Timewyrm: Exodus

Recommended Prerequisites

PROSE: Timewyrm: Genesys

TV: The War Games

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Timewyrm: Exodus

With Genesys being what it was, I went into Exodus dragging my feet. I knew we were moving from John Peel to Terrance Dicks, but I still had no desire to read more about the Timewyrm, or continue her arc in anyway. Nevertheless we persisted, and Exodus wasnt actually horrible. Far from perfect, but alright.

Exodus is formatted somewhat strangely. The Doctor and Ace, trying to track down the Timewyrm, go to 1951, then 1923, 1939, then 1940. It makes sense, plotwise, but it results in a couple of smaller interconnected stories with new groups of characters.

The first half has the Doctor and Ace walking around an alternate 1951 London, after the Nazis won WWII. This is the stronger and more interesting half of the book.

The second half has the duo going further back to stop the Nazis from winning the war, and followed characters such as Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, and of course, Adolf Hitler, who is possessed by the titular Timewyrm

The issue here, and with much of this book, is that Dicks is trying to do too much in only 234 pages. We get an interesting revolution subplot which doesn't go too far, we have only two moments with the Timewyrm, which is barely relevant to anything, and as if that's not enough, we are reintroduced to the War Lords, the antagonists that appeared in one episode twenty-five years earlier. Because why not.

It's a bunch of ideas that aren't inherently bad in themselves, but could definitely be executed a lot better. Dicks goes quantity over quality, and it really makes the book feel disjointed.

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Top Quote

"In history, the real history, Hitler's Thousand Year Reich lasted from 1933 to 1945. Twelve years and that was it, finished."

"So?"

"The main reason was that Hitler was an incompetent madman. You blow him to bits and maybe a competent madman takes charge. Someone who really can make the Reich last a thousand years."

"first the timewyrm, now super hitler" wtf is this book

Okay, I have a lot of thoughts about Timewyrm: Exodus.

Let's start with the most basic - it is, as many reviews have discussed before me, a huge shift in tone and quality from Timewyrm: Genesys. It is a very obvious distinction to make, and really a bit of a non-achievement for Exodus. Exodus is better than a lot of the worst in Doctor Who, sure, but most Doctor Who stories are to begin with.

Beyond that, I approached this novel with a lot of excitement, which at first seemed to really pay off. With Terrence Dicks writing, and his huge history with the Classic series, I expected the novel to be in capable hands that really understood the Doctor. The first act is exactly what I wanted - it was smart, quickly paced, and even fun in spite of some very serious material. It was an incredibly fast read getting through the first act. The Doctor and Ace find themselves in an alternate Britain controlled by Nazis. Clearly inspired by the Third Reich's plans for the UK had they conquered it, this part is fascinating on so many levels.

The Doctor and Ace really get to shine here in tons of little ways. It really feels like only the Doctor could get in the face of the British snitch police and just intimidate them through sheer force of will, and a nice touch that the actual Nazis were less affected by his charisma. I love the people we meet along the way forming a sort of quiet, but very weak, resistance to Nazi-occupied Britain. All that works really well.

Which is where the second act brings me down so heavily it kind of crushed my spirit and positive sentiment for the novel entirely. Everything built up in the first act is whisked away as we go back in time to a few earlier moments in Hitler's career. Then it becomes this bizarre pseudo-sequel to War Games, of all things, and, oh yeah, by the way, this is supposed to be a Timewyrm novel, so sooner or later you know Ishtar has to get involved somehow.

It feels very clumsy, to be honest. Where as I raced through the first act, I found the second very disappointing, and the last to an outright slog to get through. This wasn't a terrible book, but given that Dicks wrote it and it is well-recommended by others, I can't say I was at all impressed. It was tolerable - fun at times, and even occasionally interesting, but otherwise a disjointed experience with a lot of very strange moments to it. I feel like I could tell the entire time that this book was written by an older author, even by 1990s standards. The way he would describe something like Ace hurling rockets at Nazis as if the explosives were mildly annoying rocks, the way the War Chief and War Lords come back only to be unceremoniously defeated and whisked away from the plot, the way the Doctor is able to impress Hitler and his inner circle so easily - these were all executed by a writer who is a little too old hat for my taste. It is very, very hard to imagine a modern Who writer tackling this material like Dicks did, and I would argue that is a good thing. Tropes and cliches are generally avoided for a reason, you know?

