Recommended Prerequisites

PROSE: Timewyrm: Apocalypse

TV: Inferno

Timewyrm: Revelation

This book was interesting and entertaining throughout, but like the first three Timewyrm books, it's still just missing something. I absolutely loved the deep dive on Ace. I feel this is the first time we've actually examined her as a character, and the different names for different versions of her throughout her life was so sick. We also saw the Doctor in a bit of a darker light, where he has literally taken the physical manifestation of his conscious and tied it to a tree, like a Christ-like figure. I know Ace and the Doctor have issues going forward and I think their dynamics in this book really add to what will be coming soon.

However, we're also introduced to a number of just really pointless characters. Trelaw, Emily, Saul, etc. At first I thought they must be from a classic series episode that I haven't seen, apparently not. Were introduced to these people like we're meant to know them, then they do nothing for 90% of the book except look around confused st each other. It wasn't the most engaging reading.

Quote

"You live in paradise, you start to wonder who empties the bins"

A bit hard to follow plot-wise at points, but an incredible character study of my personal favorite character in all of Doctor Who: Ace McShane.

Paul Cornell immediately establishes himself as THE Ace writer here, a title that he definitely keeps up as time goes on. Cornell's Ace feels like the most natural development of her character from the TV show -- she's action-oriented and tends towards impulsivity, but is tempered by her kindness, virtue, and intelligence. She's a perfect foil to the Doctor, sharing many of his feelings and emotional experiences (particularly in relation to both of their pasts) while handling them in wildly different ways, bringing them head to head. They're a powerful match here in particular.

Much of Ace's arc here -- having her experience stripped away, her past altered, and finally her entire life replaced with sanded-down, perfect, painless version before reclaiming her self-knowledge and rising up, victorious -- really resonated with me as a queer fan. It brought me to tears at a couple points, which hardly ever happens. Ace's name is a tool of self-determination for her. She's Dotty to the childhood bully that nearly destroys her entirely, she's Dorry when she's been stripped down and reupholstered as a perfect, popular girl, and when she rises up again, bloody knuckled and wreathed in flame and victorious, she's Ace again, the name she picked for herself. Her clothes as well (her jacket of course) show her taking back her power and identity, going from pink sweaters and ungainly stilettos to her own boots and anorak.

She reclaims her identity at the same time that she regains control over her gender presentation. This isn't the really the main plot of the book, but it is the heart of it. It's the thing that allows her to help the Doctor (another character who picked their name for themself...) to save himself, and to become a better version of himself, which in turn allows him to defeat Ishtar once and for all.

Cornell sets the standard for Ace's characterization in this series -- a standard that is sadly rarely met. Revelation should, quite honestly, be considered one of the most successful queer empowerment stories in all Doctor Who media, whether created intentionally or not. This one earns an 8/10 from me.

I have mixed feelings on this novel.  It is easily the best experience I had reading any of the Timewyrm books, but that isn't saying much.  These four books were a tough and slow read compared to pretty much anything Doctor Who I've read before.  Each were like this for different reasons, and in the case of Revelation I found the book a bit dense and meandering, to say the least.  I basically had to force myself through a huge chunk of the middle, and I think that is explicitly because the nature of this story is so vague and esoteric.  Here we travel into the mind of the Doctor, and while there are lots of interesting details to this, I had a very hard time dealing with a story this surreal and untethered to anything resembling reality.  It's hard to have an emotional investment for something kind of just going on entirely in the Doctor's imagination.

Still, this book does have moments.  There's a scene where the Timewyrm has apparently created the embodiment of Death itself, a Grim Reaper that enjoys a dance with the Doctor, killing him in the process.  It's captivating and a little unforgettable, but then it never really comes up again.  Stuff like that are what both works and doesn't work about the book.  The three dead companions - Adric, Sara, and Katarina show up as terrifying demons that haunt the Doctor as figures of guilt.  So a big part of this story becomes about the Doctor reconciling with these things and learning to accept what happened to those he has lost along the way.  That's good, and a part of the novel that really works, but we don't actually end up dealing with the Doctor's feelings much along the way.  It ends up being expressed as Ace freeing a mental picture of the Fifth Doctor, who plants a flower and everything kind of starts to fix itself over time.

There are a ton of other plot points going on here.  Other past incarnations of the Doctor show up, there's a sentient church that gets moved to the moon, and a particularly creepy sequence where a village of people ambush the Doctor, led by a returned Hemmings (a character from the Timewyrm: Exodus novel).  And Ace really gets to shine here.  We delve into her past, contemplate her future, and she digs deep in a way few if any other companions manage to.  Even that rings as a bit flawed, though, as Ace spends a lot of time angry at the Doctor in this novel for reasons that feel forced and unnecessary.  A lot of this stuff I did enjoy, but it felt like a long road to get there with a lot of plot points that took forever to explain themselves.  We don't actually learn we are in the Doctor's head until very near the end of the story, and I think that doesn't help matters as the mystery makes everything we see up until that point feel like a lot of confused nonsense.  All told, I definitely wouldn't recommend the Timewyrm series overall.  Two of the books were outright bad reads and the other two were just barely passable.

i feel like i need to reread this already to understand wtf is happening... the 5th doctor... oh my god

Essential reading.

With this book, I wondered whether I should revise my ratings system. It's transcendentally good; even if you have no plans to read the VNAs as a whole, even if you had no interest in reading any of them, this one is a must read if you like Doctor Who. Even casual fans would do well to read this book, it's that good.

There's a small reference to the very first Doctor Who story, which I have excluded from the extensive background for the reason that it's a reference to one line of dialogue. If you're a new series fan, you may still get the reference, since the line was referenced once again in the Moffat era. I think this, and a few moments and ideas across the Davies and Moffat eras of the new series, were in fact due to both showrunners really liking this book.

The first three books of the VNAs were an attempt to do some more Doctor Who, in prose form. This one explored just what Doctor Who could be, if it was free from constraints of budget and time, and did a story that was aimed squarely at the adults in the audience—not by deploying gratuitous sex or violence, but by being a legitimately mature and nuanced piece of science fiction. And it is absolutely goddamn mental.

Essential background: Timewyrm: Exodus (VNA \#2)
Extensive background: The Daleks' Master Plan (season 3 - 9/12 parts missing), Inferno (season 7), Earthshock (season 19), Remembrance of the Daleks (season 25), the Greatest Show in the Galaxy (season 25), Ghost Light (season 26), Survival (season 26)

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.