Solid DW outing. 'Seeing I' is a tough act to follow, but 'Placebo Effect' was perfectly nice and fun, just not very deep.

The Doctor is invited to be best man at the wedding of former (off-screen) companions Stacy and Ssard. He and Sam travel to Micawber's World (weird name) for the celebration, the same place where the Olympic games will be held starting later that week. One fairly small incident at the wedding gets the Doctor investigating and unraveling a truly enormous net of conspiracies and schemes around the planet's government, the Church of the Way Forward, the space secret service, the local Foamasi mafia, and the Games.

The discussion around religion was pretty shallow, and neither Kyle nor Reverend Lukas were particularly interesting characters to me; as far as 'Sam's wannabe BF of the day' goes, Kyle was below average. This book suffers a bit from having too many characters. Sam meeting the entourage of the Duchess of Auckland was contrived, and in the end completely unnecessary, as these characters don't really do all that much, even though they were fun. We end up not really getting to know most of the characters, with the exception of Ms. Sox and Green Fingers, who got the most time and the most action in the story. Stacy and Ssard are in and out in a heartbeat, which really surprised me: I though they'd be tagging along for the whole book. That being said, I really liked the plot, and though it was well laid out and explained (maybe even over-explained); a feat, considering the amount of factions and characters involved in the conspiracies the Doctor unravels. My one complaint is that the Wirrrn were defeated too easily, and that Sam didn't get to do anything vital of her own accord. She does stuff, but they end up being irrelevant (like keeping an eye on Reverend Lukas), or things that the Doctor figures out without her telling him anyways (like knowing the Wirrrn are on the caves). She does show up to save him on the caves, but really, that was more his own plan than her acting out of her own intuition.

I was expecting more from experienced and mature Sam. Not to say she was bad or anything, but she didn't feel that different from, say, 'Option Lock' Sam, and after the 3 year timeskip we got on 'Seeing I', I was hoping to see a much more grown up version of her. Both Sam herself and the Doctor say she's grown, but I didn't see that reflected in her actions in a meaningful way. Largely all she does in this book were either the Doctor's plan, or a coincidence. Well, I suppose old Sam would have gotten more jealous of Stacy and Ssard traveling with the Doctor, so there was growth there, sure. Hoping for more in the next book.

Congratulations, Doctor, for not getting seriously injured and/or severely mentally abused this time around! He did get a mental punch in the teeth from the Wirrrn, but he just passed out and was 100% fine afterwards. That doesn't even compute in the EDA scale of Doctor Torment.

How can it be that the guy who wrote Erasure and Gallifrey: Annihilation and masterminded Gallifrey and also did some other great work for Big Finish can be so capable of writing such horrible books?

If I had to give this book a compliment, it would be that it is just boring - which, if you have read any other 90s DW books you will know is pretty good going among some of the more dire, misogynistic, violent, and boring stories. But that is where the compliments end. This book is like 280 pages of pointless side characters meandering pointlessly around, 10 pages of the actual Wirrn and defeating the queen, then another 10 back on the pointless side characters.

Safe to say, I will not be reading this one again. Onwards.