Maybe my expectations clouded my vision, but I sadly didn't love this. I liked it alright, the stuff with the Doctor's character was all fantastic, but the story didn't do much for me.

After the world shattering ending of 'The Ancestor Cell', the Doctor is alone in the late 19th century, maybe even more amnesiac as he was in the movie. It's that flavor of amnesia where information comes to him, but he has no idea where from. "You understand German?" beat. "I suppose I do". He finds it just as weird as the others, with the added frustration of being, as he says himself, burning to know who he is. Compassion dropped him in a time where his personality matches the surroundings (thanks Compassion), so he's not immediately perceived as being overly strange. I wonder if he even has a feeling that he's not human. The Doctor surely knows he's different, but alien? I don't think he does.

At times, there's a feeling of sorrow about him, of loneliness. It catches up with him in quieter moments, when something he sees or hears triggers a hint of a memory in him. Of course, we the readers know him, and we know what he's just been through. I found it a mix of melancholy and relief: thank God he doesn't remember what he did, but I felt somewhat disconsolate to see him so alone and so lost. That being said, these gloomy moments are few; he's busy with the mystery most of the time.

As a new beginning for the EDAs, this works very nicely. The Doctor is an absolute little sh*t, it's amazing. The way he wiggles his way into the dinner at the manor with a mix of charm, good timing, vague statements and just plain lies was masterful. Suck it, psychic paper, suck it, sonic screwdriver. He's incredibly clever in this story. The whole auction scene was brilliant, he's never been more annoying. Give the man an Oscar and a PhD in psychology, he played Nepath like a fiddle. I was giggling the whole time. Still, he's working with less knowledge than he (and we, actually) is used to. A lot of what he does is gut instinct, and that's how he gets poor Dobbs killed. Chilling scene, that. The Doctor's 'callous' responses to death weird out the other characters; Dobbs outright accuses him of having no feelings after they discover Gaddis' body. More interestingly, his responses apparently weird himself out, like he knows they are improper. This is a well established character trait of Eight's, maybe more than in other Doctors: he cares immensely, but once someone is dead he does not dwell on grief, especially not if there's still things to solve, more lives to save. And once the mystery is solved, he wants to move on. He's hyper, he's restless.

There's a few nice parallels between the Doctor and the mud/fire creature (don't they ever get named?). One that caught my eye was during Nepath's presentation: 'Whatever happens after that, whether the form is squashed or broken or dropped or moulded, it remembers how it was'. Ha! Nepath notices this as well, but his observations are slightly off mark. The Doctor is not exactly 'mimicking in order survive' or 'conform to expectations', he's mostly acting like he always did, only he doesn't (can't) know that.

In the end, he kiiiinda kills Nepath (at the very least, he lets him die), after trying to get the man to see reason many times. Nepath 'sold' the world to the fire creature to get his sister back, and by the way he reacts to seeing what the creature has planned for the planet (namely, lots of fire), we know the man is beyond insane. The Doctor tells him again and again that whatever the fire creature brings back it won't really be his dead sister. Funny that, when we think of Fitz. Completely different circumstances, I know, but there is some similarity there. Not that the Doctor remembers it, of course. In any case, the Oncoming Storm kicks the guy into the fire. While in other circumstances he might not have done that, it makes sense for him to do it here, I think. As far as we know, this is the first Doctor Who(TM) situation he's been in since he woke up. He's acting on instinct, he's re-forming his personality, he's pretty angry as well, and he's alone; Professor Dobbs and Reverend Stobbold are not his companions, they're not in it with him, they don't know how he operates, they're too close to the situation at hand. This is not a criticism: the Doctor should be alone in this story, that's what it's for, after all. It's interesting to see all of his personality there, but have him not know how to substantiate it, if that makes sense. He's arrogant and stubborn and gets annoyed when people don't believe him or follow his orders, but he can't go 'I'm hundreds of years old and a Time Lord and those are the Gurlbs from planet Gurlbia, they'll eat your planet like they did Varadia XI and Bitus V' or what have you; ya know, that moment where 'I'm the Doctor' plays in the background. He has all the experience in his head, and it is informing his actions, but he can't provide a single concrete example. Must be incredibly frustrating.

Oh, and the TARDIS!!! Compassion put her in his pocket as a tiny cube. She eats (?) some of the mud-fire thing and grows police box sized again, but still no doors. It hurt my heart when the Doctor was on the verge of remembering her ('it certainly didn't materialise out....'), but couldn't. So now he has a very cumbersome apparently useless bluish box he has to drag around. For the love of God, Doctor, do NOT lose her.

So, what's my problem with this book? The plot. It's maddeningly simple. We spend whole chapters waiting for the Doctor & Co. to realised that uhhh maybe breaking the dam and unleashing the WATER is the best way to deal with the FIRE monsters, right? We know from the start that Nepath is behind everything, we know the creatures replaced Lord and Lady Urton, we know from the first second that Betty is being controlled. There's a fine line between the reader not being given enough information to follow the plot, and the reader getting too much information and figuring things out much faster than the characters. To me, this book fell on the TMI side of the line, and it made the whole reading experience slow and kind of frustrating. The writing is good, so this didn't kill the book, but it made for a more boring story. I felt like it could be a lot shorter as well. Many of the Doctor's little expeditions don't do that much to move the plot forward, they don't discover that much this way. Why do the Doctor and Dobbs go to the mine? So Dobbs can die. They both already know the fire creatures exist, and they didn't have to go to the mine to see the source of the material. Which reminds me: we never really learn what the fire creatures were and where they came from. The Doctor, given his amnesia, probably didn't even entertain the idea of asking which planet the things were from, or anything of the sort. A lot of the action scenes with the fire creatures left me quite confused: do they move in slow motion or something? The other characters could run circles around them! But anyway, the characters. Let's see, Gaddis dies early on, Dobbs follows a bit later, and we're left with Stobbold and the main side character. None of these side characters leave an impression on me, and I gotta say the (3 -- being generous) female characters were really done dirty. Nepath was alright, but again, I couldn't care much for him. This is the Doctor's show, though, so it's not a huge problem that the side characters were kind of dull, but man, I miss Fitz already.

Kudos for Justin Richards for tricking me three!!! times with his fakeout Doctor 'reveals' in the first couple of chapters. Curses! When he does show up, it's very discreet.

I wonder how I should count the memory loss from now on, given that he's not remembering stuff any time soon. Hmm.

Memory Loss:2.5 (in 'The Eight Doctors', maybe 'The Blue Angel', he forgor!!)
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:14 (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 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more in 'Interference' 1&2, broken wrist + near death in vacuum of space + more in 'The Taking of Planet 5', falls from a cliff + shot in 'Frontier Worlds', gas alien attack in 'The Fall of Yquatine', beat up + shot with a crossbow + hit by tonnes of ice cold water here)
Torture:6 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', 'Interference' 1&2, 'The Taking of Planet 5', 'Parallel 59')

TL;DR: The Doctor is basically set to factory mode in this bare bones adventure. Character stuff was marvelous, the Doctor is infuriating and charming in the best ways, but the plot is so simple and the side characters s unremarkable that I got a bit bored.

This one really doesn't shine, does it? And I'm a Dalek enjoyer, so that's saying something. Sarah's first Dalek encounter too, and it was disappointing. It was a bit hard to get through since the plot was so slow. The build up with Galloway being sketchy doesn't really go anywhere, which was strange. Fantastic make up on the Exxilons, though, and some funny Dalek dying scenes. The "mental challenges" of the city were hilarious (ep. 3 ending on a dramatic zoom of the patterned floor killed me); gotta hand to Pertwee for acting it out with such seriousness. I would have loved seeing the Daleks solve that hopscotch challenge (that city was breaking many accessibility laws!), but yes, shooting it was more in character.

Well.

It's done.

Okay. This book is not great, but it's not bad. It tries its best to pick up all the threads that have been going on since Alien Bodies and knot them together into a coherent solution, and, you know, it does that, I guess. It's not satisfying, but it does the job. Bear in mind the date I'm writing this review in. It's the 12th of June, 2025, not even two weeks after 'The Reality War', which was, in my opinion, an infinitely worse finale than The Ancestor Cell could ever hope to be, so I'm not being harsh here.

This is what happens, basically: the Doctor was infected by the Paradox virus in 'Interference', when they changed Three's regeneration to happen on Dust rather than on Earth after 'Planet of the Spiders'. As far as the Faction was aware, that meant that the Eighth Doctor, after having the virus in him for so long, was now pretty much ready for harvest (him losing his shadow was a sign of that), ready to be turned into a Faction agent. According to this book, this means turning Evil TM and Loving Paradoxes. Alright. The thing is, though: he wasn't infected, or at least, he was only 'probably' infected. The TARDIS (the true MVP of the story) was holding the two timelines, the original (where he regenerates on Earth after Metebelis III) and the new, infected timeline. She was stopping the infected timeline from overwriting the original, basically. How exactly? No idea, but she's the best and I believe her power to do so. She exploded though, remember, in the beginning of 'Shadows of Avalon'. That was also partially because of the strain of holding these two realities. But she... uh... was actually holding on even then, in the time vortex... Man, I'm not sure, this part really didn't make much sense. ANYWAY! Remember the universe in a bottle? The Time Lords, not the Doctor, were the ones who stole it from Foreman's World, and to keep it safe they chucked it in the time vortex. They kinda forgot to close the cap, tough, so the universe leaked all over the time vortex (how will we ever the these stains out...). Absorbing some of that somehow turned the TARDIS into the Edifice thingy that appeared on Gallifrey and was causing massive disruptions to causality (basically meaning that the timelines it was trying to hold back from overwriting the correct, untainted one were 'leaking'). These waves were, in turn, drawing the Enemy to Gallifrey for what would be first attack of the war Romana has been preparing them to fight. We get a god awful explanation for the nature of the Enemy that I'm electing to mostly ignore. The Faction want to use this first attack, as Gallifrey is weak, to insert themselves as rulers of Gallifrey, as they believe they'd do a much better job at winning the war and ruling over time in general. When did they become terrorists rather than being a weird little cult? I don't know!

Nothing about this story makes you really cover your mouth and go 'ohhh damn that's clever!' apart from, maybe, the beginning of the temporal attack when the number of walls in the Panopticon and the number of Gallifreys kept decreasing, with only Fitz noticing. The big reveal of Grandfather Paradox, sadly, went in the most obvious way possible: yes, he is an evil future Eighth Doctor, big yawn (although Paul McGann would play him amazingly...). It works, though, boring as it is. And I understood it as that only being true in the infected timeline, so there's that. A bit silly that this much older, much more malicious Doctor can't stop our Doctor, and even sillier that Eight 'wins' because Grandfather just can't physically hold him back from pulling the Kill Them All lever with just one arm. That's what it comes down to, in the end. The Doctor has 3 choices: leave Gallifrey in the hands of the Faction and to deal with the war (everyone suffers forever and dies), try to reason with Grandfather and beg for mercy (would never work, right back to suffering forever and dying), and explode the Edifice, taking Gallifrey, the Faction armada (they have an armada!?), and Kasterborous with it. His only real choice is to destroy Gallifrey, and destroy it he does, fully intending to die along with everyone. He is, however, the narrative's favourite and can never die, in the worst way possible for him.