Still, like Genesys, both books have solid moments to them and are each worth checking out if you really want to know more about this era of Doctor Who. If a Doctor Who story were to deal with Nazi stuff, I'm glad they were doing it this way. Hitler befriending the Doctor like many other historical figures had or would was a nice touch - a clever bit of writing that gives the Doctor a lot of agency in the final third of the story, though even then I found this content very rushed and poorly explored by the end of the book.

I did like the cover though, and the epilogue talking about the second printing of Exodus. That stuff was neat and about the only thing I unambiguously enjoyed about Exodus.

Essential reading.

This is how to start the range. Terrance Dicks (a well-loved Classic Who writer/script editor, having written the War Games, Robot, and the Five Doctors) tells an epic tale taking full advantage of the budget-free medium of the written word, and delivers a very good Doctor Who book. It does have some under-the-surface implications about history that make some uncomfortable in the second half, but one can easily read it in a way that dismisses this, and in doing so, you get to enjoy a lot of good in the book itself. That problematic reading aside, a couple of scenes towards the end mischaracterise Ace in my view.

The book's main issue is really that there's an implication that the Nazis only came to power as a result of the scifi interference involved in the book. This can be dismissed with the simple explanation that the interfering scifi element only went to earth because of the events of the previous book, Genesys, and in fact the Doctor himself at various points uses the phrase "getting history back on track." So, logically, this reading doesn't make sense. There are only a couple of lines in the book that really pay any lip service to this reading, and they stood out to me as rather logically nonsensical—as well as being a wrongheaded take on the very human evil of fascism, specifically the racist, nationalist version of it deployed by the Nazis.

The book as a whole is very good, but there are definitely some problematic ideas presented in a few scenes in the early second half. If you can look past that, however, it's a very good read. Personally, I favour the first half of the book over the second—while the second half is something of a historically-based political thriller, the first half is wonderfully fun pulp action in the vein of WWII-era noir films.

Essential background: The War Games (season 6)
Extensive background: The Deadly Assassin (season 14), the Five Doctors (special), the Curse of Fenric (season 26). Technically also Timewyrm Genesys, but frankly that book's so bad it's not worth it.

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In my reviews, particularly of the Virgin New Adventures, I prefer to use a 4-tier system of grading:
Essential reading - If you want to read all the best VNAs, get all the most memorable story arc beats, and generally enjoy the VNAs without having to trudge through the mediocre/bad books, or perhaps even if you just want to pick up a good Doctor Who book with no intention of reading the entire series, look for this rating.
Worthwhile for extensive reading - Not outstanding, but I won't outright tell you to skip it if you want a sense of the VNAs overall. If you're determind to only read the best, skip these, but for a read-through of the series, I wouldn't skip them. They're the worthwhile, good-but-not-amazing books. You'll get a stronger sense of character arcs, story arc beats, and the growth of the VNAs as a range if you read these, but it will also take you a lot longer.
Not recommended - Not very good. If you really want to maximise your experience of the VNAs, you could read this, but it's definitely not advised.
Avoid at all costs - An irredeemable lump of human fecal matter. Do not waste your time with this insult to the franchise.

In addition, I list Recommended background that you may find necessary for understanding the story in full, as well as Extensive background for some additional details you may find interesting.

Virgin New Adventures: Timewyrm Arc

#002. Exodus ~ 10/10

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◆ An Introduction

The Wolfenstein Paradox is my nickname for the scenario wherein the Nazis somehow gained a last-minute advantage and won the Second World War. It’s undoubtedly the oldest paradox in the book and has been prevalent in fiction for years – the aforementioned game series has shown the fascist menace armed with mech suits, and cybernetic bloodhounds with giant cheese graters for a face! They even demolished down-town London and replaced it with a top research facility focused on aviation and space travel.

Doctor Who has also dabbled with this paradox on a few occasions, like when Elizabeth Klein managed to unmake her own timeline during a visit to Colditz Castle. I’ve already reviewed BigFinish’s attempts to showcase a nightmarish future where Hitler was victorious, so let’s see how the novels did.

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◆ Publisher’s Summary

The pursuit of the Timewyrm leads the Doctor and Ace to London, 1951, and the Festival of Britain — a celebration of the achievements of this small country, this insignificant corner of the glorious Thousand Year Reich.

Someone — or something — has been interfering with the time lines, and in order to investigate, the Doctor travels further back in time to the very dawn of the Nazi evil. In the heart of the Germany of the Third Reich, he finds that this little band of thugs and misfits did not take over half the world unaided.

