12 - The Pit

This is definitely the worst-written prose I’ve seen from the VNAs so far, and I have the least to say about it.  There’s nothing offensive in this one like Timewyrm: Genesys, but some sections made me laugh with how inept they were, with the short, choppy sentences often deflating any kind of emotion Penswick was trying to invoke.

To kick off this adventure, Benny asks the Doctor if she can visit the Seven Planets, which mysteriously disappeared before she was born.  The duo are quickly plunged into a scattered narrative featuring a group of androids, two shapeshifters, a nuclear weapon nicknamed Pandora’s Box, and an offbeat political drama.  None of these plot threads really go anywhere, and none feature the Doctor, who is plunged into a hellish underworld for most of the story.  There, he meets 19th century poet William Blake, who travels with him to Victorian London and present-day Wiltshire.  The parts with the Doctor and Blake are by far the most entertaining sections of this book, but they’re few and far between.  Most of the story focuses on Bernice’s escapades with the androids, and on the characters Carlson, Brown, and Kopyion as they investigate a series of murders.  At the end of the story, the Doctor re-emerges and is captured by Kopyion, who reveals himself to be a figure from Gallifreyan history.  The Seven Planets were the site of a conflict involving the Yssgaroth (or the Great Vampires), and Kopyion detonates Pandora’s Box to ensure that the gateway to their dimension remains closed.  Benny is left shaken, questioning the Doctor’s refusal to interfere.  This ending would be emotionally powerful if it was written well, but unfortunately it just... isn’t.

The Pit is very skippable for anyone who isn’t a completionist; on top of the poor prose, it is so overstuffed with half-baked plot threads that I considered moving on to Deceit halfway through.  I can’t be too angry about it, though; from what I can tell, Neil Penswick never wrote for Doctor Who again, and has spent his life working in child protective services and as a social worker, and he seems like a lovely man.  To quote The Pit itself: “Things didn't seem to matter anymore. He thought about the words in the Book. Just words.”  Time to move on.