Maybe my expectations clouded my vision, but I sadly didn't love this. I liked it alright, the stuff with the Doctor's character was all fantastic, but the story didn't do much for me.

After the world shattering ending of 'The Ancestor Cell', the Doctor is alone in the late 19th century, maybe even more amnesiac as he was in the movie. It's that flavor of amnesia where information comes to him, but he has no idea where from. "You understand German?" beat. "I suppose I do". He finds it just as weird as the others, with the added frustration of being, as he says himself, burning to know who he is. Compassion dropped him in a time where his personality matches the surroundings (thanks Compassion), so he's not immediately perceived as being overly strange. I wonder if he even has a feeling that he's not human. The Doctor surely knows he's different, but alien? I don't think he does.

At times, there's a feeling of sorrow about him, of loneliness. It catches up with him in quieter moments, when something he sees or hears triggers a hint of a memory in him. Of course, we the readers know him, and we know what he's just been through. I found it a mix of melancholy and relief: thank God he doesn't remember what he did, but I felt somewhat disconsolate to see him so alone and so lost. That being said, these gloomy moments are few; he's busy with the mystery most of the time.

As a new beginning for the EDAs, this works very nicely. The Doctor is an absolute little sh*t, it's amazing. The way he wiggles his way into the dinner at the manor with a mix of charm, good timing, vague statements and just plain lies was masterful. Suck it, psychic paper, suck it, sonic screwdriver. He's incredibly clever in this story. The whole auction scene was brilliant, he's never been more annoying. Give the man an Oscar and a PhD in psychology, he played Nepath like a fiddle. I was giggling the whole time. Still, he's working with less knowledge than he (and we, actually) is used to. A lot of what he does is gut instinct, and that's how he gets poor Dobbs killed. Chilling scene, that. The Doctor's 'callous' responses to death weird out the other characters; Dobbs outright accuses him of having no feelings after they discover Gaddis' body. More interestingly, his responses apparently weird himself out, like he knows they are improper. This is a well established character trait of Eight's, maybe more than in other Doctors: he cares immensely, but once someone is dead he does not dwell on grief, especially not if there's still things to solve, more lives to save. And once the mystery is solved, he wants to move on. He's hyper, he's restless.

There's a few nice parallels between the Doctor and the mud/fire creature (don't they ever get named?). One that caught my eye was during Nepath's presentation: 'Whatever happens after that, whether the form is squashed or broken or dropped or moulded, it remembers how it was'. Ha! Nepath notices this as well, but his observations are slightly off mark. The Doctor is not exactly 'mimicking in order survive' or 'conform to expectations', he's mostly acting like he always did, only he doesn't (can't) know that.

In the end, he kiiiinda kills Nepath (at the very least, he lets him die), after trying to get the man to see reason many times. Nepath 'sold' the world to the fire creature to get his sister back, and by the way he reacts to seeing what the creature has planned for the planet (namely, lots of fire), we know the man is beyond insane. The Doctor tells him again and again that whatever the fire creature brings back it won't really be his dead sister. Funny that, when we think of Fitz. Completely different circumstances, I know, but there is some similarity there. Not that the Doctor remembers it, of course. In any case, the Oncoming Storm kicks the guy into the fire. While in other circumstances he might not have done that, it makes sense for him to do it here, I think. As far as we know, this is the first Doctor Who(TM) situation he's been in since he woke up. He's acting on instinct, he's re-forming his personality, he's pretty angry as well, and he's alone; Professor Dobbs and Reverend Stobbold are not his companions, they're not in it with him, they don't know how he operates, they're too close to the situation at hand. This is not a criticism: the Doctor should be alone in this story, that's what it's for, after all. It's interesting to see all of his personality there, but have him not know how to substantiate it, if that makes sense. He's arrogant and stubborn and gets annoyed when people don't believe him or follow his orders, but he can't go 'I'm hundreds of years old and a Time Lord and those are the Gurlbs from planet Gurlbia, they'll eat your planet like they did Varadia XI and Bitus V' or what have you; ya know, that moment where 'I'm the Doctor' plays in the background. He has all the experience in his head, and it is informing his actions, but he can't provide a single concrete example. Must be incredibly frustrating.

Oh, and the TARDIS!!! Compassion put her in his pocket as a tiny cube. She eats (?) some of the mud-fire thing and grows police box sized again, but still no doors. It hurt my heart when the Doctor was on the verge of remembering her ('it certainly didn't materialise out....'), but couldn't. So now he has a very cumbersome apparently useless bluish box he has to drag around. For the love of God, Doctor, do NOT lose her.

So, what's my problem with this book? The plot. It's maddeningly simple. We spend whole chapters waiting for the Doctor & Co. to realised that uhhh maybe breaking the dam and unleashing the WATER is the best way to deal with the FIRE monsters, right? We know from the start that Nepath is behind everything, we know the creatures replaced Lord and Lady Urton, we know from the first second that Betty is being controlled. There's a fine line between the reader not being given enough information to follow the plot, and the reader getting too much information and figuring things out much faster than the characters. To me, this book fell on the TMI side of the line, and it made the whole reading experience slow and kind of frustrating. The writing is good, so this didn't kill the book, but it made for a more boring story. I felt like it could be a lot shorter as well. Many of the Doctor's little expeditions don't do that much to move the plot forward, they don't discover that much this way. Why do the Doctor and Dobbs go to the mine? So Dobbs can die. They both already know the fire creatures exist, and they didn't have to go to the mine to see the source of the material. Which reminds me: we never really learn what the fire creatures were and where they came from. The Doctor, given his amnesia, probably didn't even entertain the idea of asking which planet the things were from, or anything of the sort. A lot of the action scenes with the fire creatures left me quite confused: do they move in slow motion or something? The other characters could run circles around them! But anyway, the characters. Let's see, Gaddis dies early on, Dobbs follows a bit later, and we're left with Stobbold and the main side character. None of these side characters leave an impression on me, and I gotta say the (3 -- being generous) female characters were really done dirty. Nepath was alright, but again, I couldn't care much for him. This is the Doctor's show, though, so it's not a huge problem that the side characters were kind of dull, but man, I miss Fitz already.

Kudos for Justin Richards for tricking me three!!! times with his fakeout Doctor 'reveals' in the first couple of chapters. Curses! When he does show up, it's very discreet.

I wonder how I should count the memory loss from now on, given that he's not remembering stuff any time soon. Hmm.

Memory Loss:2.5 (in 'The Eight Doctors', maybe 'The Blue Angel', he forgor!!)
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:14 (gets vampired 'Vampire Science', nearly drowns in the Thames in 'The Bodysnatchers', bomb+fingers broken in 'Kursaal', electrocuted in 'Longest Day', gets shot + severe blood loss in 'Legacy of the Daleks', nearly squashed by giant hydra in 'The Scarlet Empress', leg broken + slapped around by giant tentacled monster in 'The Face-Eater', stabbed 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more in 'Interference' 1&2, broken wrist + near death in vacuum of space + more in 'The Taking of Planet 5', falls from a cliff + shot in 'Frontier Worlds', gas alien attack in 'The Fall of Yquatine', beat up + shot with a crossbow + hit by tonnes of ice cold water here)
Torture:6 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', 'Interference' 1&2, 'The Taking of Planet 5', 'Parallel 59')

TL;DR: The Doctor is basically set to factory mode in this bare bones adventure. Character stuff was marvelous, the Doctor is infuriating and charming in the best ways, but the plot is so simple and the side characters s unremarkable that I got a bit bored.