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| What: | The Highest Science (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 14 March 2023 |
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| Rating: |   7 |
Gareth Roberts' first Doctor Who novel gives readers a good preview of his preferences for Doctor Who. He clearly prefers the intellectually lighter style of Graham Williams and Douglas Adams and so his entry here takes Doctor 7 back the 1987 version with Mel, a bit inept, with pratfalls and offbeat witticisms. As with Doctor Who of 1987 (and the 1988 story "Silver Nemesis"), The Doctor gets pitted against people with strange obsessions. It is a neat ploy that gets the writer out of having to find motivations any deeper than "I really want it." It has that Sylvester McCoy era plot of multiple entities all after the same thing, and multiple people offed one after another as collateral damage.
The plot involves The Doctor on the hunt for the source of "Fortean flickers" (named after Charles Fort, an American writer who chronicled strange and unexplained phenomena in the early 20th century). The search takes him and Bernice to the planet Sakkrat, where supposedly "The Highest Science" is kept in some ancient temple. On the planet are three groups of beings captured by the Fortean flicker. One is a trio of drug-addled misfits who were on their way to the intergalactic version of the Glastonbury Festival. Another is a group of 20th-century train passengers. The third is a force of Chelonian invaders, plucked out of time from their moment of victory. The Chelonians are bionic tortoises whose sole purpose is to wipe "mammalian parasites" off planets. Added to this is the most feared intergalactic criminal of all time - Sheldukher. He has collected a group of lesser intergalactic criminals and press-ganged them into helping him claim The Highest Science for himself.
Basically, this is a journey-to-the-center plot. It's find the lost city and claim the power, at least for some. The Chelonians have no interest in it and know nothing about it, and seem to be in the story mainly to be a major obstacle to the others. The human train travellers are there to be hapless victims needing rescue. The story has many moving parts, and Roberts seems keen to throw in as many ideas as he can come up with. Much of it is very amusing. Roberts has a very good sense of Doctor 7 from 1987. This is also the first novel in which we really see what Benny is like as a companion. For the most part, I could see this story fitting very comfortably within the first season of Sylvester McCoy's run.
I find that the casualness of tone in these kinds of stories leads to a disturbing casualness of ethics. It comes across early in this novel when the people of Vaagon are saved from destruction at the hands of the Chelonians, only to be wiped out in about three casually tossed in sentences 300 years later by another group of Chelonians, with the writer taking a "hey-ho, that's life, what can you do?" attitude toward the whole thing. This casualness about genocide, because hey it is funny that the genocidal maniacs are munching leaves while doing it, is the writer's choice. He did not have to put in this detail. He had already established how homicidal the Chelonians are. The detail adds nothing to the plot, yet there it is. This casualness becomes extremely disturbing to me by the novel's end. Here, having gotten to a point where a group of English commuters, plucked out of their own time and plopped onto a future alien world, are about to be wiped out, and The Doctor's only solution is to freeze them in "slow time." That would be fine, except he simply abandons them all at this point, his only comment being that he will at some point probably, perhaps, maybe, come back and rescue them. And then he and Benny move on happy to have survived the whole catastrophe, with no mention of it again. There they are, all these people, stuck at the point of destruction, and The Doctor and Benny simply forget about them after about half an hour. The reader should keep in mind that one of these forgotten humans is a baby that Roberts went out of his way earlier in the novel to put into danger for the sole purpose of showing how nasty the villain Sheldukher is. For what purpose has Roberts written this ending? If it is to demythologize The Doctor, he had already done that in dozens of ways in this novel, so there is no need to do it yet again. It appears more likely that Roberts had not really thought about it that much. He wanted some kind of nifty idea for an ending and never bothered to consider the ethical implications of his idea. [On a side note, the situation is finally rectified in Paul Cornell's Happy Endings, written years later. Even there, Romana is the one to fix the problem, not The Doctor, who, as far as we know, never went back. This was part of the purpose of Happy Endings, tie up all the loose ends of previous New Adventures novels. So, Roberts had no intention, as far as the evidence goes, of straightening this out and restoring The Doctor's status as a moral hero, and neither did Cornell.] So, what I see is that Roberts created a tangled mess of an ending, and could not see a way out of it, even though the way was obviously staring him in the face. It strikes me as Roberts' casual disregard for the intelligence and sensibilities of the reader.
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 | Awesome idea! Needs more time, though |
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It seems Tennant’s take on the titular TimeLord can’t escape "needs more time" syndrome. Even in an hour-long audio!
