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| What: | The Slow Empire (BBC Eighth Doctor novels) |
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| By: | Wolfgang Bailey, Harrogate, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Sunday 26 March 2023 |
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| Rating: |   4 |
Crikey, this one felt like it went on a bit
It's obviously common knowledge now that the relationship between The Doctor and Karl was deliberately coded as romantic, albeit not sexual, so it's not an insightful observation to say that, but I think it's played very well, without compromising what many Who fans (myself included) believe should be a red line in that "the Doctor is essentially asexual". It marries that up well with the Eighth's characterisation as something of a romantic, showing that romantic love can still be asexual.
Ahead of its time in that regard, and I think this is well observed by Orman
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 | Story forgettable at best |
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| What: | Eater of Wasps (BBC Eighth Doctor novels) |
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| By: | Wolfgang Bailey, Harrogate, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Sunday 26 March 2023 |
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| Rating: | 4 |
Not only is the story "meh", but it seems Baxendale is also a transphobe, so it makes it even harder to find the will to look for something good in it
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| Very strange to have read this post 2020 |
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| What: | Escape Velocity (BBC Eighth Doctor novels) |
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| By: | Wolfgang Bailey, Harrogate, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Sunday 26 March 2023 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
I imagine having rival obnoxious, repugnant billionaires engaged in a private sector space race as a form of developmentally arrested dick measuring contest seemed kind of strange to people back in 2000/2001. But the only part I found hard to suspend my disbelief for having read it for the first time in 2022/23 was the fact that the billionaire characters have any redeeming human traits whatsoever.
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| Clever outcome, but not how you expected |
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| What: | Unnatural History (BBC Eighth Doctor novels) |
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| By: | Wolfgang Bailey, Harrogate, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Sunday 26 March 2023 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
So the actual story of this, as a self-contained book, is fairly average, but its role in the whole Eighth Doctor story is very clever indeed.
*Spoilers hereafter*
The way that this story links the Faction Paradox arc, Sam Jones, and makes the whole Eighth Doctor story fit with pre-existing canon (or what passes therefore), including little nods to the pre-tv Movie "Leekley Bible" etc. This book was essentially the point at which it became basically impossible for any future relaunch of the show to just ignore the TV movie and pretend McGann was never the Doctor.
In that regard I think it's excellent!
As a story of its own?
Well I quite like Sam's story in it. I'm aware that a lot of people have a squeamishness about its depiction of sex and drugs, but I think it's a really good, albeit hardly original, look into how small decisions can completely change the course of your life.
I think the arguments against this book fall into two main categories:
1) people who don't like DW having grand story arcs, especially not when they make any changes or elaborations into the show's lore. And that's fine, but I personally disagree and quite like those stories when handled well
2) people who don't like depictions of sex or drug taking in their media (or maybe just in DW). This one I have mixed feelings about, because IMO if you're going to do it, you should do it properly, and this is done in a very BBC way. But equally I have absolutely no issues with depictions of sex and drugs more broadly because I am a person who has sex and has taken drugs and has enjoyed both a lot. I feel like to ignore those two innately human behaviours always limited Classic Who's ability to develop 3 dimensional companion characters (not at all saying that it always failed, and even less that simply having the companions have sexual/romantic feelings or engaging in recreationally altering their state of consciousness would have achieved it alone. Just both are things humans have done since long before the written word existed and statistically were likely to have cropped up at some point or other).
This is a rambling mess of a review, but I'm basically just quite defensive of this book, because I know a lot of people who would prefer every story to be completely self-contained and rated U, whereas I like the bigger stories and I've never minded a bit of less than child friendly behaviour
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| When a longrunning series... |
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| What: | The Eight Doctors (BBC Eighth Doctor novels) |
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| By: | Wolfgang Bailey, Harrogate, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Sunday 26 March 2023 |
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| Rating: | 5 |
...Does a cheesy clip show
This was like having Doctor Who explained to me by Peter Kay.
"D'yuh 'member The Master? Duh Yuh? D'yer 'member? What aboowt the brigerdeeuh?! D'yer 'member the brigerdeeuh?!"
Sorry Terry.