History must be restored to its proper course, and in his attempt to repair the time lines, the Doctor faces the most terrible dilemma he has ever known...

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◆ The Seventh Doctor

Terrance Dicks penned more novelisations than any other author for this franchise, and served as script editor for the entirety of the Pertwee era, so it should come as no shock to you how well written this adventure is. The characterisation of the Seventh Doctor is incredibly fun, if a little bit on the generic side (you could easily switch in any other incarnation and it would make very little difference). Still an improvement over what we got in the first novel though, so well done to Uncle Terrance, because I had actual fun with the Seventh Doctor in ‘Exodus’.

The Doctor is described as a smallish dark-haired man. He wore shabby brown checked trousers, a brown sports jacket with a garish fair-isle pullover beneath, and a jaunty straw hat. He believes that Edward VIII was a vain and silly man, a German sympathiser from his early youth that gave poor old Churchill no end of trouble. He theorises that the Meddling Monk could be responsible for this abhorrent timeline (he’s not, but we will be meeting up with that menace later in this range). The Doctor takes an incredible risk by posing as a Reichsinspektor-General, and it appears to pay off – confronting the commanding officer of the Freikorps, right in the foyer of their headquarters, that takes some guts! He claims that he likes to have his enemies where he can see them, hence why he had the recently humiliated Lieutenant Hemmings selected to be his aide. Considering the Doctor is undercover as a senior officer of the Reich, it’s unsurprising that he has decked himself out with a long leather overcoat and a monocle (which Ace thinks looks ghastly, describing it as “real Gestapo chic”). He manages to get a Free Korps lieutenant arrested, shop the resistance to the Gestapo and get them right off the hook, all in one breath – leading Ma Barker to agree with Ace about him having the cheek of the devil! He informs Kriegslieter that he is a doctor of practically everything. The Doctor claims that when it comes to low cunning and high treason, the Nazis have got nothing on the Time Lords of Gallifrey. He manages to manipulate the forces of the Reich into attacking each other, in a monumental fire-fight at Drachensberg Castle – Goering marches in there with an armoured column of the standard German Army, fighting tooth and nail against the mind-controlled troops of the Black Coven!

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◆ Ace

‘Exodus’ is the first time Terrance Dicks has written for the girl from Perivale, and I think he does an excellent job at capturing her character.

Ace is described as a brown-haired, round-faced girl in a badge-covered bomber jacket. After witnessing a man die, carried off by the strong current of the River Thames, she thinks they should inform the authorities… and is taken aback by the Doctor’s willingness to just not bother (“The crime I’m concerned with now concerns millions, billions of lives. I’ve no time to worry about one squalid little murder”). She ends up having a rather odd nightmare whilst staying at Freikorps HQ, one where swastika-clad Daleks are chasing her shouting “Heil Doktor!” and carrying breakfast trays filled with coffee and bacon! Ace believed that all politicians were slightly weird and suspect.

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◆ Story Recap

London, 1951. People should be visiting the Festival of Britain in their millions, celebrating the end of post-war austerity, and the hope of future prosperity… but something has gone incredibly wrong with time. The Doctor and Ace arrive to find the festival ground adorned with swastika flags, the remaining local populous threatened and bullied by thugs working for the British Free Korps. The Dome of Discovery recounts the historic moment that King Edward VIII was restored to the throne, alongside her royal highness Queen Wallis, and the moment Great Britain was formally established as a protectorate of the German Empire. Somehow, the Nazis were victorious in the Second World War, and Great Britain is now occupied!

The Doctor and Ace soon find themselves heading towards the point where history was diverted, Nuremberg in 1939. They discover an occult society has been operating out of a remote castle in the German countryside, disguising advanced alien technology as black magic, to keep up the pretence and maintain favour with their contact within the Nazi party, one Heinrich Himmler. The leader of the mysterious Black Coven, Dr Kriegsleiter, seems more than a little familiar to the Doctor, but it has been many lifetimes since their paths last crossed.

Are the Black Coven truly responsible for the disturbances in time, or does it have something to do with the Timewyrm trapped inside the brain of Adolf Hitler?

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◆ Time-hopping Action

‘Exodus’ is a novel that never stands still for too long, with the narrative hopping to various times and locations as the Doctor attempts to deal with related instances of alien interference in Earth’s history.