In this story, The Doctor and River whiz through multiple locations and time periods chasing down a conspiracy involving exploding gems. The idea is quite solid, but the execution is very rushed given the time constraints. All the 10 & River time-hopping gets confusing quite fast, especially with a B-plot taking place in another completely different time & location running alongside it all. Names of offscreen characters are thrown around so much, you have to pull out a notebook just to keep track of them all!
However, this story has too many positives to deem it bad. The concept of the episode is super fun and it fits really well with both River and 10. It has a ton of potential! Their banter back and forth is witty, and the sequence of them being thrown overboard felt truly adventurous. It’s easily the highlight of the entire story. Tennant gives a fantastic performance in the final act, too. So, despite starting out the review all negative, the adventure isn’t bad by any means. It’s just super rushed. Way too much to do in just one hour. This story could’ve easily spanned the entire box set. A slowly building mystery that requires River and 10 to traverse different places and time periods would've been loads of fun!
If this had the time it needed in order to be fleshed out, I guarantee this story would be loved. Right now, it’s just okay. Sparks of great ideas here and there, but that’s about it.
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| A boring Zoe story, unfortunately |
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| What: | Fear of the Daleks (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
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| By: | Jared Star, Portsmouth, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 9 March 2023 |
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| Rating: | 4 |
What is sold as a gripping psychological exploration of Zoe, actually turns out to be an incredibly basic and boring Doctor Who plot. Not only that, but this story forgets it's a Companion Chronicle. Zoe has only one meaningful exchange between her and another character. The rest of the narrative is carried by the Doctor.
The dialogue, aside from the Doctor’s, was also incredibly poor. It lacked subtlety, resorting to excessive exposition that sounds very unnatural. The characters have zero depth and are very poorly developed. The best of this audio happens towards the end. A few lines of dialogue openly explain what the Daleks fear, and one of the characters uses that against them. This could've made for an interesting twist on the title in theory. But it didn't have the proper groundwork to make it meaningful. The music is also uninspiring, which is rare for Big Finish.
Perhaps with some heavy rewrites, this story could have potential. Putting Zoe front and center, the script could've delved into exploring her fear of the Daleks. Then, towards the end, she discovers what the Daleks fear, and uses that against them. That would make for a much more interesting (and true to the marketing) story.
Despite its flaws, the story is at least not offensive in any way. It's just simply not good.
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| Not Sure What to Make of It |
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| What: | Transit (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 20 February 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The early brief on the Doctor Who New Adventures novels was that they were to be more "adult" than the TV series. This brief led to some controversial takes on Doctor Who, with writers sort of force-fitting Doctor Who into a cussin', sexin', fightin' kind of story, or vice versa. Eventually, the series settled into somewhat more "adult" than TV Doctor Who, but before that, we got novels like "Transit." Ben Aaronovitch, who had written two scripts for the TV series, the very good "Remembrance of the Daleks" and the very muddled "Battlefield," here goes in an entirely different direction. "Transit" is cyberpunk Doctor Who. That leads to quite a lot of cussin', a lot of sexin', and a gritty, grimy, everyone is miserable ambience that hangs on the whole thing like the anchor of a battleship. The premise, as far as I can tell, runs something like this: about one and a half centuries in the future, humanity will have developed a kind of interplanetary metro rail system similar to the London Underground, but with the "trains" running on quantum mechanical probabilities, which means that while the passenger feels a passage of time of minutes to hours between stations, the trains get from here to there in no time at all. The whole thing is run by a complicated AI system that, unknown to any of its operators, has crossed the threshold into some form of self-awareness. The humans are staging a grand opening of the new interstellar line, but "something" comes through that nearly destroys the Pluto station, unthinkingly turns all the spectators into blue goo, and takes over Benny. This something, I think, is a computer virus generated by the complexities of the total system once they added the interstellar line. The virus not only takes over Benny, but also several other people, most notably a gang who "surf" the train tunnels, turning them into maniacal killers for some unknown purpose.
One will have noticed by now that I say things like "I think" and "unknown" in this assessment, mostly because Aaronovitch works hard to keep nearly everything in this novel murky. The atmosphere is murky, the explanations are murky, the characters are murky. The experience is like reading a novel made entirely from innuendo, except for the descriptions of violence and sex, which are as plain and brightly lit as Aaronovitch can manage.