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| Issue with the Season 2-American Version |
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| What: | The Collection: Season 2 (The Collection Blu-ray box sets) |
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| By: | Charles G. Dietz, San Jose, CA, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 25 March 2023 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
On the back cover of the bluray, it says it comes with a booklet but that is only true I believe if you have the region 2 copy and not the region 1 copy. Other than missing the beetles in the Chase, it is a very good to have especially if you like the Behind the Sofa feature that is a must to watch for these collection series. (Maureen O'Brien is with Peter Purves and Caroline Ann Ford, Sophie is with Bonnie and Wendy is with Janet and Sarah)
Telesnaps are used for the Crusade since it was not animated.
You can tell that a lot of work has gone into turning this script from made for TV into the audio medium but in some ways its a poorer story for it.
I lot of explaining and visualising from Colin to make up the fact we cant see the action.
A very confusing story, which had me lost most of the time.
However, as always Colin and Nicola turn out great performances and the sound and score are spot on.
Would I be in a hurry to listen again, no.
| What: | The Bounty of Ceres (The Early Adventures audio dramas) |
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| By: | Andrew Munro, Corby, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Wednesday 22 March 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
As has been mentioned by others this is a typical Doctor Who story which would have easily been picked out of the 1960's.
I believe the story is stretched too far and would have made a good 3 parts, keeping the action and suspense compact.
However, the acting is great including the supporting cast and Peter's 1st Doctor.
Would I listen again in a hurry?
No but that doesn't mean to say I didn't enjoy the ride back to classic who.
| What: | The Pit (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 21 March 2023 |
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| Rating: | 4 |
"The Pit" has a reputation as one of the worst novels in the New Adventures series. I have not read enough of them to make that assessment, but I can say it is a proper mess of a novel. I think this mess happens because Penswick has a concept, but not a plot. The concept is basically Doctor Who inside the book of Revelation. The question, then, for Penswick is how he is going to get the major elements of that story into this one. Penswick tries to create a sprawling epic of a novel, with action in three major locations focused primarily on three characters - The Doctor, Bernice, and the enigmatic Kopyion. To add mystery and misdirection to the story, Penswick relates the events of these three characters and locations primarily through side characters, though Bernice gets more internal monologue than the other two primary characters. Thus, we see The Doctor's part primarily through the famous poet William Blake's perspective, Kopyion's part primarily through his underling Carlson's perspective, and Bernice's part primarily through the android soldier Spike's perspective. There are numerous other side characters necessary to keep the contraption running, and parts of the story get told from their perspective, but once they have served that function, Penswick then kills them off in particularly nasty ways, except for Blake whom he cannot kill off but probably really wanted to.
The problem here is that the events on the three locations do not logically relate. This is particularly true of events on the planet Nicaea. Society is breaking down into total anarchy, yet what has this anarchy to do with events on the Planet Without a Name or with The Doctor wandering through holes in reality to alternate universes (or are they? another thing Penswick never bothers to make clear). The Doctor and Bernice never go to Nicaea, so what is all that action, nearly half of the novel, doing here?
One could go on about all the things in this book that just do not make sense. For instance, the androids are thoroughly inconsistent in concept. Are they "metal men" (walking toasters as Benny describes them) or organic simulations of humans? Both, but only when needed to be. And what about the Nicaean religion? All this stuff about the Prime Mover (God) and the Form Manipulator (Satan) suggests some kind of technological origin of Nicaean society, and that Nicaean society was created to fulfill some machine's or organization's purpose. Yet, that avenue is never explored, nor is it fit into the resolution. Why is half of The Planet with No Name artificially created by the company that makes the androids? On and on it goes.
Then, one gets to Penswick's conception of The Doctor. Here, The Doctor is utterly useless. He spends most the novel completely lost, making snide and cryptic comments to Blake, showing none of his usual compassion and good humor, and has no part in the Deus ex Machina ending of the novel.
Blake is also useless and unnecessary. William Blake is here used not as a guide for The Doctor, as Vergil was for Dante, but as a commentator to point to the correct thematic interpretation of the action for the reader. Fulfilling this function means that no more thought went into the character of Blake or why from the standpoint of realistic action rather than thematic convenience, it is William Blake of all the humans throughout history who ends up in the pit. Penswick's Blake is an anachronism, who does not think or talk in early 19th-century ways, but in 20th-century clichés.
To summarize, "The Pit" has many interesting ideas, all of which go nowhere. There is not much of a plot; instead, the "story" is mostly a situation. The story has more loose ends than a rope ladder cut in half lengthwise. The Doctor Who elements are almost completely unrecognizable. The story is disturbingly violent and grim from beginning to end.
| 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.
