Well.

It's done.

Okay. This book is not great, but it's not bad. It tries its best to pick up all the threads that have been going on since Alien Bodies and knot them together into a coherent solution, and, you know, it does that, I guess. It's not satisfying, but it does the job. Bear in mind the date I'm writing this review in. It's the 12th of June, 2025, not even two weeks after 'The Reality War', which was, in my opinion, an infinitely worse finale than The Ancestor Cell could ever hope to be, so I'm not being harsh here.

This is what happens, basically: the Doctor was infected by the Paradox virus in 'Interference', when they changed Three's regeneration to happen on Dust rather than on Earth after 'Planet of the Spiders'. As far as the Faction was aware, that meant that the Eighth Doctor, after having the virus in him for so long, was now pretty much ready for harvest (him losing his shadow was a sign of that), ready to be turned into a Faction agent. According to this book, this means turning Evil TM and Loving Paradoxes. Alright. The thing is, though: he wasn't infected, or at least, he was only 'probably' infected. The TARDIS (the true MVP of the story) was holding the two timelines, the original (where he regenerates on Earth after Metebelis III) and the new, infected timeline. She was stopping the infected timeline from overwriting the original, basically. How exactly? No idea, but she's the best and I believe her power to do so. She exploded though, remember, in the beginning of 'Shadows of Avalon'. That was also partially because of the strain of holding these two realities. But she... uh... was actually holding on even then, in the time vortex... Man, I'm not sure, this part really didn't make much sense. ANYWAY! Remember the universe in a bottle? The Time Lords, not the Doctor, were the ones who stole it from Foreman's World, and to keep it safe they chucked it in the time vortex. They kinda forgot to close the cap, tough, so the universe leaked all over the time vortex (how will we ever the these stains out...). Absorbing some of that somehow turned the TARDIS into the Edifice thingy that appeared on Gallifrey and was causing massive disruptions to causality (basically meaning that the timelines it was trying to hold back from overwriting the correct, untainted one were 'leaking'). These waves were, in turn, drawing the Enemy to Gallifrey for what would be first attack of the war Romana has been preparing them to fight. We get a god awful explanation for the nature of the Enemy that I'm electing to mostly ignore. The Faction want to use this first attack, as Gallifrey is weak, to insert themselves as rulers of Gallifrey, as they believe they'd do a much better job at winning the war and ruling over time in general. When did they become terrorists rather than being a weird little cult? I don't know!

Nothing about this story makes you really cover your mouth and go 'ohhh damn that's clever!' apart from, maybe, the beginning of the temporal attack when the number of walls in the Panopticon and the number of Gallifreys kept decreasing, with only Fitz noticing. The big reveal of Grandfather Paradox, sadly, went in the most obvious way possible: yes, he is an evil future Eighth Doctor, big yawn (although Paul McGann would play him amazingly...). It works, though, boring as it is. And I understood it as that only being true in the infected timeline, so there's that. A bit silly that this much older, much more malicious Doctor can't stop our Doctor, and even sillier that Eight 'wins' because Grandfather just can't physically hold him back from pulling the Kill Them All lever with just one arm. That's what it comes down to, in the end. The Doctor has 3 choices: leave Gallifrey in the hands of the Faction and to deal with the war (everyone suffers forever and dies), try to reason with Grandfather and beg for mercy (would never work, right back to suffering forever and dying), and explode the Edifice, taking Gallifrey, the Faction armada (they have an armada!?), and Kasterborous with it. His only real choice is to destroy Gallifrey, and destroy it he does, fully intending to die along with everyone. He is, however, the narrative's favourite and can never die, in the worst way possible for him.

It's a mess, but I do like that the War is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if Romana hadn't been obsessed with preparing for it, she wouldn't have gone after Compassion, then the TARDIS probably wouldn't have been destroyed (and/or they wouldn't have lost the bottle universe), and the Edifice wouldn't have been created to attract the Enemy in the first place. Romana, in general, thinks she's a girlboss president, but is actually a girlfailure president; Gallifrey is in shambles. She's not 100% to blame, though, because the worst of it is due to Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole just not being very good at writing Time Lords. Really. None of these Time Lord characters felt like Time Lords at all, not even in the simplest things. Why were they sweating, why were they feeling cold, why were they flirting and doing things to 'get girls' and having moms and dads, why were they being strange about looking older/younger than they actually were? It was baffling, really. They don't fare much better as characters, either. From the High Council to the young students, none of these characters were interesting in any way. The book tries a bit harder with Mali, but it doesn't land, and we only really care about Romana because we know her from before. The Faction Paradox people are the same, as it's hard to care about such cartoonishly evil people like Mother Tarra. The exception is Father Kreiner, who we are already invested in.