"Transit" is very much a cyberpunk novel, which makes it more strictly science fiction than most other Doctor Who novels or most post-1980 Doctor Who TV episodes. The cyberpunk aspects come through loud and hazy. Thus, the plot rests on questions of AI self-awareness and whether such a system could be "alive," and whether humans would be able to recognize a self-aware computer intelligence if they came across one. The world that Aaronovitch imagines is an almost entirely urban future, divided into enclaves of people ground down into perpetual poverty, organized almost entirely into gangs, and constantly hustling each other just for survival. No one has a happy, meaningful life. Everyone is "tough" and speaks in various kinds of street lingo and is technologically augmented in one way or another, but rarely to their own benefit. It is a grimy, miserable, mirthless world. And everyone in it uses drugs, alcohol, or computer-technological means for temporary escape from this miserable existence. Like so many cyberpunk novels, there is a big showdown in virtual reality at the end. These endings often do not work well because the authors do not have a good sense of what this virtual world would be like and how it would work.
As many readers of this novel have noted, Benny is hardly in it, at least not as herself. I suspect that Aaronovitch originally thought of this story with Ace in mind, then was told that a new companion was in, Ace was out, and so had to simply slot Benny into the Ace position. Thus, we do not really get a good sense of the new companion. As many readers have noted, the true companion of this novel is Aaronovitch's creation, Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart. It feels that Aaronovitch really wanted her rather than Benny to be the new companion.
On the one hand, one has to admire Aaronovitch for taking Doctor Who into cyberpunk territory more firmly than in the few attempts of the Doctor 7 run on TV. On the other hand, the needless difficulties that Aaronovitch has forced the reader to go through make the novel less appealing than it could have been.
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| An embarrassment of a book |
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| What: | Timewyrm: Genesys (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | Steven Prosser, Brighton, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Sunday 12 February 2023 |
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| Rating: | 2 |
This is the first original Doctor Who book and it is very clear that that is the only reason it was written. Peel has absolutely no interest in the plot, the villain is abysmal, every character is insufferable and the Doctor tells Ace to stop complaining and get sexually assaulted. Skip this one, it really isn't worth it.
| What: | Love and War (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 1 February 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Paul Cornell's novel "Love and War" introduces the character of Bernice Summerfield. The story is written in a way that would make it fit with Doctor Who 1989. The story itself is fairly typical Paul Cornell, involving an ancient evil that can easily control people's minds and that spends aeons collecting corpses so that it can raise an army of the undead and take over the universe. The center of the story is Ace. That is both good and problematic. In classic Who, the companions rarely got the time and development that they needed. Cornell here makes the central conflict Ace's conflict. The alien menace is really the occasion that tests Ace's battle with herself. That battle basically comes down to this: Ace is growing up, physically, and the biological imperative to mate, ...er emotional imperative to fall in love, has been driving her to hook up with the nearest pretty boy in wherever she and The Doctor land (see the previous New Adventures novels for further details). She also runs through her mind that The Doctor needs her more than she needs him, and that while she feels obliged to help him wherever she can to her fullest extent, she is starting to resent his role as surrogate parent. She's grown up, dammit, and ought to be striking out on her own. The latest pretty boy to cross her path is Jan, a member of The Travellers, essentially hippie space gypsies. She falls instantly and totally in love with Jan, a dangerous young man who reminds her just a bit of another dangerous young man, the gay Julian, whom she had known in her time before The Doctor, and who died in a reckless accident. She repeatedly confronts her memories, her relationship with Julian, her relationship with her mom, and all the resentments she has built up about her past and about her current relationship with The Doctor. Things come to a head with her because she builds up this fantasy that she and Jan can just have happy times together with The Doctor in the TARDIS. However, The Doctor knows what Ace is going through, knows that probably it will mean that she will leave him, knows that Jan will break her heart (but not, to begin with, the way that this will happen), and knows that he cannot tell her all this because she will not listen to the truth and because as a grown-up she has to discover the truth herself. The relationship between The Doctor and Ace is getting a little more prickly as The Doctor becomes more manipulative in his methods of outsmarting opponents. All his attempts to keep Ace out of it backfire and eventually lead to a confrontation in which Ace goes ballistic after she realizes that The Doctor knew for a long time that Jan was doomed, did not tell Ace, and used the doomed Jan as the key to his plan for defeating the evil Hoothie (perhaps the least fear-inspiring name for an ancient evil one could devise).
The novel also introduces the reader to the next companion - "Professor" Bernice Summerfield. She is an orphan of the Dalek wars now turned archaeologist with a fake degree and a rather casual attitude about everything she does. The Doctor gradually slots her into the space that Ace is leaving. Clearly, her relationship with The Doctor will be different from Ace's. First, she is older, thirty rather than twenty, and so not prone to viewing The Doctor as a parental figure to rebel against. Second, she is more intellectual than Ace, more self-aware and emotionally mature. She puts The Doctor clearly on notice: no manipulation.
