn't expecting was a "base-under-siege" type story which would have felt at home in the Troughton era or would even do well in the New Series. I'd certainly take this over the crap-tacular "The Rebel Flesh" any day. 

Having not long ago completed a "watch" of Season 5, I was a little wary of having to deal with yet another base-under-siege story. Fortunately, Frayed falls into the realms of the excellent The Ice Warriors and The Web of Fear rather than the dull The Abominable Snowmen. What helps is that the base personnel are really well characterized, yes we have a few tropes of the base commander who can't cope, the overzealous security chief who is out to get the bosses job, the quite overlooked type (in this case a librarian) who goes on to play a key role in the story, but you feel that they are real people fighting for survival and dying at the hands of the "foxes". It is rather interesting then to see the very early First Doctor having to interact with this group of primitives and be coerced to assisting them in return for their assistance in locating Susan.

In contrast to the claustrophobic hospital base, Susan's adventures turn out to be all the more bizarre as her mind becomes drawn into the dreamscape of a child who is in cryogenic sleep inside the base. While we are assaulted by a series of bizarre visions of various animal creatures such as cats, half-human creatures and what not, a rather harrowing tale is revealed of the bases zoologist who was charged with looking after the animals that were at the base to entertain children. As an animal lover I was mortified as the tale was related of how when the base came under attack, the animals were sent out into the wilderness as they were a drain on resources and how these defenceless animals were torn apart by the foxes. The zoologist being seriously injured in a vain attempt to defend his beloved cats. Even writing this, I get a lump in my throat.  It turns out that this child patient was in love with the zoologist and her latent telepathic abilities created this whole dreamscape.

The cover for Frayed.

In summing up then, Frayed is a bit of an oddity. The period details with the Doctor and Susan is correct (indeed they are actually given their names in this story and the TARDIS has a functioning chameleon circuit), yet this type of story just doesn't feel at home in the Hartnell era. This story does so well in both the dreamscape and base scenes and certainly kept me reading, but I found that the solutions to both problems were not brilliant. In fact, in writing this review, I can not recall the solution to the fox crisis besides them taking over the base and getting the humans to work for them. An uneven tale, that feels as if it's from another era, but a good read.

5/10