It's a mess, but I do like that the War is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if Romana hadn't been obsessed with preparing for it, she wouldn't have gone after Compassion, then the TARDIS probably wouldn't have been destroyed (and/or they wouldn't have lost the bottle universe), and the Edifice wouldn't have been created to attract the Enemy in the first place. Romana, in general, thinks she's a girlboss president, but is actually a girlfailure president; Gallifrey is in shambles. She's not 100% to blame, though, because the worst of it is due to Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole just not being very good at writing Time Lords. Really. None of these Time Lord characters felt like Time Lords at all, not even in the simplest things. Why were they sweating, why were they feeling cold, why were they flirting and doing things to 'get girls' and having moms and dads, why were they being strange about looking older/younger than they actually were? It was baffling, really. They don't fare much better as characters, either. From the High Council to the young students, none of these characters were interesting in any way. The book tries a bit harder with Mali, but it doesn't land, and we only really care about Romana because we know her from before. The Faction Paradox people are the same, as it's hard to care about such cartoonishly evil people like Mother Tarra. The exception is Father Kreiner, who we are already invested in.

There's a lot of talk about responsibility and guilt being thrown around, most of it at the Doctor, and I honestly don't think it's warranted. Timon flat out says he started the war by bringing the Enemy to them, as the Edifice came about because his TARDIS was trying to protect him. Okay, but... He didn't know any of that. Faction Paradox went after him and infected him, that's not his fault. The TARDIS protected him, that's also not really his fault, or her fault... If we're throwing blame around, it seems that losing the damn bottle universe was one of the main catalysts for everything, and that had nothing to do with the Doctor. But yes, I do see that he would feel guilty for being used like this, and would feel responsible nonetheless. Things that really are his fault were Compassion turning into a TARDIS (even though the possibility of something like that happening never crossed his mind, so it's a bit unfair), and Fitz becoming Father Kreiner (definitely unfair, but understandable that Kreiner feels betrayed). The Faction keep rubbing his nose in his past mistakes (funny that leaving Susan is placed on the same level as not rescuing Fitz, when the two situations were absolutely nothing alike) and reminding him of moments when just one small paradox would have made everything better until he's reduced to tears; it's 'let's make the Doctor depressed!' hours.

One of the things that do hit in this book are the bits with Father Kreiner, who is such a tragic character. It's heart-wrenching to see the little bits of young Fitz underneath it all. He wants to kill the Doctor for leaving him (it kills me that he's too far gone to see that it was never his intention to leave him, that he never even knew Fitz was in danger...), but one very sincere heartfelt 'I'm so sorry' from the Doctor brings him back. He really wants to trust the Doctor and to forgive him, ouch my heart. And, hello, him stroking the Doctor's face when he asks if he's faking being a Faction agent? Some complex feelings we have there, uh? The whole thing made me so sad. I mean, it's pretty obvious he'd die, but man... He just wanted to be Fitz again... he had forgiven the Doctor... 'Promise? I promise'. Grandfather Paradox, when I catch you!!!

If I had any doubt that our Fitz, the remembered Fitz, really had all the essence of the original, the fact that both he and Father Kreiner say 'he's still the Doctor, no matter what they/we do to him' would do it for me. Fitz doesn't get to do all that much in this book except meet his terrifying alternate self, go through the horrors and spend some time with the worst version of Romana.

Compassion is done diiiirty here. This is her final adventure, and this is what she gets? She barely in it, and spends most of the time being used as an Uber to bring these boring Time Lords to the Edifice and back. Then, for absolutely no reason I can discern, she kind of falls for this random Time Lord guy Nivet. Why??? She had never shown any interest in anyone before! Hell, she doesn't even like Fitz and the Doctor that much! No idea why they did this. In any case, yes, Compassion saves Fitz and this guy from Gallifrey and saves the Doctor from the Edifice. I don't think he'd thank her for it. From what I understood, she is the one who wipes his memory. She then puts him on Earth, late 19th century ('If I had to be trapped in one time and place', as he said in 'Banquo Legacy'), to... heal? To wait? Meanwhile, the TARDIS itself is going to be reforming from her also very bad experiences. Compassion leaves Fitz somewhen around the late 90s, with instructions to find the Doctor in 2001. An interesting bit: Fitz thinks the Doctor destroyed the planet because he was being controlled by the Faction, but that's not what happened. I wonder if that misunderstanding goes anywhere. Anyway. I really don't understand why his two friends would decide to leave the Doctor, an alien very prone to getting in trouble and to getting hurt, completely alone in another planet with 0 memories, right after the hugest traumatic experience possible... Well, let's see where this goes.

TLDR; the War arc goes out with a middling 'pop' rather than a bang, Compassion is gone, Fitz is gone (but coming back), and the Doctor was pretty much abandoned on Earth, TARDIS-less and worse, completely amnesiac, after destroying Gallifrey: the Eighth Doctor's greatest tricks.

One thing that made me laugh was this exchange:

'It's hopeless, Doctor', the Grandfather said. 'I have only to wait and you will be mine'

The Doctor looked up at him, wiped a streak of blood from his mouth. 'You're right. It is hopeless. You're really not my type'

Thank you, Doctor, for the little gay joke just a couple of pages before you kill everyone <3

We're so back! I'll preface this one by saying I love this type of old-timey mystery novel with first person POV; Dracula is one of my favorite books. If you like that, this book works. If you don't, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

There's three mysteries interlocked in this story. One is the fake suicide of Dr. Seavers and the subsequent murder of Richard Harries. This part is a classic whodunnit. Then there's the scifi part with the zombie Harries and the other murders. And then there's the Doctor Who part with Simpson, the Time Lord agent in disguise, and the Artron energy drain that is killing Compassion (and the Doctor, but much more slowly) and that would stop any Time Lord around from regenerating. I'm not gonna lie, the mystery solving part of the novel was not as well done as it could have been, and the scifi was not super tight (the murder in the past was a source of Artron energy? How? Why?) but it was fun to read anyways. One complaint I have is that Hopkinson's and Stratford's voices, as it were, were not distinguishable enough; sometimes I had to stop and check whose POV I was in. Nothing major, but it could have been done better.

Seeing the TARDIS team from an outsider POV was a delight for me. Fitz in particular was a highlight. We usually see him from the author's POV, but we've got his first person POV in 'Frontier Worlds' and 'Parallel 59', and now we've got an outsider view of him. It's fascinating. He comes across as much braver than he thinks he is, as both Hopkinson and Stratford note that he's very quick to react when people are in danger. Compassion is sadly mostly absent again, kind of possessing Susan Seymour only at some points. It would have been nice to see how these people would have reacted to her lovely personality. The Doctor spends half the book missing, but evokes the expected confusion, suspicion and admiration from the people in the house, as he should.

Fitz is firmly in the role of #1 Main Companion, which includes being very worried about the Doctor when he goes missing, hackling the policeman Stratford about it. His breakdown when they find the Doctor 'dead' was a very good scene, it made me honestly clutch my heart. I think this is the first time Fitz truly believed the Doctor was dead. He has been told the Doctor was probably dead before, but this is his first time seeing it. Probably not the last. Poor man nearly throws himself down the hill right after the 'body' to try to save him. I love how their relationship is developing, and how much we can tell they care for each other. Sam leaving and Compassion's coldness really were the perfect catalysts to bring the Doctor and Fitz close together. I wonder if maybe the TARDIS reconstructed Fitz with some slight alterations to make him a better fit for the Doctor, or if this was all a natural development. Hmmmm.

The big consequence of this story is that, thank to stupid, stupid Susan Seymour, the Time Lords have a fix on them now. The next book, 'The Ancestor Cell', is probably about that. Knowing a bit about what is soon to happen, the Doctor's line about how the late 19th century was where he'd choose to live if he had to is a very unsubtle bit of foreshadowing.

Apart from pretending to be dead, the Doctor comes out of this one pretty much unharmed. Well, he does get slapped around and choked by a zombie, but it's not that serious. No list of pain this time.

TL;DR: Solid book that fans of mystery novels will like, and non-fans will probably hate. Don't you love how Doctor Who can play around with so many genres, though? The Time Lords are on our heels now, and things are coming to a head...

After the thoroughly enjoyable 'Coldheart', this was a massive let down. The premise of this book is not bad, a benevolent but misguided alien making a 'perfect future' for humans who helped them. The execution is also not bad, exactly, but it lacks heart. The characters just don't feel alive, and if your characters don't feel alive, I can't really care much about what they're going through. It's not that they are not well constructed, but they way they're written made me feel like I was being told what they were feeling rather than experiencing it with them, if that makes sense. I can't quite put my finger on it, but that was my impression.

The whole rockers vs mods thing was very silly, and boy am I lucky to have a particular interest in the 60s, because without that background this entire premise would make no sense at all. The characters (and damned if can remember a single name) are split into these two factions, fighting a ridiculous fight in this obvious fake city. The scifi part of the story is also made uninteresting by the fact that what's happening is painfully obvious. At no point we wonder if this is really the Earth, or anything of the sort; we know the mods' technician is a captured Maker, because that's the only possible answer. There's no mystery. The whole drama between whats-their-names rocker leader and wife and the mod leader was so circular it made me dizzy. They keep having the exact same conversation every 20 pages. The reveal about her being his mom? I don't care! Could not care less, actually!

It does not help that the TARDIS team is completely split up for most of the book. Compassion is quite literally parked for the whole first half of the book, and does nothing of consequence at all. This was very disappointing after her growth in the past few books. Fitz fares only a little better, because at least he's more entertaining, but even his usually charming presence felt flat. The same can be said for the Doctor, who was doing his best, but wasn't shinning as brightly as I know he can.

Very little to say about this one. Mostly forgettable, with no big consequences to the ongoing story arc that I can see. Fitz is still worried about the Doctor's increasing carelessness with his own safety, the Maker says that the Doctor's future is uncertain until the paradox in his past is resolved, referencing the Faction Paradox virus from 'Interference', but that's it. Boring, boring.

If 'Coldheart' has one fan, I am that fan. If it has no fans, I am dead. This book is solid. Good adventure, great use of the characters, interesting conflicts for everyone involved, and a good amount of humor. Crazy that after 'The Fall of Yquatine' I was saying that I wanted another 'Demontage'-like book, where the TARDIS team is mostly together, in a bread and butter DW adventure, and 'Coldheart' was right there waiting for me with open arms, saying 'I got you'. Trevor Baxendale also wrote 'Janus Conjunction', which I also quite enjoyed, but 'Coldheart' was even better; he does seem to have a thing for sand and for slime, huh?

The first 20 pages or so of this book are a complete delight. Full on, non-stop TARDIS team banter; I think we haven't had so much interaction between the three of them since 'Frontier Worlds'. The Doctor and Fitz ganging up with jokes so bad Compassion wanted to kill them. The Doctor and Compassion ganging up and making smart deductions about their surroundings, Fitz wanting to kill them for showing off. The Doctor falling down a hole, Fitz falling in after him (like in 'Dominion'!) with the great exchange of 'Thought I'd just drop in'/'I knew you'd say that'. Just great stuff, I had to stop myself from highlighting everything. The rest of the book continues on this tone, with the Doctor and Fitz wistfully dreaming of tea, Fitz's 'I've never thought of you as a woman' to Compassion, Compassion wondering if the Doctor is just 'some kind of Gallifreyan freak', and so many more.