What is good about the novel is that Cornell writes the internal struggles that characters have rather well. The motivations and conflicts are clear. He has a good ear for realistic dialogue, with each character having a distinct manner of speaking. He sets up the main problem of the planet Heaven well.
For me, part of the problem in reading this novel is that Cornell ratchets up Ace's emotionality to 11. Thus, her final confrontation with The Doctor, when she is ready to kill him, just goes far too over the top. I keep wanting Ace to stop and think for a couple of minutes, rather than constantly being victim of her hormones. Parts of the story don't quite hang together, mostly those involving the virtual-reality setup called Puterspace in this story. The virtual reality is too real to be virtual. Cornell's big ending is a big mess and very typical of his later work: a community under siege by the animated corpses of their loved ones (read, for instance, Goth Opera and Human Nature). The last 50 pages or so mostly contain long, detailed descriptions of helpless people getting blown to smithereens. Plus, we get the obligatory "you think the villain is dead, but there is just one more attack you weren't expecting" moment.
The verdict from me is that Love and War has a pretty good first half and a rather uncontrolled second half.
| What: | Nightshade (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 7 January 2023 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
"Nightshade" is a novel drawing on the works of Nigel Kneale and John Wyndham, but one heck of a lot bloodier. The story takes place in a small Yorkshire village where the retired actor who once played Professor Nightshade on TV now lives and where a new space research station has been built on top of the remains of an old castle and quarry with a spooky history. Something is invading people's dreams and recreating their fears. The Doctor and Ace arrive and The Doctor tells Ace over breakfast that he wants to retire. Much of the early action revolves around repeated incentives for The Doctor to get involved and The Doctor's agonizing quandary that if he does get involved, then he cannot retire. Professor Nightshade is not meant to represent Doctor Who as much as it is Professor Quatermass. Gatiss' manner of writing I found a little annoying. Mostly, it is his insistence on going through paragraphs of personal history for nearly every character he introduces, no matter what is going on in the narrative at that time. This awkward manner of characterization breaks the narrative forward motion. Gatiss also pulls a quick dodge so that he gets out of having to explain what the evil creature is. It's a thing that has been around for a while and needs to eat energy. That is all. For me, this non-explanation is unsatisfying.
| What: | Cat's Cradle: Witchmark (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 12 December 2022 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
The third and final of the Cat's Cradle series, Witchmark starts well enough with a mystery or two - a crashed coach full of unidentified bodies and large amounts of cash, a small town in northern Wales where centaurs and giant wolves appear from nowhere, mysterious locals, and a broken down TARDIS in need of some off time to recover. Once the book starts moving the plot, it does not go so well for me. It seems a bit underdeveloped and rushed. The plot devolves into two standard motions going in rather predictable ways - one is the journey to the wizard's tower, and the other low-rent X-Files. The plot is basically a way to shoehorn heroic fantasy into a science-fiction box. The ending is rushed, really rushed, with many loose ends. We don't truly learn what happened to Hugh and Janet, or to the Doctor and Ace clones, or even why there were Doctor and Ace clones in the first place. We don't know how The Doctor knows to call Bathsheba "Bats." We don't learn what has happened to the four Earthlings who crossed over to Tir na n-Og.
Additionally, this novel doesn't really wrap up the 'Cat's Cradle' arc. That arc has been problematic given that it is hardly a presence in any of the three novels. The silver cat is some sort of virtual avatar indicating danger to the TARDIS? That is about all I got out of it. The three novels do not in any way link together apart from the almost non-present cat.
One positive of this novel is that Andrew Hunt writes the characters of The Seventh Doctor and Ace well. In this novel, they look after each other. We do not get any of the Ace moaning and shouting that dogs so many of the Seventh and Ace productions. Hunt gives us reason to believe that Ace really likes traveling with The Doctor.
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| 1940s Horror Movie in Space |
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| What: | The Monsters of Gokroth (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 28 November 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Doctor 7, feeling his next regeneration coming on, has decided to tie up loose ends from his term as The Doctor. He has tracked down werewolf Mags from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy to the planet Gokroth (a possible rearrangement of Goth Rock? You be the judge). There, a bunch of peasants are being stalked by monsters in a forest, while a seemingly mad scientist, Maleeva, and her assistant Gor (presumably because it was too much for him to say Igor), lives in a "castle" performing experiments that one supposes produce the monsters. And then a monster-catching showman arrives to capture all the monsters for a price. Is Mags just another of the monsters? Is The Doctor? This story runs its course in fairly typical 1940s horror movie fashion, with a few bits of technology and biology thrown in to give it some sci-fi glitz. It does have a really good surprise at the end of Part Three, so there is something to counteract the rather predictable way the story goes. It is entertaining, but all the monster-voice acting gets rather annoying.