There's a lot of talk about responsibility and guilt being thrown around, most of it at the Doctor, and I honestly don't think it's warranted. Timon flat out says he started the war by bringing the Enemy to them, as the Edifice came about because his TARDIS was trying to protect him. Okay, but... He didn't know any of that. Faction Paradox went after him and infected him, that's not his fault. The TARDIS protected him, that's also not really his fault, or her fault... If we're throwing blame around, it seems that losing the damn bottle universe was one of the main catalysts for everything, and that had nothing to do with the Doctor. But yes, I do see that he would feel guilty for being used like this, and would feel responsible nonetheless. Things that really are his fault were Compassion turning into a TARDIS (even though the possibility of something like that happening never crossed his mind, so it's a bit unfair), and Fitz becoming Father Kreiner (definitely unfair, but understandable that Kreiner feels betrayed). The Faction keep rubbing his nose in his past mistakes (funny that leaving Susan is placed on the same level as not rescuing Fitz, when the two situations were absolutely nothing alike) and reminding him of moments when just one small paradox would have made everything better until he's reduced to tears; it's 'let's make the Doctor depressed!' hours.

One of the things that do hit in this book are the bits with Father Kreiner, who is such a tragic character. It's heart-wrenching to see the little bits of young Fitz underneath it all. He wants to kill the Doctor for leaving him (it kills me that he's too far gone to see that it was never his intention to leave him, that he never even knew Fitz was in danger...), but one very sincere heartfelt 'I'm so sorry' from the Doctor brings him back. He really wants to trust the Doctor and to forgive him, ouch my heart. And, hello, him stroking the Doctor's face when he asks if he's faking being a Faction agent? Some complex feelings we have there, uh? The whole thing made me so sad. I mean, it's pretty obvious he'd die, but man... He just wanted to be Fitz again... he had forgiven the Doctor... 'Promise? I promise'. Grandfather Paradox, when I catch you!!!

If I had any doubt that our Fitz, the remembered Fitz, really had all the essence of the original, the fact that both he and Father Kreiner say 'he's still the Doctor, no matter what they/we do to him' would do it for me. Fitz doesn't get to do all that much in this book except meet his terrifying alternate self, go through the horrors and spend some time with the worst version of Romana.

Compassion is done diiiirty here. This is her final adventure, and this is what she gets? She barely in it, and spends most of the time being used as an Uber to bring these boring Time Lords to the Edifice and back. Then, for absolutely no reason I can discern, she kind of falls for this random Time Lord guy Nivet. Why??? She had never shown any interest in anyone before! Hell, she doesn't even like Fitz and the Doctor that much! No idea why they did this. In any case, yes, Compassion saves Fitz and this guy from Gallifrey and saves the Doctor from the Edifice. I don't think he'd thank her for it. From what I understood, she is the one who wipes his memory. She then puts him on Earth, late 19th century ('If I had to be trapped in one time and place', as he said in 'Banquo Legacy'), to... heal? To wait? Meanwhile, the TARDIS itself is going to be reforming from her also very bad experiences. Compassion leaves Fitz somewhen around the late 90s, with instructions to find the Doctor in 2001. An interesting bit: Fitz thinks the Doctor destroyed the planet because he was being controlled by the Faction, but that's not what happened. I wonder if that misunderstanding goes anywhere. Anyway. I really don't understand why his two friends would decide to leave the Doctor, an alien very prone to getting in trouble and to getting hurt, completely alone in another planet with 0 memories, right after the hugest traumatic experience possible... Well, let's see where this goes.

TLDR; the War arc goes out with a middling 'pop' rather than a bang, Compassion is gone, Fitz is gone (but coming back), and the Doctor was pretty much abandoned on Earth, TARDIS-less and worse, completely amnesiac, after destroying Gallifrey: the Eighth Doctor's greatest tricks.

One thing that made me laugh was this exchange:

'It's hopeless, Doctor', the Grandfather said. 'I have only to wait and you will be mine'

The Doctor looked up at him, wiped a streak of blood from his mouth. 'You're right. It is hopeless. You're really not my type'

Thank you, Doctor, for the little gay joke just a couple of pages before you kill everyone <3