Compassion's feelings about not being human anymore are explored more here. She goes on a very interesting tangent after she tries and fails to save a guy's life: she wouldn't have tried, wouldn't have cared, before the transformation. I like that she's confused, and that she's not sure how much of what she thinks and feels is really her and how much is the TARDIS's (and the Doctor's) influence. She thinks about how she can see the same thing in Fitz; how traveling with the Doctor is making him more empathetic, more willing to Do The Right Thing, even at some personal cost. In a strange scifi way, the TARDIS is both Fitz's and Compassion's mother, at this point. She made them: Fitz by restoring him from the Remote, and Compassion by turning her into a TARDIS as well. And then, in an even stranger sense, the Doctor is their father, via his telepathic connection to the TARDIS. Craaaazy to think about this. On top of that, Compassion's feelings about her new found imperviousness and immortality were very interesting to read. Is not being able to die the same as being dead already? This ends up bringing her closer to the Doctor in the sense that he, too, is almost immortal and almost indestructible; the keyword, as Compassion herself notes, is 'almost'. Fitz notices that the Doctor seems to be getting a bit too careless of late, putting himself in unnecessary danger. He considers that maybe he's doing all that to avoid thinking about what has happened: his TARDIS is dead, Compassion was turned into one against her will, and they're in grave danger as runaways from Gallifrey. Not to mention the War, and how he must feel about having to go against Romana, who was his friend. Damn.

I can't remember if the Doctor was ever in this many fistfights before; this book has a lot of action. In true Eighth Doctor fashion, he gets horribly shot in the arm with a crossbow and generally banged about throughout the story. He's written wonderfully. He hypnotizes one man to get information (which is rude, but l always enjoy it when he has to use underhanded tactics for the greater good), and hypnotizes Fitz out of a hangover. He tries to talk rather than fight at every point, but fights when he has to, and tries to save as many people as possible. He's not too soft, though: Tor Grymna uses up all his chances to stop being a dick, and gets eaten by a slug? "Bon appetit", and he's right to say it. Plus, he has several very funny lines, and several very inspiring and deep lines. What more could you want from the Doctor?

One thing I thought the book did really well was to have the Doctor deal mostly with the huge secret alien threat that will destroy the planet while Fitz was dealing with the societal part of things, especially concerning the slimers, Ckeho (whose name I shall never forget, since it is repeated about 5 million times) and Florence. The Doctor, of course, understands the motivations behind the slimers' attacks on the ice mine. He doesn't want to fight them, but he has to stop them from potentially killing the whole city and releasing the ancient giant monster slug in the underground. Fitz is having a less violent time, but is appalled at the treatment the slimers and Florence get. He was a wonderful line where he tells one of the Eskoni that he thinks he's a 'fascist pig and your opinions suck'. The unfairness of it all really gets to him, as they're saving all these people, but their society frankly sucks, even if some individuals are apparently good. The Doctor's answer is that now these people will get another chance to be better, with their help. He'll do the 'easy thing' and fight the monster, and Fitz will make them see the errors of their ways. The Doctor even asks if Fitz wants to stay and keep helping these people to build a better society, but at this point we all know he's not leaving; the camel people can deal with their own problems.

They come out of this story as a better team then they are at the beginning, which is, if nothing else, a great merit of this book. Compassion in particular goes through a little journey of accepting that they're in it together. Well, not accepting, exactly. She chooses that, chooses to keep them with her, to keep traveling as they do, meaning that they will always try to help the people they encounter. Whether her compassion (ha!) is born from herself of from the transformation, who cares? It's there now, she feels it now, and she needs the Doctor and Fitz with her if she wants to help people as she travels. As for Fitz, he's saying things like 'He's the Doctor. And believe me, he's the best', and worrying about him constantly. If it was ever in question since 'Interference' (remembering how Fitz was questioning of his role as companion in 'Frontier Worlds'), he is now really cemented as the Doctor's best friend, ride-or-die companion.

I could frankly keep going. There's a lot to enjoy here. Good book!

Eight goes through it once more! I'm 98% sure that being hit by that amount of water falling from such a height would have vaporized a person before drowning would even become a problem, but I'm glad Baxendale didn't realise that.

Memory Loss:1.5 (in 'The Eight Doctors', maybe 'The Blue Angel')
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:14 (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 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more in 'Interference' 1&2, broken wrist + near death in vacuum of space + more in 'The Taking of Planet 5', falls from a cliff + shot in 'Frontier Worlds', gas alien attack in 'The Fall of Yquatine', beat up + shot with a crossbow + hit by tonnes of ice cold water here)
Torture:6 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', 'Interference' 1&2, 'The Taking of Planet 5', 'Parallel 59')

I wasn't going to write a review because a lot of people already said most of what I think, and more eloquently than I ever could. However, I want to point out that one of the things that really annoyed me was how this was a bad episode of TV. I love Doctor Who, even when the plot is not all that; hell, I adore the Movie, which we know is not really good. The Reality War failed in three very, very important things an episode of a show, let alone a season finale, could not have failed at:

1) It was impossible for the audience to know where the plot was going, because the goal posts kept moving and completely new things kept being introduced at breakneck speed. The Deus Ex Machina of Anita's literal magic door key is an insane offender. How could we know Poppy was 'impossible', why does the Rani need Omega specifically? Because the surviving Time Lords are sterile now, we're informed in an exposition dump. Why is Omega a giant mummy? Because he became his own legend in the Underverse, we're informed in an exposition dump. What are the bone things? They are Underverse creatures, we're informed in an exposition dump. How will we protect Poppy from the wish being undone? Susan Triad will build a Zero Room in... what, 15 minutes? It was all insanely clunky. The vindicator is a laser gun because sure, why not. The Doctor has to die because, you see, he needs to shoot regeneration energy into the vortex. HOW were we supposed to put the pieces together and follow the story if we didn't know basically ANY of the rules? If your audience can't even begin to grasp at what the rules of your story are, the solutions are not going to be satisfying. They need to be laid down, but not in a verbose, technobabbly exposition the second before it becomes plot relevant!

2) Not a single character arc is realized. Belinda has her whole life rewritten, is now not even the same person as the Belinda we met in 'The Robot Revolution'. Ruby also has no arc; she was there for the story and did things (which more than I can say for Belinda), but she did not grow or learn anything. What she got was trust issues and PTSD. The UNIT gang are there, sure. Shirley was saying she was gonna bring down god last episode, but she just ends up being one of the 23489 characters in the UNIT tower. Same with Mel. Kate was given what has to be one of the cheesiest, most forced lines I've ever heard, and then spends the rest of her time spinning the tower around. Anita suddenly had a crush on the Doctor all along, is now pregnant, holds a door open to [checks exposition notes] real time to keep flowing. Rose Noble is there for 0.3 seconds. Everyone keeps hugging and telling each other 'you're the best!' and these characters just do not feel like real people. The Rani gets eaten alive by Omega. There is no character arc for anyone. The closest we get is with the Doctor himself, who had a bit of theme of looking for family going on in this incarnation.

3) It doesn't know who its audience is. There's things here for kids, there's things for regular scifi fans, and there are things for superfans. The problem these aspects are not playing together to make this an episode many different people can enjoy: they are playing against each other. The kiddy bits feel more embarrassing than fun, the fanservice to Classic Who is confusing, makes the plot needlessly contrived, and the scifi has wand-wavy, arbitrary rules. The pacing is also all over the place, with some fast action suddenly followed by strange, long scenes of 10+ characters standing around listening to long winded explanations.

I'm gonna stop now. It's been almost a day I just keep getting more and more frustrated with this episode. What a damn shame.

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ETA: I don't wanna be all downer here! Here's some assorted things I liked: Anita's 'I'm just the hotel manager' jokes; Kate's disgusted 'I'm wearing tweed'; Ruby fighting to get people to believe her about Poppy; all the set designs and special effects (yes, even mummy Omega); Ncuti's lovely, tender acting in the quiet scene where Belinda is 'reminding' him of things she 'told' him (gods, I wish we had more time with him). And Billie? I'm optimistic :)

This is... a book. That I read, I'm pretty sure. I can't tell you much more, though. This book is just a huge coincidence after another moving a boring plot along somehow, with bad side characters, and weak characterization for the Doctor and Fitz.

The Doctor decides they need to fit Compassion with a randomizer to help them give the Time Lords the slip. Compassion says she doesn't want to. He thinks it's for her own good, and gets one anyway. Instead of doing the normal thing and trying to convince her, he just plugs the thing in her, and it all goes to sh*t. It hurts her a lot, and it won't come out, and she is, of course, absolutely furious at the Doctor. He tries to use his big puppy eyes and apologize, and he is genuine, but goddammit what possessed him to do it in the first place? Then the planet they're in is attacked, the Doctor escapes to an orbiting station and Compassion takes Fitz and goes back in time a month, and dumps him there.

I miss Fitz. Remember Fitz? Last time he was really done well was in 'Frontier Worlds'. He was fine in 'Parallel 59', pretty much invisible in 'Shadows of Avalon', and here there's this guy saying he's Fitz, but I'm no buying it. He's more sad here than pathetic and silly, and that's not right vibe. Fine, I'm being dramatic, he's okay. But not nearly as funny and entertaining as I know he can be. Meets the most beautiful woman on the planet, falls for her, then spends a month in jail (congrats on your first imprisonment, Fitz!) waiting for apocalypse day. It's implied it's an open causal loop flavored time travel mechanic we're using this time around: Fitz tries to avoid a paradox, but in the end he and Compassion are responsible for getting Arielle infected, and for activating that machine thing she built. But then again, it is also said multiple times that had it not been Arielle, it would have been someone else. So maybe they did change something. So this whole planet being wiped out was either our TARDIS dream team's fault, or it was random. It being random would make more sense for the 'the universal process is indifferent to the individual', 'there's no predestination' theme, I think. Anyway.

Let's talk about Arielle, the most beautiful woman in the Galaxy or whatever (in my mind she was played by Gisele Bundchen). The whole backstory about her good looks goes nowhere, by the way. I think it's just there so the author can say how effortless and unassuming she is, and how that makes her ever prettier or some other nonsense. The interesting bit is that she's running away from her horrible boyfriend who happens to be the President. She then happens to run into Fitz, who happens to have found a truly miraculous job as bartender. Fitz sees hot lady and becomes almost instantly enthralled. He says he isn't, and I don't know why he's lying; he spares one thought for Filippa ('Parallel 59'), but that's it. He's known Arielle for a day is once again considering leaving the Doctor to stay with her. This is getting old already. I don't mind him fancying people, I like that, actually. But can we drop this 'oooh is he going to stay behind this time with the lady?'. At least space these instances more than 2 books apart. Poor Arielle gets possessed and dies horribly so President Vargeld and Fitz can be sad about it.

Vargeld (by the way he's described as looking like the Doctor, I guess Nick Walters is casting one of the McGann brothers to play him) is a dick. From his POV, he's a great boyfriend that made only one small mistake: hitting Arielle when she said she didn't want to marry him. That's a huge mistake, btw, Vargeld. From what Arielle tells Fitz, however, he was dismissive, jealous and patronizing all the time, and was in love with her looks, not with her. His 'boohoo I can't live without her' shtick, therefore, is grating and made me detest him probably more than the author intended.