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| The Base Is Under Siege Again |
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| What: | The Star Men (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 14 November 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The Star Men presents the TARDIS crew with a formidable opponent. Because The Star Men are new, so to speak, it takes them a while to figure out how they work. That is the best part of this story. In many respects, the story is fairly standard Doctor Who. It strongly resembles The Wheel in Space, with a scientific establishment being attacked by a military force. There are a few things that perplex me about the story. The Star Men come from another universe, so why do they take the form of "men"? For that matter, why is the lone alien from another galaxy basically human, down to being able to eat human food? Also, why is it that every time someone from another universe shows up in ours, they get to carry their rules of physics into our universe, while those from our universe cannot use the rules of our physics in theirs? I would assume that once someone crosses into our universe, the rules of our universe would apply, full stop. Finally, I think that the rationale for taking over the universe should be a bit more complicated than wanting to "feed." There is, if one rules out other factors, the matter of scale to consider. The sheer size of the universe makes the threat of gobbling up the universe rather silly. So, throughout this story, I keep having these little worries. In general, though, this one is nicely paced, with an intensifying sense of doom running through to the end.
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| Good for $1.25, but not much more |
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| What: | The Weeping Angels (BBC new series DVDs/Blu-rays) |
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| By: | Danielle Starrett, HEBRON, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 13 November 2022 |
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| Rating: | 2 |
The documentary is short and reveals little to anyone who has already seen the episodes featuring the weeping angels and the silence. From one completionist to another, don't buy this release unless you find it in your local dollar tree and can't stop yourself. It isn't worth it, especially if you already own series 3-7, and you could get a pop or a cookie for that same $1.25.
The second set of adventures with Christopher Eccleston returning as The Doctor takes us firmly toward the Doctor 9 we saw on television. This second box set featuring three stories of Doctor 9, recorded under difficult lockdown circumstances, takes us back season 1 of Nuwho in style and tone. The stories themselves are all set before The Doctor meets Rose. This is a Doctor on his own. Unlike the mood set with Doctor 10, that The Doctor on his own would run out of control, we see here a Doctor "on call," saving lives on a case by case basis. The stories are all very personal, local emergencies involving historical nobodies, the ordinary people finding it hard just to get by. Yes, in two of the stories the Universe seems to be at risk, but these are more metaphorical dilemmas than actual dilemmas, large-scale interpretations of the difficulties people often have when their personal universes are falling apart. Eccleston is clearly having fun as The Doctor, reminding us just how energetic and enthusiastic his Doctor was. To get the Russell T. Davies vibe, Big Finish went to new, younger writers for these scripts, and used a Present - Past - Future pattern for the stories. The first story is "Girl, Deconstructed." This is the story of the Present, early 2000s. Teenagers are going missing in Scotland and it has something to do with the Doctor's efforts to track down what has gone wrong with the Serafim (I'm not sure of the spelling). The story is a sci-fi, haunted house depiction of teen angst, centering on Marnie, a teen girl struggling to connect with her single father, wishing simply that she could be anywhere other than home. Having a teen girl be both absent and present is a great metaphor for what teens often go through. Some of the explanations of events are a bit dodgy, and The Doctor is a bit too precise in his TARDIS control, a convenience to make the plot run smoothly that is out of sync with Doctor Who lore. The second story, the Past story, called Fright Motif, takes us to Paris, around 1949, recovering from the war. An American musician working in a hotel finds he can no longer play music. He's being pursued by an other-dimensional sound monster, as well. While the first story symbolized teen angst and family disconnection, this one symbolizes grief. In trying to save the situation, The Doctor brings together three very different people all dealing with grief in different ways. The sound monster is the symbol of that grief, destructive, drawn to the sounds that remind people of what they have lost. For me, this is the weakest of the three stories. There is quite a bit of running around to no end, and the resolution seems stretched out. Last is the Future story, Planet of the End, by playwright Timothy X. Atack. This one, in my opinion, is by far the best of the three. That is, in part, because Atack has more cleverly hidden the personal problem that is the real center of the story. The Doctor has responded to a distress signal that takes him to the far future when most intelligent races have come and gone. The planet is a giant cemetary-memorial to these lost races, but one on which no one is actually allowed to visit or memorialize anyone lest their presence "disturbs" the memorials. Apart from wildlife, the only intelligent presence on the planet is an AI robot, managed from afar by an officious oaf. The signal The Doctor has followed is a lure for a trap, so that The Incorporation, ancient beings from the dawn of the Universe, can resurrect themselves and begin again their business operations of destruction for profit. Atack does not even try to hide his contempt for modern corporate greed, or his disdain for corporate executives. This would seem to be the focus of the story, but in fact the actual focus of the story is the robot AI, whom The Doctor names Fred. The AI is symbol of the ordinary employee, whom the executive class "employ" in the sense of use. Allowed no identity outside of function, expected to follow directives without question, no matter how foolish those directives are, and not allowed to display will or personality, Fred is in some sense every-employee. By treating the AI as a person, giving it a name, talking to it as an equal, asking for its help rather than ordering it, The Doctor helps Fred to liberate itself, to realize its own desires, and to resolve its crisis of being. Thus, what appears to be a big, universe-threatening, all-hands-on-deck Doctor Who story, is, at heart, about The Doctor helping one person toward self-realization, an identity separate from the job. The set is enjoyable, especially given Eccleston's mix of fun, enthusiasm, and seriousness. The set makes one realize how much audiences missed by having Eccleston for only one season on TV.