We get to explore an alternate version of London; a bombed-out shell of a city where civilians and resistance members alike are brutally beaten by the British Free Korps, who enjoy the luxuries of their headquarters inside of the former Savoy Hotel.

We accompany our protagonists to Munich, 1923, on the date of Hitler’s failed coup that led to his imprisonment (during which he would write “Mein Kampf”).

We even spend some time at the infamous Nuremberg Rally, where the Doctor manages to ingratiate himself with the most high ranking members of the Nazi party (which also includes a mysterious sorcerer working out of the imposing Drachensberg Castle).

Speaking as someone who has a very limited attention span, the pacing will always be what makes or breaks a novel for me. Not once did I feel bored whilst reading this adventure, not once did I consider skipping ahead a couple of chapters hoping for something interesting to happen. This whole book is exquisitely paced. It’s a real page turner that you simply wont want to put down.

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◆ Occultists in Deutschland

I’d like to move onto the subject of antagonists now, as ‘Exodus’ does a brilliant job at leaning into the Reich’s obsession with matters of the occult. From the moment they made their presence known in 1933, the Black Coven attempted to curry favour with the new ruling power in Germany. Commander-in-chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, quickly became the group’s biggest cheerleader, thus allowing them to become a part of the war effort at the end of the decade. Using a combination of advanced technology and knowledge of the future, they devised a strategy that would lead to a Nazi victory in the Second World War… but why go to all that effort? What do the Black Coven actually hope to achieve from doing all this?

That leads me neatly onto the group’s enigmatic leader, Kriegslieter, whose name just so happens to be the German translation of the title “war chief”. It becomes apparent in the latter half of this novel that it’s a sequel to the very first story Terrance Dicks wrote for the franchise, ‘The War Games’.

The War Chief was a renegade from Gallifrey who allied himself with a race that were hell-bent on conquering the entirety of Mutter’s Spiral. The War Lords attempted to build an army by taking human soldiers from different moments in Earth’s history and subjecting them to a giant death match; the survivors would be used in their conquest of the galaxy. The plan was foiled by the Second Doctor and his allies, and by the Time Lords, who executed their leader and placed their homeworld within a force field – cutting it off from the rest of the universe forever.

The War Chief barely survived the chaos, enduring a failed regeneration that left him disfigured, before being taken back to the War Lord homeworld as a scientific curio. He eventually convinced his former allies that he hadn’t betrayed them, and began work on a new plan for universal domination… which led him to a faction utterly obsessed with taking over planet Earth and uniting it under the swastika. The War Chief knew full well how powerful the Third Reich could be, especially if he increased their ambitions from global to galactic conquest!

Terrance Dicks really managed to up the ante for this sequel to ‘The War Games’, and also make it a lot more horrifying by mixing it with the oldest paradox in the book.

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◆ The Timewyrm

Before I conclude my review of ‘Exodus’, I feel as though I should mention the eponymous villain of this story arc. The character formerly known as Ishtar did have a lot of potential to be incredibly unique and frightening in her first adventure, but expecting John Peel to write anything original that doesn’t make you vomit into the nearest latrine is like expecting pigs to fly. I wondered if Dicks would manage do her justice, but he kind of just sweeps her under the carpet.

The Timewyrm spends the majority of this novel trapped inside the mind of Adolf Hitler, an idea which is equal parts barmy and terrifying. That being said, it does feel like she was only included in this novel to kidnap Lieutenant Hemmings from this abhorrent timeline… who will become a lot more deadly during the final novel in this story arc.

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◆ Conclusion

“Hitler is a magician, a spellbinder. The German people will follow him anywhere, even to disaster.”

Adolf Hitler’s quest for world domination was meant to die with him when his forces lost the Second World War, but what if history were diverted down a different path?

Great Britain has been established as a German protectorate, patrolled by the numerous thugs that have pledged allegiance to the tyrannical Free Korps, all working to keep the fascist war machine at the top of its game. Members of the ever-dwindling resistance are routinely brought in for questioning, and beaten within an inch of their lives. History has been manipulated down a nightmarish path, and it’s up to the Doctor and Ace to put things right.

‘Exodus’ is a real page turner that you simply wont want to put down, thanks to both its exquisite pacing and the huge amount of detail written into every single page. Terrance Dicks will likely always be a legendary figure to us Doctor Who fans, but I am tempted to call this the best thing he had ever written.