The Doctor is way too patient with Vargeld, and with the whole senate for that matter. After his big decision in the last book to keep interfering and doing what he does best, he was almost passive here. Offers his advice, but doesn't push it, which was mind boggling since he had a very simple solution to the Omnethoth (ridiculous name) that he could have implemented if he'd just broken into a room or two. I love you, Doc, but this was the time to be sneaky and fix things, not make grand speeches to people who are way too hurt and way too close to an all-out war for a few pretty words to have an effect. By the way, was it just me who thought maybe this 'Omnethoth' was a Time Lord weapon? I'm basing this on the Doctor being able to 'reprogram its DNA' super easily, and how he says '[the Omnethoth], ahem, thought I was a master'. Why the 'ahem'? Probably completely irrelevant anyway.

Compassion's attempts to master the randomiser are interesting. She's besides herself with fury at the thing, nearly murders Fitz, really does murder a guy she thought could get it off her. We don't spend much time with her, but we see that, in contrast to Fitz, who decides not to try to interfere lest he causes the destruction of Yquatine, Compassion is all for changing things. Her little appearance in the Anthaurk world, however, was just kind of silly. She stands up and goes 'how about no war!'. Nice that she's using the chameleon circuit, though, that was a nice little set up for her using it in the end to masquerade as Vargeld. After that, Compassion spends a looong time in the vortex trying to get back to Fitz and the Doctor. She finds Fitz and basically stops the war by herself like a boss, while the Doctor is off screen (dead, they believe) reconfiguring the Omnethoth. Interesting that she was 100% sure the Doctor was dead. Why was she not detecting him? Their connection is telepathic; surely if he was working on the Omnethoth he was conscious? The Doctor does say he thinks their connection is weak and they might be incompatible, as Time Lords and TARDISes go. Maybe that's part of it.

The dynamic of the team at the end is: Fitz is extremely upset at Compassion for the aforementioned attempted murder and for dumping him on a doomed planet, Compassion is extremely upset at the Doctor for putting the randomiser in her without consent, and the Doctor is just very sorry and glad they are all alive. Fitz forgives her, she forgives the Doctor, and they go their merry randomised way.

One complaint I have at the moment: I really miss Fitz being in the same story as the Doctor. They've spent most books since 'The Taking of Planet 5' separated for most of the plot, the last two thinking the other was dead. Compassion as well, but the Doctor and Fitz are more fun together, and I'd like some humor, please; Fitz hasn't been properly funny since 'Frontier Worlds'. I want something like 'Demontage' again.

One line I must point out:

"You can't blame the President, Doctor. How would you feel if your home planet was destroyed?"

Yeaaah, I wonder!!!

The Doctor nearly dies when he traps the Omnethoth in his lungs, I think, although he says it was fine... Well, I think it counts.

I've just realised: should I be counting 'The Blue Angel' as memory loss? I'll half count it.

Memory Loss:1.5 (in 'The Eight Doctors', maybe 'The Blue Angel')
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:13 (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 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more in 'Interference' 1&2, broken wrist + near death in vacuum of space + more in 'The Taking of Planet 5', falls from a cliff + shot in 'Frontier Worlds', gas alien attack here)
Torture:6 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', 'Interference' 1&2, 'The Taking of Planet 5', 'Parallel 59')

Inside of this book there are two books: one is about the dream kingdom of Avalon and their war, the other is about Compassion being turned into a TARDIS. Book one? I could not care less. Book two? Hell yeah.

Picking up right where 'Parallel 59' left off, we learn the Doctor and Fitz stayed on Skale for a while, helping with the rebuilding of the planet after the massacre. Compassion was acting so cold and being so unhelpful in general that the Doctor shipped her to Earth because she was annoying him, which is objectively very funny. He gave her a little list of things to do while she was there, which included 'make friends', 'kiss someone properly', and 'fall in love'. That's his way of begging her on his hands and knees to please form some sort of bond with people. Doesn't work. Anyway, back on Skale, there's a second where we (and the Doctor (and Fitz himself)) are quite sure Fitz is going to stay behind with Filippa. The time to say goodbye comes and Filippa just asks him to visit sometime and kisses him goodbye. He's relived, but it is sort of implied he is planning on coming back to her eventually. I frankly doubt we'll ever see that place or that woman again. I'm just glad he's not pulling another 'Revolution Man' on us, and so is the Doctor, who was probably internally panicking over the prospect of traveling alone with Compassion (like he does in 'The Blue Angel'). The Doctor and Fitz head back to Earth to pick up Compassion, and the TARDIS explodes immediately upon landing, stranding them + the Brigadier, who was around, in Avalon.

We are finally told why the TARDIS kept going to strange, time-space distortions on Earth (in 'Unnatural History', 'Dominion', etc.). As the Doctor theorizes, 'All those strange realities were her trying to escape her fate, trying to convince herself that [...] she wasn't going to die when she hit the gap between worlds.' And why did she follow the dimensional disturbance in Drebnar ('Frontier Worlds') and the Mechta shared dream ('Parallel 59')? She knew what was coming, and was sort of preparing herself to 'face her death'. Now, I know the TARDIS is not really gone for good, because there are 1231920 other stories set after this where she's alive and well, but the Doctor cannot sense her at all, and we have no reason to believe she's not dead. Sad!!!

The Brigadier is here and he's very sad as well. Sadder, even. His second wife Doris (not Kate's mother, by the way) died tragically recently, and the Brig, repressed man that he is, has not allowed himself to properly grieve and recover from it. He is so deep in it that he's suicidal. I didn't read the VNAs or saw much of him outside Classic Who, so seeing him like this was not a fun time. Kind of similar to seeing an older, jaded Jo Grant in 'Genocide'. Paul Cornell, the author, does his best in exploring the Brigadier's pain throughout the book, and although gloomy, this was one of the best parts of it. The Doctor and the Brigadier butt heads as never before, as the Brigadier kiiiinda starts a war with the fairy Silurians of Avalon, the Fair Folk. All their scenes together are quite good, as the Doctor is desperately trying to de-escalate the situation, while the Brigadier stoically insists there is no other solution.

The Doctor, in a sense, is in a similar position of despair as the Brigadier. The war breaks out, and he's stuck in Avalon, fighting with the Brigadier, and not knowing where Compassion and Fitz are, or if they're even alive. We know he gets antsy without the TARDIS, and he still has a lot on his mind from his recent encounters with Faction Paradox. He doesn't know what they did, but he knows they did something to him ('Interference'). 'While Faction Paradox existed, there was no reason for him to do anything', as they can change history around him and undermine all his efforts. The Doctor's feeling 'sick at heart, incapable', but he says he 'won't be distant from [himself]', and that he's going to find out whatever is hiding in Avalon, whatever must be found to stop the war, and save everyone. He makes a point in this story to interfere anyway and not let the possibility of Faction Paradox or whoever else changing history stop him from doing what he thinks must be done. By the end of the story, he's come to terms with it. As he puts it, 'Just because nothing is written in stone doesn't mean I can stop kicking over the statues!' So he will keep doing his bit, as always, no matter what.

I must say I do not vibe with mystical-fairy-Arthurian flavored fantasy in my Doctor Who. Avalon and its politics are incredibly simplistic, and I honestly could not get attached to any of the side characters in this book. Not Queen Mab, not her adviser, whatever his name was, not anyone. Yes, this book has the Doctor riding a dragon against fighter planes, and yet I was yawning. Mab's little insta-crush on the Brigadier was also quite strange. I'm glad he begins to heal by the end of this story, when he realizes things are only really worth something because they eventually end. He stays behind in Avalon; I hope he has a good holiday.

The big thing that happens in this book is Compassion turning into a TARDIS. Which is insane, by the way, but does make sense with everything that has happened recently. The TARDIS saying she could be so much more in 'Frontier Worlds', the scanner blowing up in 'Parallel 59', the war TARDISes and Marie recognizing her in 'The Taking of Planet 5'. Basically, it's the Doctor's fault. I don't think there was any way he could have possibly predicted this fantastic development, so I can't really blame him. They say it all started in the Obverse ('The Blue Angel'). The Remote absorb information, so filtering signals to Compassion's receiver through the TARDIS programmed her with 'everything about the TARDIS'. Now, this could all be fine (more or less), as Compassion is pretty okay with being a type 102 TARDIS once the change happens. The problem is that Romana III, President of Gallifrey, wants to breed her like a dog to make 103s (like Marie) for the war against the Enemy. Romana!!! Our friend Romana! I'm scandalized. She sent two agents to Avalon to make sure the change happened according to history and to bring Compassion back to Gallifrey, even if they had to off the Doctor to do it. I cannot express how much I hated Cavis and Gandar, the Time Lord interventionists. They were like a Gallifreyan Team Rocket, but more evil and extremely unfunny. They shall not be missed. The Doctor is obviously livid (due to plot reasons, he's yelling at her while soaking wet and shirtless, which made for a funnier scene than intended), so he does the good old trick of stealing a TARDIS and running away with his companions; it just so happens that one of said companions is a TARDIS. So now we're on the run from the Time Lords, and isn't it sad to have to think of Romana as an enemy...

Final thoughts: amazing developments for the story, massive change in the status-quo, but otherwise not the a very compelling story, and I frankly don't care for Avalon at all. The character bits with the Brig and the Doctor were quite good, but we got very little of Compassion, who is basically another person by the end of this book, and Fitz does and says next to nothing throughout.

There was one haunting line in this book that I have to point out. The Doctor is putting his life on the line to prove a point to the Brigadier, he's about to be shot down and thinks

Maybe next time he'll be someone who could control his destiny, and not have to make this gestures.

Knowing how Eight dies and who he becomes, this is heartbreaking.

Not a fantastic book, but there's a lot of interesting ideas, and it's very competently written. Way too many side characters, though, and some of the scifi elements weren't very clear. Basically, the TARDIS lands on a strange ship that immediately forces the team to scram into two separate pods: the Doctor and Compassion in one, Fitz in another. The Doctor and Compassion are shot out into space back to the planet the ship was orbiting, Skale, while Fitz remains there. So the Doctor and Compassion end up arrested as spies and saboteurs and maybe aliens while Fitz gets trapped into a dream, communist land, Mechta.

The whole thing with Mechta was pretty interesting. We, the readers, can figure out pretty quickly that Fitz is not in a real place, since the time he perceives doesn't match with the time in Skale, and everyone at Facility One is being very cagey about telling the Doctor where Mechta is. I think this is how it works: Parallel 59 (basically a country in Skale) developed this project where these ships called Bastions were sent into space, forming a mesh around the planet. The idea is that the mesh would protect them from their alien neighbors in Haltiel (who they've never interacted with) and also place all space travel under 59's control. These Bastions need a human brain to be controlled. Not people, mind, but live human brains. Skale's tech is based on these bio-interfaces. 'Flesh-tech', the Doctor calls it. It's not nice at all for the brain involved. These Bastions are full of 59's 'undesirables', criminals and marginalized people, being kept there basically as spare batteries. Once you're used up, your pod is sent away into space. Or, alternatively, down to the planet as a bomb. While you're in the Bastion, you enter this gestalt shared dream place, Mechta, where things are honestly pretty good, a real communist utopia. That's where Fitz is, living life as normal, not knowing where the Doctor and Compassion are, but kind of waiting for them to show up and get him.