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| Perplexing Mix of Good and Bad |
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| What: | Cat's Cradle: Warhead (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 13 October 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The second of the Cat's Cradle trilogy is written to be a taught thriller, James Bond style. It conforms to Cartmel's view of The Doctor from the time Cartmel was script editor. The Doctor here is a kind of criminal mastermind working on the side of good. Thus, there is a running conflict between the questionable morality of The Doctor's methods for putting together a "team" and the supposed larger morality of the cause he uses the team to bring about. As with Doctor Who 1988-9, it appears in this novel that Cartmel has not thoroughly thought through the ethics, nor has he thought through what this portrayal does to perceptions of The Doctor's character. Basically, I really don't like this Doctor as a person. He's superficially charming while being mostly callous and insensitive. I also have some troubles with how Cartmel characterizes Ace. In this novel, Ace is basically the James Bond character. Thus, she acts as commando, spy, streetfighter, and wisecracking badass throughout the novel. She gets beat up, knocked down, bruised and abused. Cartmel seems to forget that she is a small, teenaged girl from Perivale without any of the formal training necessary to do what she does in this novel. And then, there's the cat. Or rather, there isn't. As a middle novel in a trilogy, the book should move along the arcing plot. The cat from book 1 appears briefly in the first few chapters of Warhead, to no discernible purpose, and then vanishes without any more mention. What Warhead has to do Time's Crucible is anyone's guess.
The plot of the novel itself has some interesting features that would work better if Cartmel had not force-fit Doctor Who into it. Basically, in the near future (2020s or 2030s), the world is a burning mess. Nature is in collapse, pollution covers everything, humans are dying in the millions because of diseases caused by environmental toxins, national governments are useless, and corporations run everything. In the background of all this is the corporation Butler Institute, run by a cold, humorless man named Mathew O'Hara. The Butler Institute has been buying out virtually every tech company, sending agents to collect bodies and even living specimens from among the homeless and imprisoned, and has been carving some giant project into the side of the Catskill Mountains. O'Hara is a kind of Ray Kurzweil as Bond villain, a man who believes that the only salvation for humanity is for the rich people to all upload themselves into computers, thus "live" virtually forever and never have to suffer from the problems of the body. O'Hara is willing to sacrifice anybody to achieve this end, even his wife and young son. The Doctor's project is O'Hara, stopping him from achieving his goal of computer utopia for the rich. Apart from O'Hara's methods, there does not seem to me to be reason enough to bring down O'Hara, or for The Doctor to go to such elaborate lengths to do it. Yes, O'Hara is a murderer, and a murderer with power, but in the world that Cartmel depicts, that does not make him all that much worse than thousands of others. The plan for computer utopia itself is riddled with difficulties that make it unlikely ever to succeed, and on the face of it is dubious practically rather than morally. Again, O'Hara's methods are the problem, and the "evil" plan really is not all that evil. So, in the end, it is not clear just exactly what The Doctor has accomplished.
To give credit where it is due, Cartmel handles the pace of the novel very well. He writes action scenes so that a reader is not confused by all that is going on. He knows how to keep relevant details hidden in plain sight, so that a reader is unaware of their relevance until they become relevant. Apart from the cat there are no loose ends. On the whole, Cat's Cradle: Warhead is a decent action-adventure spy thriller, but it is problematic Doctor Who.
