What a wild ride. The TARDIS team goes to San Francisco to investigate some time weirdness. The find out that the Doctor's regeneration and the Master's meddling with the Eye of Harmony during the TV Movie left a nasty scar in space-time that is attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Sam falls into the scar is turns into the alternate version of herself we found out existed in her biodata in 'Alien Bodies', a dark-haired Sam that's a junkie and general nobody back in London. The Doctor uses the TARDIS to contain the scar while he figures out how to bring blonde Sam back. This is really, really, really bad for the TARDIS, though, and she'll die if she stays there too long. To make things worse, Faction Paradox is there, and there's a scientist from a higher dimension that wants to pin the Doctor, Sam and Fitz like butterflies, and also a Kraken. Yeah.

Dark-haired loser Sam, you're a star. Like, from her perspective, she's is told she has a 'good twin' who is best friends/maybe more with a hot time traveling alien, and he wants his Sam back. For that, she has to basically die, to 'change' into this blonde Sam. She gets her past rewritten many times, and tries to hold onto her sense of self with all her might. It's not even that she's a better character than our Sam (although the contrast really makes our Sam, blonde Sam, seem really boring and too much of a goodie two shoes), it's more that the conflict she's put into is more compelling than anything that has happened to our Sam in a long time.

It's a story about identity, about how and if your past really defines who you are. The ley lines and the scar are actually the Doctor's exposed biodata (hi, 'Alien Bodies'!), his history, his everything, vulnerable to 'edits' just as Sam's. Faction Paradox is here, but their presence, in the shape of an annoying as hell little boy with a knife, is not that threatening: he's mostly keeping an eye on things, being a nuisance, and stabbing the Doctor. The real danger to the Doctor's and Sam's biodata is Griffin, the higher dimensional scientist that wants to 'make sense' of them, prune the bits of their biodata that makes them too complicated.

For the Doctor, this means straightening out his conflicting backstories. Remember the 'I'm half-human on my mother's side' bit they did in the Movie? Well, it's one of his backstories now, it's the one Eight apparently believes is the truth, and the one Griffin sees in his biodata. And if his past was altered to make him half-human, if that was changed by someone, well, how would the Doctor even know? The Faction Paradox boy taunts the Doctor with this, and the Doctor's answer is a very good 'I don't care, I am who I am now, it doesn't matter if I was different yesterday or not'. I can't not think of the Timeless Child story arc, which resolves similarly when Thirteen (after considerable more angst than Eight) realises she doesn't want or need her memories from before the First Doctor to know who she is today. The whole 'conflicting backstories/memories can be due to malicious agents editing biodata' is a great concept overall, pretty much an in-universe retcon of retcons. A DeRetcon gun.

Dark-haired Sam speed runs Blonde Sam's 'crush on the Doctor' arc: she goes from 'he's insane' to 'still insane, but hot' to 'still hot, but too dangerous and alien to shag'. The Doctor takes it in stride, almost like he expected it. In the back massage scene (which was wooow, go Sam, get him), he's a little bit confused at the beginning, then just goes with it ('Defender of the Laws of Time, Protector of the Galaxy, and the biggest back-rub slut she's ever seen'). When she kisses him, he calmly slows her down and says he's very very old and very very dangerous, and that she should actually be afraid of what might happen to her because she's with him. She lets it go once she reaches the 'still hot, but too dangerous and alien to shag' bit of her development, after Kyra is killed. She ends up connecting (and sleeping) with Fitz then, who is just very human. He thinks that's not a great reason, but it is! She's not talking about biology, obviously. She's talking about emotional reactions, which Eight in particular has been known to 'miscalculate', in a sense. He cares, but he also moves on at breakneck speeds. It's why (spoiler for his BF audios) Charley leaves him. Fitz is a caring, vulnerable guy, and at that moment that counts for a lot.

Poor, poor TARDIS. The Doctor using her to plug the space-time-biodata scar is going to destroy her; it's so sad that he knows and did it deliberately, because he had no alternative if he wanted to save Sam and San Francisco. We're told he can hear her anguished cries of pain and confusion and betrayal throughout the whole story, and that just hurts my heart. If he lets her dies inside the scar, chances are she'll heal it and everything will be alright for the city. It's not 100% guaranteed, though. The Doctor ends up considering long and hard what his life would be like if he were to be stranded in SF in 2002. He can visualise a life, kind of similar to what he had during the UNIT years, with Sam and Fitz, with Grace. He thinks about how he considered it for a hot second in the Movie, when Grace asked him to stay with her. How it would be nice to really know a place completely, to go local like Prof. Joyce, to care about the small things. The idea is not wholly abhorrent, but it doesn't sit right with him, how 'easy' it would be. Moreover, the TARDIS is not just a ship. It's his home, his friend, part of him, as we were just told in 'Dominion'. So of course he wants to save her. The whole scene of them rushing to the alley in the Bug to be with her in what could be her final moments is painful. RIP to the Doctor's purple VW Bug, which gets knackered by the Doctor's absolutely unhinged driving. You were a good car.

As the plot gets closer and closer to a catastrophic end (as in, imminent Kraken attack), the Doctor gets ruthless. He can't sacrifice the TARDIS, getting her out of the rift and putting all his chips in the much riskier plan of using Griffin's collector's box to seal the it instead. Fitz is distraught that he'd chose to put so many people in danger just so he doesn't lose his freedom. The Doctor's answer is a chilling 'I will not be pinned down to one place and time. And I will not lose another friend. I don't have to. I'm the Doctor. I win.' Hi, Time Lord Victorious, good to see you so young! Dark Sam's internal comment to this line is that she's not sure if that means he did it in a moment of strength or a moment of weakness. Nice stuff. He also reduces FP boy to tears in his cold fury. And at the end there, with Griffin and the box? Did he say 'number 18' knowing dark Sam wouldn't know what it was and would have to change into blonde Sam (pretty much kill herself, eh?) to save the day? I honestly think he did, yeah. Cold. In the end, blonde Sam is back, with only a few memories of her time as dark-haired Sam, and the lesson of 'you are who you are at the moment, and you can make your own future'. Plus, she and Fitz are probably not going to go into the romance territory again, thankfully.

While this book was a great time, I do have some problems with the plot. There's always lot going on, a lot of getting captured and escaping, back and forth, a lot of problems jumbled together. It's the scar, it's FP, it's the Henches, it's Griffin, it's the goddamned Kraken. The whole thing with Prof. Joyce (who was this guy? He says he's not a Time Lord, but...) and the stabilizer gadget was a spanner in the works that was too (in)convenient and 'mysterious' too me.

Ah, and don't think I haven't noticed, Blum and Orman! Why did Griffin want Fitz as well as Sam and the Doctor? What was it in his biodata that didn't conform??? I'm also wondering if the reason the TARDIS tried to get rid of Sam in 'Dominion' was to avoid being hurt in this story...

The List of Pain is back! I'm gonna count what he goes through in this book as Torture and as Serious Injuries, as he gets stabbed like 3 times (2 by FP boy, another at the end by Griffin -- at least that's what I understood from all the blood in his shirt).

• Memory Loss:1 (in 'The Eight Doctors')
• Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:8 (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 in this one)
• Torture:3 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', goes through a lot in this one)

EVERYBODY SAY THANK YOU KATE ORMAN AND JONATHAN BLUM