Fitz's side story is... fine. He, of course, starts an affair with a married woman as soon as he gets there, then dumps her when he meets Fillipa, this book's designated Mandatory Love Interest for Fitz. He behaves like a complete dick and ends up lying and  cheating on her. I love Fitz, but this was not a good look. We know he's attracted to everyone and falls in love 5 times a day, but c'mon. There was no real reason for him to cheat on Fillipa apart from Denna being gorgeous. It didn't even make that much sense, given how things ended up with Alura in 'Frontier Worlds': I'd expected him to be more careful with these girls' feelings from then on. He does regret his mistakes and constantly puts himself down for them, does the 'I'm such an idiot loser' bit, so it's not like his behavior isn't questioned or addressed. It very much is, and he does seem to learn from it, but I'm just not sure how necessary it was. Otherwise, his part of the plot was pretty slow, almost boring.

The Doctor is in his natural habitat, i.e., a prison cell surrounded by people that want to torture him for both information and for medical proposes. Compassion escapes with some revolutionaries when she gets a chance, but he stays put since he is in the correct place to find out what the hell is going on and how to get Fitz (who he's very concerned for) and the TARDIS back. He does his bit of being non-threatening and very, very intelligent, offers his to help the people at the Facility to fix their mesh thingy to get the info he needs. There's a lovely scene where he's taken to the Facility's meeting and just keeps on being cute, clever, and exasperating in equal measures. Yve, one of the billions of side characters, thinks 'this performing little puppy could bite if provoked'. Yep, that's my guy! Biiiig fan of his fake heart attack as well. This man has 0 respect for his own body, he'll do anything to himself if it moves his plan along. Cute how worried he was for Fitz; he's still guilty about what happened in 'Interference' (not that it was in any his fault...) and has some left over anxiety from the Lost Sam arc. Separation anxiety, I guess? He's okay with Fitz being away so long as he knows exactly where he is and how to get to him, like in 'Frontier Worlds', but not knowing gets him antsy. Speaking of the Doctor's mental illnesses, this book is one example of how his claustrophobia only shows up when the writers deign to remember he has it, and its only as strong as they want it to be. He was only mildly panicky in the escape pod at the beginning of the book, is mostly unconcerned with being in a prison cell for most of the book, and is not particularly affected by the tiny pod he and Compassion are crammed into to go back to the Bastion. I get that they don't want him to be incapacitated, sure, but I'd appreciate some consistency, or some mention of how he's dealing with it.

Meanwhile Compassion's with the rebels, who want to shoot the whole mesh down. They know they can't possibly save those millions of people used to power it, so that's the next best thing. Compassion is not as great as she was in 'Frontier Worlds', but she's still pretty good here. She convinces the rebels the TARDIS can be used to save those people, if they can get the Doctor. She notices she's actually acting as the Doctor's spy, gathering information from the rebels in the hopes it'll be useful to him. She puts that down to the Doctor's and the TARDIS's influence, saying 'she'd obviously been picking up TARDIS vibes for too long -- it was trying to make her into an 'old girl' too'. She also notes that she doesn't really think of the Doctor as a friend, more like 'a function of the universe she could respond to'. She once again says that she feels like she's changing, and it's starting to scare her. She's been having headaches. When the people at the Facility tried to scan her, the machine blew up sky high, but the same machine had no problem scanning the Doctor, 'complex space time event' that he is. She has a freak out after that as well, seems very scared for no discernible reason. The Doctor was confused, and so was I. Compassion was absolutely instrumental at the end. For all that the Doctor doesn't want her to go around receiving transmissions from just about anything, they would all have died if she hadn't been able to interface with the Bastion's systems.

The ending was really not what I had expected. I definitely didn't think there'd be an attack by Haltiel. It shook things up in an interesting way, 100% stopping any plans they had to save the people in the Bastions using the TARDIS. They take control of the mesh and just start bombing the planet. Skale fires back, once they're convinced there's actual aliens attacking, but Haltiel trounces the place and go back home happy. Basically, lots of people die. Lots and lots and lots. Full on disaster.

The main moral question they raise in this story was whether rescuing the people in Mechta was the correct thing to do. Compassion doesn't think so: Mechta is a good place, where they have good lives. Why force them to come back to the planet that cares so little for them they were being used as human batteries? The Doctor disagrees: there's people on Skale that still care for them, and they have the right to live a real life, however difficult real life is. Well, in the end, no one gets to choose anything, as Haltiel takes the choice from them. In the end, Compassion and the Doctor manage to save 7 people, including Fitz, and that's it. Fillipa is one of the survivors, to Fitz's immense relief. They book ends as the Doctor is taking the TARDIS back to Skale, so it's a bit of cliffhanger, I guess, to what Fitz is gonna do next. Not that I had any doubt he's staying.

Some more torture for our dear Doctor. Very mild, by his standards, but torture nonetheless. There's a few scrapes as well, but nothing major

Memory Loss:1 (in 'The Eight Doctors')
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:12 (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 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more in 'Interference' 1&2, broken wrist + near death in vacuum of space + more in 'The Taking of Planet 5', falls from a cliff + shot in 'Frontier Worlds')
Torture:6 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', 'Interference' 1&2, 'The Taking of Planet 5', 'Parallel 59')

I quite liked this. Better than Peter Anghelides​' previous EDA, 'Kursaal', in that it wonderfully characterizes Fitz and Compassion as well as the Doctor. The plot itself is nothing novel: evil CEO abusing the environment and alien species for the most basic of evil CEO goals, eternal life and wealth. A classic, really. But hey, it works, even if the resolution was a piece of extremely unrealistic business deal.

The merit of this book is in the characters and in the prose style. It's very dynamic, funny, and vivid. Maybe too vivid, even. Fitz gets to be the narrator for his and Compassion's underground agents subplot working at Frontier Worlds Corporation, and boy does he know how to tell a tale. His descriptions of Ellis, his horrible, disgusting boss and of Sempiter's transformation were so detailed I found myself getting kinda nauseated, and I'm a person that had meals watching 'Hannibal'. If you need any more reasons to like Fitz as a character, him choosing to give himself and Compassion the aliases Frank and Nancy Sinatra certainly count; that reveal got a very honest snort out of me.

As he said he would at the end of last book, the Doctor found a way to give Fitz and Compassion a 'mission' that would force them to cooperate with each other. He really wants Compassion to become a more compassionate (ha!) person, show more emotion, become more human, and believes pairing her up with the painfully human Fitz is the perfect way to go about it. Plus, he's using the TARDIS to filter the signals that Compassion gets to her receiver to protect her from malicious influences, and encourages her to forgo the receiver whenever possible. She clearly doesn't want to, but goes along. It's manipulative, and he's not subtle at all about it. As usual with the Doctor, his hearts are in the right place. On the one hand, yes, she can be heavily influenced by outside forces to behave in certain ways. He wants her to find herself, to find who she is after lifetimes of being bombarded by signals. On the other hand, that's her culture. She's human, but she's Remote. Does he have the right to keep her from the signals? But then again, she chose to travel with him, and he does have to make sure she can be trusted. After all, she can be a liability in their adventures if he can't trust her to be on his side. Complicated stuff, interesting stuff.

Compassion's characterization here is phenomenal. We get why she's traveling with them. She wants to see more of the Universe and to learn, to get more 'facts and opinions', as she puts it. She clearly enjoys (as much as she can enjoy anything) these adventures, and is taking her part in the Doctor's plan very seriously. Its heavily implied that being connected to Frontier Worlds' computers literally nourishes her, and it's clearly the moments when she feels best. Her little Oscar worthy acting moments were a great addition, as they really drive home that Compassion is cold not because she doesn't know how feelings and relationships work, but because she really doesn't give a f**k. Does she even care for Fitz and the Doctor as friends? Not really! As people? Who knows! It's interesting then that she's very loyal to them. She follows the Doctor's plan to the letter even when she's angry at him, and protects Fitz both physically and emotionally during their trek in the forest.

We finally get to spend some relatively quiet time with Fitz after the whole ordeal that was 'Interference'. In short, the Fitz we have now is a 'remembered' version of the original Fitz, rebuilt from Kode by the Doctor and the TARDIS. He tries his best to move on from it. He's here now, and it's not like he can change what's happened anyway. His mother's dead and he has nothing waiting for him in the 60's except maybe the police. At best he has Sam in the 90's. But is that even true? Can he say 'his' mother's dead, when he's basically just a collection of the original Fitz's memories in a completely remade body? He says even his dreams are different, too ordered. We find out here that so is his (and Compassion's, who is also a remembered version of the once human Laura Tobin) DNA. It's human DNA alright, but it's too 'clean', manufactured. Completely cutoff from everything he knew and was, the TARDIS and the Doctor are really all he has. However, he kind of resents, or fears the TARDIS a bit. She brought him back, but what if she changed him? As for the Doctor, well, Fitz has come to care for him and really trust him. There's a nice scene at the start of the book after the Doctor falls from a goddamned cliff (more on that later) where Fitz really just wants to hug him to comfort him, but can't bring himself to do it. Later, he confides to Compassion that he thinks the Doctor only 'tolerates' his presence, that he never chose him as companion. Bullshit. For one, the Doctor invited him to come with him and Sam at the end of 'The Taint'. Maybe out of pity, maybe as someone to be a friend for Sam, but invite him he did. And just very recently he brought Fitz back from the dead. He didn't exactly coerce Kode into going back to being Fitz, but he did strongly encourage it. Side note, there's a parallel here between Kode and Dark-haired Sam from 'Unnatural History': she did not want to, but had to turn back into blonde Sam, while Kode very much wants to be Fitz again. Anyway, Fitz basically feels like he cares for and needs the Doctor more than the Doctor does him.

Another huge thing he has going on here is his relationship with Alura. We know she's gonna die from the second we meet her, fridged as only a 90's love interest can. While Compassion was locked in their mission, Fitz couldn't help but form connections. They were left there by the Doctor for months, after all. Fitz is very aware that once the Doctor comes back he's going with him. He's just having fun with these people on Drebnar; once he's gone, he won't think of them again. 'Frank Sinatra' is just a character he's playing. But poor Alura doesn't know it's all a game. He gets her killed by involving her in his adventure, which he should know by now can get very dangerous very fast. Later, when her killer comes after him, Fitz is put in a classic 'villain is nearly falling to their death, you can save them by grabbing their hand' situation. He makes the executive decision to let go. We can spin it as self-defense, since the guy was trying to kill Fitz and Compassion, and probably would have killed Fitz if he had helped him, but well. Fitz is not happy about it, but doesn't regret it either.

Compassion and Fitz are a great duo. Her no-nonsense attitude is a great contrast to Fitz's, as their polar opposite personalities and strengths make their interactions very interesting to follow. There are several very good scenes with the two of them. Compassion kills Ellis to save Fitz's life, and gives him a very good pep talk about how the Doctor both likes and needs him, since Fitz can see the big picture and the human side of things better than she and the Doctor can. She later reveals in an ice cold tone she said those things because it's 'what he needed to hear'; more of her great acting in display. She doubles down by warning him that the Doctor is not perfect, that Fitz dotes on him too much, and that he should be aware that they're both likes pets to the Time Lord. 'He's got you to sit up and beg, like a well-trained dog. Well, he won't change me.' was a fantastic line. She's very much aware that the Doctor is teaching her morality, and she is aware that she's changing, but as she puts it, she doesn't 'have to let [Fitz] and the Doctor decide what that change is'. Fitz is incredibly frustrated at her, but one thing he does get out of the whole ordeal is that he's glad he's a dumb, normal human with dumb normal feelings, not someone cold like Compassion, even if that means he will get hurt by things like Alura's death in the future.