Just about any reviewer of this book is going to say how weird it is. There is no doubt about the weirdness, but then weirdness is Marc Platt's schtick. The plot, and it is very thin, seems to be that some kind of space data leech has invaded the TARDIS and caused it to go into an emergency collapse. This collapse throws The Doctor into total discombobulation. Just as the TARDIS is falling to bits, it crashes with a primitive, experimental time vessel from Ancient Gallifrey, when Rassilon is just coming into power (and a right little Napoleon he is, too, down to being short in a society in which men are short and women tall). The resulting time crash plops Ace into a gray world in which the twisted remains of buildings form a kind of surrealistic empty city. The only living creatures there are the crew of the Gallifreyan Time Vessel, herself, and the information leech, now calling itself Process, turned gigantic, and using the time crew to find the Future, which has somehow gotten lost. Oh, and there is a silver pussy cat roaming around that seems inordinately interested in Ace. The city is divided into time zones in which the characters keep meeting earlier or later versions of themselves in what seems to be an endless loop. It is all extremely clever, and reasonably well described. However, the whole thing seems to be that Platt likes taking widely disparate elements, throwing them together, stirring vigorously, and seeing what comes out. What is missing from all this is the Why. This is very important for making the story cohere and giving the reader some kind of payout. The book is very light on explanations. Why are these specific elements thrown together? What is the relationship between them? Why does the leech thing invade the TARDIS in the first place? What is it, exactly? Why does the TARDIS react this way? One can go on for many more questions and be begging for many more answers. It is this lack of explanation that drags down my valuation of the novel. Had Platt been more forthcoming with the reasons and less determined to show off how well he can describe weird, this could have been a quite excellent novel.
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| Weird Just for the Sake of It |
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| What: | Timewyrm: Revelation (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 3 August 2022 |
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| Rating: | 5 |
Paul Cornell's first novel is, to put it bluntly, a bit of a mess. At least this is the first of the four Timewyrm novels in which the Timewyrm actually has significance to the plot. So, Cornell got the brief to write the Grande Finale of the Timewyrm series. He decided on what amounts to a pitched battle in fantasy space, just as in "The Deadly Assassin" and "The Ultimate Foe," except that in this novel fantasy space is not the Matrix, but the Doctor's subconscious. The change in source really makes no difference because the way the story moves is mostly the same. The villain has control of fantasy space and throws all kinds of guilt trip scenarios at The Doctor to break him down. Problem #1 for me emerges when Cornell decides that outer reality should be almost as weird as fantasy space. Thus, we get a psychic church, the powers of which are very poorly explained. Yes, a psychic church, a building that talks. What is the point of that? How does the fact of a talking church contribute to the plot in any way that a talking person could not do? These questions never get answered. Cornell does not realize that uncanny nature of fantasy space works only if there is a solid reality space, a normal that is very normal, to work as contrast. If there is no functional difference between fantasy and reality, then any dichotomy the writer tries to make fails. Problem #2 is what turns out to be typical in Cornell's Doctor Who writing: the villain is super-powerful, godlike, able to take over people and manipulate their behavior at will, to change reality on a whim, to destroy worlds without any real effort. If the villain is that powerful, why does it bother with all this nonsense of creating fantasy space and elaborate plots, and debating with companions, and so on? Problem #3 is the HUGE amount of fan-candy flung about in the novel, references to all sorts of Doctor Who esoterica without much need for any of it to be there. To give Cornell some credit, he knows how to build to cliff hangers. He also does well in laying out the pieces of the plot early in places where he can pick them up again as needed, thus giving the story a general thread the holds all the wild elements and keeps them from flying off entirely. Additionally, Cornell describes all the weird and surprise elements in clear and concrete detail, so that the reader is not confused about picturing the scene. My final assessment is that Cornell in this novel is trying too hard to impress.
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| An episode that keeps you guessing! |
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| What: | Torchwood: Zone 10 (Torchwood audio dramas) |
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| By: | Jared Star, Portsmouth, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 11 July 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
This one is a lot more plot-focused than the previously reviewed “Gooseberry,” but David Llewellyn does take a decent chunk of time to explore the main characters. It's at times a little clunky (given that this is an early release for the range) but ultimately did its job at making audiences feel for the characters. Overall they’re well-written and there's a nice balance of exploration between them.
The only real criticisms lie in the plotting, and to an extent the marketing. Everything from the cover art to the trailer build this episode up as a classic atmospheric horror piece set in the Arctic circle. But as the story unravels, it turns into more of an action piece involving covert spies and shootouts. The setup of the story is quite slow, moody, and atmospheric, but by the halfway point, the story turns into half action, half Committee exposition. It was surprising just how much this story connected to the Committee Arc, providing further mysteries I desperately wanted answered.
