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| Published: 2000 Acquired: November 2009 Read: November 2020 |
by Paul Leonard
With this installment, my reading of the BBC's Eighth Doctor Adventures jumps ahead to the "trapped on Earth" story arc. This began with The Ancestor Cell and The Burning, which I read over fifteen years ago; an amnesiac Doctor is left on Earth in 1890 to make a rendezvous with his companion Fitz in 2001, giving him and the TARDIS over a century to recuperate. This story details what the Doctor was up to during World War II, as he becomes involved in the activities of a group of aliens trapped in Nazi Germany.
I remember finding what I read of the post-Burning novels a mixed bag: while the novels did have the freedom to be more inventive and weird in the new post-Time Lord universe, it wasn't really clear to me what purpose the Doctor's amnesia was meant to serve. He seemed to always know how to do things anyway, and always remembered what was necessary for the plot. The Turing Test, however, makes great use of this premise, possibly the greatest of any EDA I've read. This Doctor is among humans, but knows he is not of them-- yet does not know who he actually is. So while a "normal" Doctor might thwart some aliens, this Doctor genuinely does not know what his "side" is. This approach is amplified by having the story narrated from the outside in the first person; the narrators here know less of the Doctor than we do, so we can read between the lines, but in some ways, we know as little as they do of this new Doctor. When telling the story from, say, a companion role, I think it's impossible to really render the Doctor as unknowable, but Leonard does an excellent job here of using his narrators to create distance and danger. Overall, this is an effective and gripping story of WWII intrigue and violence. I don't think it's the best Doctor Who novel but it is in the top tier.
I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: Father Time