So, did the Doctor's social experiment work? Hm. Both Compassion and Fitz kill someone in this story; neither breath a word of it to the Doctor. Or maybe Fitz does when he's telling him what happened? Either way, the Doctor doesn't comment on it. The TARDIS gets to tell the Doctor (in a very nice dream sequence) what she thinks of his companions: 'The boy hates you for knowing how much he cares. The girl hates you for wanting her to care. They could both be so much more...' I don't know what that means, but it sounds prophetic.

A few more thoughts on the Doctor: I really like his characterization. Anghelides' also did a great job with him in 'Kursaal', and I'm glad he got it right again. In true Eighth Doctor fashion, he gets horribly hurt within the first 20 pages of this story by falling down a cliff and then getting shot. A silly thing that I adored was this bit, when he's hacking into Dewfurth's account.

'Welcome, Mr. Dewfurth', said the display panel.

'Thank you', the Doctor said to the text on the screen, giving it a halfbow. 'I'm very pleased to be here, you stupid insecure system'

He escapes the torture routine (in the 'medical' flavor rather than the 'information' flavor this time) by very unexpectedly headbutting Sempiter in the freaking face. Him being livid at Fitz and Compassion for burning down the Darkling crop made for a pretty entertaining scene, starting with this great opening line: 'As plans to hamper the program goes, I'd give it less than one out of ten. In fact, I wouldn't even use vulgar fractions, and believe me I'm in the mood for saying something extremely vulgar at the moment'. Lol.

If I must complain, I'd say Sempiter could have been a better villain. He wasn't really menacing enough, especially after the Doctor escapes from him so easily. The resolution of having the rival corporation, Reddenblak, buy out Frontier Worlds was, as I said, a bit too simple. I'm no businessman, but the Doctor is impersonating Dewfurth with just an ID card and selling his shares of the company to Reddenblak seemed extremely unrealistic. I like how Fitz questions whether Reddenblak is going to be any better than Frontier Worlds was, and I like that the Doctor's answer is just that it was what he could do at the moment to save that planet. What happens now is out of the hands of the people of Drebnar.

The list of pain, as usual, with probably the record for how fast the Doctor gets hurt:

Memory Loss:1 (in 'The Eight Doctors')
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:12 (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 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more in 'Interference' 1&2, broken wrist + near death in vacuum of space + more in 'The Taking of Planet 5', falls from a cliff + shot here)
Torture:5 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', 'Interference' 1&2, 'The Taking of Planet 5')

We're really on a roll with these past few books. This one is stellar, if a bit convoluted and too dependent on exposition. We have the return of the Celestis and more information on the War against the Enemy and what it has done to Time Lord society. Delicious, delicious lore, and some nice character moments for the team as well.

Putting things in order, One's and the Hermit's goal is to destroy Mictlan, because Mictlan might make the Swimmers (enormous predator universes) become aware of our universe and come and Get Us. Their complicated plan goes more or less like this:

• They create the version of history where Lovecraft's Elder Things actually exist and live on prehistoric Earth.
• War-time Time Lords come to prehistoric Earth disguised as Elder Things, unaware that those things should not exist, as part of a mission to break the timeloop around Planet 5. That's where the Fendahl is trapped, and the Time Lords want to free it to use it as weapon in the War.
• One wants them to succeed in breaking the loop, because he knows that what's actually in there is the Predator of the Fendahl, a things that eats memory and meaning, and that can eat Mictlan.
• After the Predator eats Mictlan, One plans to use the War TARDISes to cut it off from the Universe, and send it away, thus making sure the Swimmers never come and *nhac* eat our Universe like a cookie.

The Doctor is not part of the original plan, but One makes it work anyways, using him to command the War TARDISes. One's going with the (correct) assumption that the Doctor would follow his plan (which he telepathically implants in his brain), since it cutting off Mictlan is the only thing that can save the Universe from the Predator.

It's all very, very cool. The writing style is compelling and entertaining, and the character's voices are captured well. My main complain is that One's plan is very convoluted, and could have gone wrong at many, many points. If the Doctor hadn't managed to diverge most of the TARDISes, they would have all been destroyed when they hit Planet 5, and then what? How would they have gotten rid of the Predator? Etc. etc. In the third act, there's quite a lot of exposition from One to Xenaria as he monologues about his plan. I can't help but feel like it could have been told in a more dynamic fashion. It's not so bad, as the other characters are having some very action heavy moments at the same time, but still.

Fitz is great as always, and gets to be the big hero and save the Doctor's life at the end. Compassion makes zero effort to be likable. She has a weird thing going on with the TARDIS, probably a consequence of the filter the Doctor put in her receiver. She talks not only to our TARDIS, but to the War TARDISes as well. Marie (2nd best TARDIS ever) saying 'you didn't realise who she was?' to Homunculette sounds ominous as hell. I'm guessing Compassion is not gonna be one of those companions that meets a nice guy and leaves to get married, uh? All that makes her an interesting character, but she doesn't feel like a companion at all. It's pretty funny how she really doesn't care about anyone, including the Doctor and Fitz. The girl's lack of empathy and morals is driving the Doctor crazy. His pet project now is making her a Better Person, a better human, according to his own idea of what that means. Can't wait for that to blow up in his face!

I can't believe we got Homunculette (first seen in 'Alien Bodies') back!!! Loved seeing him again, loved Marie's cameo at the end, and looooved every bit of war time Gallifrey we got. It's brutal, the Doctor is horrified, and so am I. They're force-regenerating to take up heavily modified bodies as disguises; Xenaria believes the Doctor to be a general because he's in a normal body, meaning that most soldiers have been modified. They're sending fresh out of the looms Time Lords straight into battle. Renegades have been drafted in the war effort (the Rani!). The War TARDISes are aggressive and angry, treated as slaves!  The landscape of the war is slowly taking shape: the Time Lords have made nine copies of Gallifrey, one of which has already been destroyed. The nature of the Enemy is still unknown. Faction Paradox is involved, but it's far from being the main antagonist of the Time Lords, and as of now, Mictlan and the Celestis are no longer players in war. The Doctor wants nothing to do with it, but keeps being put in situations where he's made to get involved. He stops the auction for the 'super weapon' in 'Alien Bodies', stops the giant Seal of Rassilon bomb in 'Interference', and basically destroys the Celestis in this one. And I'm sure there's more to come. I keep wondering what Romana's doing in the meantime.

The Doctor was really great in this story. A lot of good lines, a lot of great moments. His mantra of 'I'm the Doctor, I have walked in eternity. I have died many times. I have fought countless monsters. I have saved countless lives' to keep himself focused as the Celestis fiction machine thingy changed history was very nice. A lot of very good moments for him and the TARDIS as well, as when she vouches for him when the War TARDISes ask her if he can be trusted. It made me think of how angry she's with him in 'Zagreus'; thank God she's forgiven him for what happened in 'Unnatural History', or he'd be dead dead dead.

The Doctor spends 70% of this book covered in his own blood and being hurt by others (One and the TARDISes) or himself (to get the War TARDIS to activate their security protocols). It's all going on the list:

Memory Loss:1 (in 'The Eight Doctors')
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:11 (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 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more in 'Interference' 1&2, broken wrist + near death in vacuum of space + more here)
Torture:5 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', 'Interference' 1&2, some more torture here)

I've actually read this book once before, many years ago; it was my first ever DW book. As you can imagine, at that point I understood little, but loved the vibes, and loved Fitz. Coming back to it now, I can say I still love the vibes and Fitz, and boy does it feel good to actually know (most of) what is going on.

Scarlet Empress 2: Electric Boogaloo, AKA The Blue Angel, is miles better than its predecessor. I feel like I have to read this book at least one more time to be able to write a proper review (I re-read many parts to write this, actually); it keeps teasing you with connections between things, but never commits to them. It asks to hold on to 100 different threads, but most of them go nowhere. A lot of it is just plain fun, though. I'm gonna try to review it anyways.

Basically: Deadalus, green elephant man with so many superpowers I'm not even gonna go there, wants to start a war between our universe and the Obverse. The bridge between these two places is the Enclave. Iris Wildthyme (she's back and it's about time) knows this guy of old. She is playing 3D chess here, maybe with Deadalus, maybe against him, but her main goal is to keep the Doctor away from this mess, to stop him from stopping this war.

The setup is great. You can always count on Paul Margs for delivering pretty interesting alien races and settings, and so he does for the Enclave. There are some parallels between the races of the Enclave and some races in the normal Universe. The Glass Men are explicitly said to be like the Daleks, and the Ghillighast (who look like bats) could mirror to the Time Lords. Maybe the Sahmbekarts for the Sontarans, the Steingertrudes for the Ice Warriors? I'm reaching, but oh well. The Star Trek TOS/TNG pastiche with the crew of Federation ship Nepotist was hilarious. I'm a big, big fan of ST, and this felt like some good-natured fun poking. Thank you for the dollar store Spirk, Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad! I laughed out loud with Fitz thinking this 'hollow deck' thing sounded awful. If there's anyone that would adore the holodeck, it's Fitz.

The absolute best part of this book is the Obverse, hands down. It's intriguing and it's so melancholic, I've been thinking about it non stop for days now. The Obverse!Eight Doctor is this incredibly sweet, quiet gay man plagued by dreams of our Doctor's life. 'Funny spells', he calls the psychotic episodes he has when he can't tell the two realities apart. His memory is full of holes and contradictions. He remembers kissing Grace is San Francisco, but has he ever been to San Francisco? Fitz and Compassion, or versions of them, are his lodgers in his big blue house. His private doctor (who is the Third Doctor -- don't ask me how) tells him not to worry, ever, and keeps him heavily medicated. So what's going on? Is he insane? Is the Obverse!Doctor our Doctor being drugged/tricked into believing he's mad, being kept there against his will? Is he chameleon arched? He still has two hearts, but he feels cold in a way Time Lords don't. Is he an alternative universe version of him, fully (or more) human? Is he a completely other person that just happens to be played by Paul McGann? The Obverse!Doctor scenes are written in his POV, and it's heartbreaking, he's so lost and confused. If he is our Doctor, we desperately want to save him. If he's an AU version, we also desperately want to help him, to explain, somehow, that the world he dreams of is real.

For my money, I think he is our Doctor. Jane Fonda!Iris, in the normal Universe, says she has 'shunt him along into safety with a harmless little nudge'. He hates being tampered with, but she can't help it; he's safe, she says, confused but safe. Then we get the POV of an undisclosed character, who says in their narration that they know the Doctor has started to want to be more human, to experience things as a human, exhausted after Seven's whole 'Time's Champion' act; was this one of the Irises? In the Obverse, neither Compassion nor Fitz remember how they met, for how long they've known each other, or how any of them 'came here' (do they mean the house? Or the universe?). The Obverse!Doctor has an old friend called Sally (who is Sarah Jane -- don't ask me how), who he's known for years. Her Jack Russell, that he gave her, is called Canine. She's written a scifi book that seems to be the Scarlet Empress and the Blue Angel, minus the Obverse bits. Sally's neighbor is a version of Iris in her last incarnation, and she knows a lot more of what the Obverse is than any of the others. She says the book is dangerous because it contains too much information, and it'll lead the Glass Men to them. The Obverse!Doctor has this same fear in his funny spells, and recognizes Sally's book from his dreams. So I'd say our Jane Fonda!Iris put the real Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion in that universe to protect them from the Enclave war (a war she's playing a big role in starting... maybe mirroring how the Doctor is starting the war with the Enemy?). I assume she somehow made the TARDIS take them there at the end of the book (maybe controlling Compassion?), and created the other people there from the Doctor's memory; that's why Three is his psychiatrist, why he sees Two when he goes to church, why Sally is Sarah but not exactly, why his mum is a eastern European mermaid (do not ask me), why no one objects to calling him 'the Doctor', but his mother calls him Jonny. That other version of Iris is there to keep an eye on things. I guess Jane Fonda!Iris takes them out when the war is over, and I guess we'll never know how long they were there for. The big but is how could Iris do all this. I have absolutely no idea. But it's Iris, so maybe she can. Or I'm dead wrong and it was just a fun little AU.