On the one hand, it was nice to have a story throw so many curve balls, but the end result wasn’t as enticing as it could’ve been. Plus, Maxim Ivanov wasn’t utilized well. He changes sides way too quickly and elements of his backstory that could’ve been played with ended up being useless on the whole.
All in all, this is a slightly waffly adventure, but certainly a memorable one. The characters are nice and the string of events leads to an ending that's as solid as the rest of the piece!
| What: | Afterlife (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 9 July 2022 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
It is rare for Doctor Who stories to focus intensely on interpersonal matters and be successful at it. After all, Doctor Who is about the big stuff, the adventure, the universe. "Afterlife" is that rare exception. Convinced that Hex is dead, Ace confronts The Doctor and his seeming nonchalance regarding that fact. She cannot accept that The Doctor will not allow himself to take the human perspective on losing a loved one. Ace forces The Doctor to act like a person, for once, and treat Hex's death the way a human would. The end of Part 2, however, returns us to more familiar Doctor Who territory, with more than a hint that Doctor Who is not done with Hex just yet. His doppelganger, a Liverpool gangster night-club owner named Hector Thomas, is running around town, a man who seemingly appeared from nowhere just one year ago. This forces Ace's subconscious emotion to the surface - she just cannot let go of Hex. Part 1 is an excellent two-hander between Ace and The Doctor, played very well by Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy. Aldred holds back on much of the emotionality that she usually gives to Ace. Underneath is a churning anger she dare not release. McCoy is brilliant in conveying The Doctor's perplexity, his inability to understand human emotions and even to understand his own. In this circumstance, The Doctor is truly out of his depth. This interaction is wisely kept to one episode, and in episode 2 the story broadens out to shift seamlessly into the Doctor Who way of things. Monsters are on the loose, something's not right with reality, and The Doctor must return to the world he belongs to. Philip Olivier really shines in his Liverpool gangster mode. The main thing that takes away from this story a bit for me is that we are still tied to the whole "Elder Gods" line. I also get a feeling that things in this story are just a little too Liverpool, that Big Finish is trying too hard to be regional. Those small matters aside, this one is well worth a listen.
| What: | Timewyrm: Apocalypse (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 30 June 2022 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
The third installment of the Timewyrm tetralogy has a few things going for it. Foremost is that Robinson makes the Timewyrm more fully essential to the story than did the writers of the previous two books. Robinson manages to keep this as a surprise until late, thus a reader goes through the novel wondering "Where is the Timewyrm" and then finds out how important it actually was to the plot. Robinson does pretty well with the Doctor 7 and Ace pairing, with Doctor 7 genuinely caring for Ace but unable to show it, while Ace is uncertain about The Doctor's motivations but still trusts him when times get difficult. Most the other characters have believable, though simple, motivations. For me, the main problem with the book is that Robinson feels he constantly has to spring surprises on the both the readers and the characters. Most of these surprises are monsters that spring up from nowhere to delay our heroes. These scenes come across as devices to make a short story longer, but they really do not add anything of importance to the final product. Robinson also has Ace start a rebellion that ends up getting several natives killed, but never has her face that fact, thus trivializing the rebellion and the deaths. There are other aspects to the novel that give the whole thing an aura of having been quickly written.
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| The Red Queen's Off With Her Head |
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| What: | The Contingency Club (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 27 June 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"The Contingency Club" would have fit snugly in 1981 Doctor Who. The story has the TARDIS taken out of action, landing the crew of Doctor 5, Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan, in London 1864 and the world of the Pall Mall gentleman's club. There's a new club in town, snapping up members, and run behind the scenes by a slightly insane woman calling herself The Red Queen. The story has the mix of science-fiction and historical elements that was common in the 1980s. Guest performers Philip Jackson and Clive Merrison are excellent. Ultimately, the story is too snug to be brilliant. There are no real challenges to what one would expect for 1980s Doctor Who.
| What: | Colony of Fear (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 10 June 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"Colony of Fear" starts well enough. Part 1 is like the hard-science Doctor Who that some of us have been wanting. A space colony is barely making it, and it is being attacked by giant wasps. There is a clear problem amenable to a clear technical solution. Unfortunately, the story goes a bit sideways by burdensome secondary plot lines that intrude to become the main ones. Thus, but the end of Part Two, the story has become standard stuff: Bugs with the power to transform people into bugs are virtually unstoppable in their assault on the humans, who have little power against them. But wait, there's more. Added to this is a bizarre idea of The Doctor meeting a companion that he cannot remember ever having travelled with. While this idea had already been used in "Terror Firma," this time his memory loss seems to have something to do with the Time Lords. The mystery never gets uncovered. Perhaps, it is a clever ploy for the author to get a commission for a sequel.
