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| Originally published: 1998 Acquired: July 2010 Read: August 2020 |
by Lance Parkin
This is an odd book. The Doctor seems to be the one portrayed on screen by Paul McGann, but he lives on Gallifrey; the Time Lord we would call the Master is a government official called the Magistrate, and they are friends. There are hints that would indicate it's a Doctor who's settled down after a long time traveling the universe; there are also hints that indicate the tv adventures we know didn't happen. Is it a Doctor who returned home? Or one who never left? Or one who has yet to leave?
The real pleasure of the book is in the worldbuilding. When I was a young Doctor Who fan, I was fascinated by the Time Lords; after years of mediocre Big Finish stories about them, I've come to think that killing them off was the best thing that ever happened to them, and I'd happily go a decade without going to Gallifrey or hearing about the Matrix or transduction barriers. But Lance Parkin does a great job with the Time Lords and Gallifrey, arguably better than anyone ever. The details of how the Capitol operates, the Citadel, the relationship between the Time Lords and other Gallifreyans, the details on the technologies they possess, they're all so well done. You get an amazing sense of scale and power at the same time you see how and why a Time Lord can never actually do anything: a group of people whose power is so momentous they can never make use of it. The book is chock-full of great ideas; I loved the Needle and its inhabitants; I thought the Sontarans and the Rutan have rarely been so well depicted.
On the other hand, I did kind of wonder what the point of it all was. Why tell a story about the Doctor not leaving Gallifrey? What kind of point is this book making? I'm not quite sure. It's very epic-- but on the other hand, it feels like just another adventure in a storyworld where the Doctor lives in Gallifrey. Why tell this story in that world? What is Parkin trying to say about a Doctor who lives on Gallifrey?
I'm not sure, but I do think Parkin does a great job with the (kind of) eighth Doctor. You can hear Paul McGann saying the lines. More than that, this story does a good job of maintaining the Doctor's essential Doctorishness in a non-Doctor situation. This is the kind of thing Doctor Who writers often struggle with-- on audio, when the Doctor becomes someone else, you often wouldn't even recognize them as the Doctor except for the actor playing them. But if the Doctor did live on Gallifrey and try to work within its structures, this is how he would do it. He's playful and committed to justice and clever, and improvising so much he impresses himself; he just happens to be confined to one planet.
This book originally came out in 1998, for Doctor Who's thirty-fifth anniversary (is that really a thing?), when the television show had been off the air for nearly a decade; Big Finish wasn't even making Doctor Who audio dramas yet. There's an attempt to build up a new mythology around the character. There are hints about the Doctor's secret past, about his parents, about his past loves and losses; there's old friends we've never heard of, and new lovers. In some ways it's very like what Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat would do in the revival, but in others its very different. It adds romance and myth as they did, but it can feel a little backward-looking. Twenty years later, it feels like a bit of a dead end. I think it suffers a bit from being read out of context; it's part of something building through the novels of its era, but it's been around twenty years since I read Alien Bodies or Unnatural History or The Gallifrey Chronicles! A lot of it was lost on me. (It is fun, though, to imagine the coming doom for Gallifrey that is hinted at is the Last Great Time War against the Daleks.)
The ending is a bit sudden and definitely disappointing. But up until that point, it's always enjoyable even when it's odd. Parkin has a sense of tone that many tie-in writers don't. I might sound a little down on this novel, but I'm not really. I don't entirely get what it's trying to do, and I think some of what it's trying to do is a mistake-- but what it's trying to do is big and interesting, and pulled off fairly well, and I was almost always engaged. This is a weird side-step in more than one way, but it's a great one and well worth reading.
I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The Turing Test
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