It was a bold choice to release this book right after 'Interference'. Fitz was remade from scratch at the end of that, but we don't get to see how that's affecting him, apart from a couple of throwaway lines. What he does get is a bi awakening! He's horseback riding down a mountain chased by giant owls, but the question going on in his head is if he should try to leave the Doctor to travel with Iris. He discards the notion quickly, thinking that he 'couldn't imagine not seeing the Doctor again', and that he gets now why Sam had a crush on him. In his own words, he's probably about to die but there he is, considering 'his chances of getting laid by Iris... or even of getting laid by the Doctor'. Nice. I do like it when they fall for him, okay? At least Fitz is a full grown man, not a 17yo like Sam was.

Then we have Compassion, who's only just joined the TARDIS. We know next to nothing about her, especially away from the Media and the Remote. There's something off with her that's not explained: she can drive Iris's TARDIS. I'm thinking it was Iris herself that sent her the signals (or maybe even controlled her?) to do so, as both times this happens were in according to what Iris would have want. The Doctor is sus. He says he's going to get her a sort of signal filter. I wonder if this is gonna be brought up in the future. Compassion was also feeling out of place in the Obverse, probably because she could see a bit through the 'illusion' of it all. She doesn't have a single funny bone in her body, has a strange moral code, seems allergic to fun, and does not trust (nor likes) the Doctor and Fitz yet. I'm loving the potential for Drama.

I'm talking too much already. Let me wrap it up: my problem with this book is that I wanted to know more. I'm not used to this Murakami style magical realism weirdness in my Doctor Who books. But the more I think about this book, the more I like it. It was a fascinating read, that's for sure. Did I mention the Doctor gets pregnant, in the leg? If I had a penny every time this happened I'd have two pennies, which is not a lot, but it's weird that's happened twice.

Writing my review here for both Book 1 and Book 2, seeing as they are really one story that had to be divided in two books for logistical reasons.

Okay. Lawrence Miles is clever, that's for sure. Like in 'Alien Bodies', there's about a billion interesting ideas in these books. Although the writing is very engaging, you could easily cut 30% of the text and still come out with a full story. Or kinda, since, by design, there are quite a few loose threads that are supposed to lead to future plotlines. I really like how alien he makes the Time Lords/Gallifreyans in his works. I said the same on 'Alien Bodies', but here you can tell the Doctor is not just a guy with two hearts who is very hard to kill for real. He's made of maths, and isn't that a cool concept? Feed me that with a spoon, I love it.

The Doctor is once again knocked down to the ground in this story. He's imprisoned and tortured within an inch of his life, and is heavily implied to be mentally compromised (as he tells Sarah he's 'already out of his mind' when she rescues him). I honestly hadn't realized until it was heavily implied in the text that the prison he was in was on Earth. This newest imprisonment is the other side of the coin to his 3 year stay in Ha'olam. While that prison broke him by being a nice and humane place he could not rebel against and by having a probe in his mind that frustrated all his escape plans, this Saudi Arabian prison broke him by beating the sh*t out him with no rhyme or reason. He can't escape because he can't think. And here we have to wonder: surely the Doctor can escape a 90's Earth prison that has minimal security. He can pick the lock, he can trick the guards, he can dig a tunnel. The reason he doesn't is that Miles wants to make a point about how things work in the real world. The Doctor, a powerful being made of equations, can't escape the horrors of simple human brutality. He has saved this planet hundreds of times, but he's still going to be killed by these people for no reason. In his (wonderful) conversations with his fellow cellmate Badar, he's confronted with the hypocrisy of his interference (ha!) in a number of other worlds, bringing down corrupt governments, while he turns a blind eye to the corruption of Earth governments. He gives the standard Doctor Who explanation: the Earth is a nexus point, too many fixed points in time depend on it, and messing with them endangers causality, endangers the Web of Time TM. The true reason is closer to this: he doesn't interfere because it will be noticed, and he's afraid of the consequences to himself if he's caught. Bringing him down to the real world and making him confront and suffer what he, by not interfering, is allowing to happen, was very interesting. He promises Badar he will interfere and I.M. Foreman tells him how he can do that do that in a less obvious, untraceable manner: feeding the goose, Sam.

He's preoccupied with Sam's future while in prison. Since she was made to be his perfect companion, either by Faction Paradox or by himself, inadvertently, what happens when she stops being his companion? Does she get to live on, or does she disappear? In a way, his gross manipulation of her by telling her the future of Earth and planting the idea of acting against it in her teenage mind, he makes sure she has a purpose beyond traveling with him. I guess that since her future is anchored to that moment, to him, her continued existence is also anchored.

Goodbye, Sam! It was actually kind of funny to see how badly she handled Compassion's questioning of her principles and morals. After being exposed to the Remote for going through the trauma conga of living through horrible scenarios of 'sacrifice' for their benefit, I hope she has learned something about the type of society she wants to build. Sarah is going to make her a sort of apprentice, apparently, which was a bit frustrating to me. Let her go on her own! Let her do things on her own!!! Anyway. It's done, it's over, Sam survived, amazingly. I was ready to bet 10 quid on her dying for real this time. Good for her.

In a story where everyone, sans Sarah, is psychologically and/or physically tortured, Fitz takes the cake. I spent half the book going from 'Kode is Fitz' to 'no, the last of the Remote is Fitz' only to be doubly right, or doubly wrong. Crazy to think the real, original Fitz is only in there in the first pages of the book. There a parallel somewhere between the Doctor wanting to pretend his new car is the same as the Bug he destroyed in 'Unnatural History' and him re-building the original Fitz from Kode with the help of the TARDIS. 'It's not the same!' said the note. The original Fitz, Father Kreiner, goes on to live an incredibly miserable life, with an incredibly miserable 'death' (not quite). It's 'The Girl Who Waited' times a billion, and it's so so so sad. We know the Doctor can't go back in time and save his original self after having met Kode, but damn does it hurt. I'm very curious to see the fallout of this in the next books.

Poor Third Doctor was put in the middle of an EDA and was horrified. Yeah man, this is what waits you. 1000% more blood than he's seen in his life. And he dies! No 'Planet of the Spiders' for you! I really want to see what all this FP meddling is gonna do. So far, the only thing that's really happened was the Doctor losing his shadow, but I'm sure more sinister consequences await us.

I.M. Foreman and their increasingly f*cked up incarnations was a very cool concept, and a very cool timeloop. I stupidly though the blind man was the Doctor when he first appeared, so point for Miles for getting me with that one. The universe in a bottle thing was, again, a cool concept.

Lots of cool concepts going around. But it's far from perfect. The structure of the book is infuriating on purpose, jumping in time and in POV. You do not want to take a break between books 1 and 2; half the plot points will just slip through your fingers like sand. The Remote's motivations go back and forth, as they literally change their minds on their own plans many times. Fitz's timeline is hardest one to follow, as he's in the future but also in the relative past of Guest's gang. One thing that annoyed me was that Sam kept trying to put things together and kept being wrong, so I felt almost betrayed for believing her. The metaphor for the media dominated society began as interesting and thought provoking, but became more and more heavy handed as the story progressed. At the end, we're just going 'yes, I GET IT'. Although I really liked the bit were they flat-out say stories are supposed to inspire us real people to take action in the real world. Llewis sure was a character, but I'm not sure why he was given so much focus.

Some other assorted things I liked: Sarah Jane, my beloved. The 'script' parts of the book were great fun; the whole atmosphere was fantastic, specially the visual of the Cold. Giant Seal of Rassilon space coin bomb coming to destroy the Earth. The Eleven day Empire. Male characters breaking/losing their arms like Grandfather Paradox. The iconic 'I'm not sure I've even been a man' line from the Doctor. The nice Ogron! K9: 'Master' - The Doctor: 'Where??'. The Doctor writing time equations on the floor with his own blood while half delirious!!! Stealing himself and Sarah from time!!! Super cool. RIP Saudi soldiers lost in the TARDIS.

Things that made me go 'Ohhh': the Doctor assumes the Giant Seal of Rassilon space coin bomb was heading for the Enemy's home-world. It was, in fact heading for Earth. HMMM. Who was the arm-less shadow that talked to Fitz in his FP initiation? It kind of spoke like the Doctor. Is new!Fitz still initiated in FP? Can he become Father Kreiner again? Is this why Griffin also wanted him as a specimen in 'Unnatural History'? Who took the bottle universe? Obvious guess is the Doctor, but who knows. Did I.M. Foreman shag the Doctor on that hill??? Second book in a row I'm having to ask this! In the same note, his romantic nature (or at least his higher need for companionship) was acknowledged as a side effect of his half-human-ness. Interesting. I already know Compassion is staying for a while. Curious about how that's going to go. I can't see her being a very chummy companion.

Do I even need to say it?

Memory Loss:1 (in 'The Eight Doctors')
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:10 (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 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in 'Autumn Mist', broken arm + more here)
Torture:4 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History', by God, this one)

Easy breezy read, weirdly enough, given this one is set in WW2. The TARDIS once again refuses to leave Earth and drops the team in the middle of the Herbstnebel, the Battle of the Bulge, a real WW2 offensive in the Ardennes. BUT! There's also fairies.

I don't have much to say about this story. The bits with the real life soldiers, their conversations with Fitz, Sam and specially the Doctor were the highlights for me. But the sci-fi part of it all with the Sidhe was just so boring. These sci-fi elves/fairies exist on Earth, but on other dimensions, meaning they don't actually interfere with humans unless they wish to. However, a dimensional rift (what caused this rift, actually?) between dimensions allows the war to affect their realm as well, so they want it closed. Well, the queen, Titania (ha) wants it closed, but Oberon (haha), her counterpart, is making things worse by working with the Americans, who are kinda working with the Germans, planning to... somehow use the Sidhe's power to phase between time and space like they do. It's not a plan that holds under scrutiny, but okay.

Sam, once again, doesn't get to do much herself, and mostly just has things happen to her. She right out gets shot in the heart and dies. She's brought back by the Sidhe so they can gain the Doctor's favor. She's quite shaken, understandably. This is what, her 3rd death, as she also dies in Beltempest and Janus Conjunction (from the top of my head). In the end, she finally, finally realizes enough is enough, and tells the Doctor that next time they land on 90/2000's Earth, she's leaving. After solving the dark haired Sam plotline, there really isn't much more that could be done with her character, so it makes sense for her to leave. I say there's not much that could be done because Sam just doesn't have an interesting enough character or dynamic with the Doctor and Fitz to justify keeping her around for much longer. What could be done has been done. She was there for the Doctor when he needed her after 'Seeing I', when it would have made sense for her to stay on Ha'olam. But he's better now and he has Fitz, even though it's not the same. She has to get under his wing to become herself, at this point. Unless there's a big overhaul in her character, she's done her bit as a companion. Her proper farewell is still to come, but this is the beginning of the end.

Fitz was delightful as always. Giving 'James Bond' as his name for the American soldiers was the Fitz-est thing he could have done. Loved that little bit where the Doctor just breaks down laughing at it. There were two points that I wish had been explored more: Fitz's feelings as he, the son of a German and born during the war, has to pretend to be a Nazi officer, and seeing the Beast again, which will lead to his mother's death in '63. Oh, well.

A side rambling about our companions, since Sam's leaving soon. Sam's not very highly regarded as a companion by the fans, from what I found, while Fitz is very well liked, to the point where I don't think I've ever heard anything bad said about his character. Fans constantly call him a loser, but that's always said with a lot of affection. Fitz is Sam's polar opposite in terms of character, and also in terms of how the narrative (usually!) treats them. The comparison in inevitable. In this book, for instance: Sam is saved by the Americans, is being taken to safety, but then they are intercepted and she's killed. Fitz, on the other hand, has to disguise himself and infiltrate the Nazi troops, and escapes on a stolen motorbike after releasing their Sidhe prisoner. See what I mean? Sam loves to think that she's unaffected and in control, and that she understands everything that's going on. She's a character that notices things, a character the other characters talk to and explain things to. However, she's not nosy enough to be much of a detective, and tends to take a more passive position. She learns all she can and reports back to the Doctor, acts as a liaison to the aliens. Fitz is more open about being scared, but he can think very fast and can come up with insanely dangerous plans that nevertheless are good plans. Is he internally going 'shitshitshitohgod' the whole time? Yes. But that makes him so endearing and entertaining and real. Very different characters, very different approach. I'm excited to see where they go for the next companion.

Back to the story. The whole third act was a big mess to me. Needing 200 tons of metal to seal the rift felt incredibly arbitrary. I get that Oberon's whole thing was not having a proper motivation, but damn, the guy really doesn't have a proper motivation besides being a bit jealous of the Doctor. That makes the ending feel quite flat. The side characters were nice, but nothing to write home about. The scene where the Doctor and the boys steal a tank was cool, but I gotta echo Fitz: bit dark for you, eh, Doctor? I guess the WW2 backdrop made him accept the necessity of death more readily than usual. And to be fair, they were killing literal Nazis.

Should I add the electrocution to the List? He recovers pretty fast... after screaming a lot... Fine, it's on the list.

Memory Loss:1 (in 'The Eight Doctors')
Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:9 (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 3 times in 'Unnatural History', electrocuted in this one)
Torture:3 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I', 'Unnatural History')

Final thought: did that fairy enchant and shag him!???? Or did she just enchant and snog him? I need to know for this police report I'm filing.

Lovely, lovely, lovely serial. I wouldn’t change a single thing. It really has it all: the maggots are disgusting and frightening, the main villain is silly, but menacing, and all side characters are great. Amazing moments for my dear Mike Yates, a couple of funny moments for Benton as well, and the Brig is a delight, as usual.

I already miss Jo. I liked her immediately, much like everyone else that interacted with her on screen since her first appearance. She folded the Doctor like origami with her immense charm and earnestness, and this serial really shows just how much he came to care for her. We can tell from episode 1 that she’s ready to move on, but the ending is still so bittersweet. She’s happy, Cliff Jones is a good man, but ouch, the look on the Doctor’s face at end… I was very glad he never came across as adversarial towards Cliff, even though we could see he was jealous. Jo knows it’s time to move on with her life, and she’s never been one of the “let’s see the universe and the future and the past” type of companion. The Doctor can see that, but still has a hard time accepting it, because he just enjoys her company so much. Sigh. What a simple but powerful companion exit.

I love you, Jo, and I’ll miss you forever. Thank God I already know the next companion will not disappoint.

Fun and sweet! I mean, it's Susan!!! And a great-grandchild for the Doctor!!!

The story is nothing groundbreaking, and I'm not sure I like that a) Susan almost causes an alien invasion by naively asking random aliens for help and b) the way the xenophobes end up kind of having a point, as the aliens that answer Susan's call really are there to enslave and oppress them. Nevertheless, it is a much, much, much better reunion for Susan and the Doctor than the EDA 'Legacy of the Daleks', which is also based on the premise that the Doctor gets a distress signal from Susan and goes to 22nd century Earth to investigate.

They mention Susan looks older than the Doctor, so I guess she could somehow control her aging process? I was gonna say Alex is too bratty for my taste, but from his perspective, it really was a lot to take in: famous parents, dead dad, influential politician (?) mum, he gets manipulated by the xenophobic alien haters. Suddenly there's also this weird guy that keeps following him and saying strange things and that he knows his parents, and the guy's an alien! The xenophobes want him to shoot the aliens, but his mum calls the guy GRANDFATHER meaning his mum is an alien as well, making him HALF-ALIEN! And great-granddad has a time machine, and mum wants him to go to space college in their planet... Oof. I'd freak out as well.

Looking forward to seeing Susan and Alex again!

Not terrible by any means, but pretty uninteresting after the first two episodes. It didn't really offer anything new, and I've never cared much for stories involving the Thals. I would complain about Latep's instant crush on Jo, but she's just that lovable, I can believe a guy would fall for her in 12 hours of meeting her. Amazing fashion from the Doctor, a couple of very good lines about courage and about war. Jo's motormouth explanation to the Doctor of being saved by a Spiridon has THE funniest line: "it was terrible, and then I rescued by this bowl!!!" (since the Spiridons are invisible, and the bowl he was holding all she could see). Wait a minute, did she actually think Wester was a floating bowl? I'm very that the next serial is her goodbye, but I am super excited to see Sarah Jane next season.

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)

The story picks up immediately after 'Revolution Man': Fitz is going back to Sam's room to apologise after their fight over his and the Doctor's role on Ed Hill's murder. He gets there just in time to see her and her whole room get swallowed by a vortex, as the TARDIS has been attacked by something. The Doctor manages to land and get himself and Fitz out before she goes straight into recovery mode (complete with turning back into a grey cube!), locking them out and stranding them in Sweden, 1999.

Sam's away for half the book. We get her POV in part 2, but frankly, I don't think the story would have changed at all if she'd just showed up at the end. The one thing she does is stop Itharquell from killing himself, a scene what was not really necessary. I don't dislike Sam, but this is book number 22, and I can only say I really liked her in maybe 8 of them. I guess she's just... boring, at this point. Reacts more than acts, follows more than leads, obeys more than questions. In any case, she's sidelined here to make room for Fitz and his relationship with the Doctor to develop more, as it is only his 4th book as a companion, and he was off the TARDIS for two years during 'Revolution Man'.

The Doctor is neurotic and disoriented for this entire story. Part of it we can assume is due to Ed Hill's murder, another part due to losing Sam and the TARDIS so suddenly. The TARDIS is so broken he can't even feel her in his mind, which we are told is Very Bad, and makes him 'incomplete'. He's not talking about her resources either, he's really talking about his ability to be himself, to be the Doctor. Huh. He freezes when they're attacked at Björn's farm and is told to use his gun to protect them all. He freaks out when he's taken into custody by UNIT/C19; he developed claustrophobia in 'Seeing I', but even so, he's been locked up a few times since, and in worse circumstances, and has managed to keep his cool better than he does here. He gets pretty panicky when he can't immediately figure out who's behind the kidnappings, shaking his fist at the sky, at a point in the story where things are nowhere near as dire as they tend to get for Eight. Basically, he's flip-flopping wildly between the man you can trust with your life (the hero) and a guy making things up as he goes with no back-up plan. Dr. Lindgard's death in his escape attempt is the encapsulation of this, an easy-peasy situation in any other circumstance, botched horribly. His state of mind being this strange is intentional. Thing is, I don't mind seeing the Doctor in a vulnerable position at all; I welcome it! But he was on the verge of looking incompetent, which is a step too far. He gets better as book goes on, though, and is in much better shape by the end of it.

Poor Fitz just got back from a year of being brainwashed by the Chinese government and is thrown into this mess. He gets to play investigator for a bit, is Kerstin's caretaker for most of the story, and (unlike Sam in most of her stories) gets to do big plot relevant things and makes his own, character-driven decisions. Good for him. He does have a tendency to develop instant crushes on every girl he meets, though, but he thankfully keeps most of it inside his own head. Sam being away means that for over half the book he's the Doctor's only companion. As the Doctor is acting off, Fitz (and Kerstin, to a lesser extent) is on a roller coaster of 'it's over' and 'we're so back' in regards to his trust in the Doctor and his ability to save the day and keep the moral high ground while doing so, and also in regards to whether or not he's going to keep traveling with him or not. 'Trust the Doctor' wins out, as the Doctor saves him, Sam, Kerstin, and the T'hiili from certain death, specially when he realises his own original plan would have actually killed the T'hiili, due to his ignorance of their biology.

I have to discuss Kerstin Bergman. I feel so, so, so sorry for this girl. Boyfriend kidnapped by aliens, boyfriend returned only to be 'Alien'-ed right in front of her eyes, goes to another universe, is the only reason the Doctor manages to save the day, as she's the one that opens the TARDIS for him, goes through a whole internal journey of grief and growth in the span of a couple of days, realises she wants to travel with the Doctor, asks to stay...... AND IS TOLD 'NO'. He looks the girl in the eyes and says that she can't travel with them, that she's gonna have a good normal life, that she needs to process her grief. Rich, considering how Fitz came on board! I'd be absolutely, utterly devastated if this happened to me, asking to be a companion and getting a 'no' so callously. Big, big ouch.

The Dominion as a setting had some interesting ideas, but I'll be damned if I understood the mechanics of the sky-sea things and the interconnected caverns. I also kept confusing which aliens were the Ruin and which were the Bane. Sam's whole 200 page journey there didn't do much for me, and it's honestly ridiculous how Fitz ended up getting so much more to do there in only about 20 pages: he meets the queen and invents fire, for God's sake! The most interesting thing about the wormhole is that the Doctor mentions that the TARDIS 'wanted it' to affect her, meaning she let herself be breached so Sam would be snatched up. Hmmmmmm. Prof. Nagle and Major Wolstencroft were the tired old 'mad scientist that refuses to see the danger of their experiments' and 'military that distrusts aliens (particularly the Doctor) and science in general'. Even the Doctor says something to the effect of 'why does every military lock me up when I need to fix the Problem Machine of the Day'? I quite liked Inspector Nordenstam, but he vanishes completely from the plot after Johan's death by 'Alien'.

Nothing for the List of Pain this time. The Doctor gets shot (in a very 'what are you gonna do, shoot me?' *gets shot* scene), but it's only a tranquiliser gun. What he does get is 02 kisses!!! He kisses Fitz out of pure joy when he sees Fitz is alive, and is kissed by Sam when they were about to maybe die at the end of the story. It's very funny to me that Sam's the one kissing him in all their 3 kisses ('Longest Day', 'Seeing I' and here), while he's the one to kiss Fitz. It's like Eleven with Amy and Rory! Another funny thing is how multiple people include in their internal monologue how beautiful Eight is. They are, of course, correct. I liked the Doctor's conversation with Björn, when he uses his often forgotten Future Sight (which is soon proven to be unreliable), and pretty much all of Fitz's conversations with Kerstin. I also liked how he has a couple of moments of being a bit envious of the Doctor: once when he manages to get Kerstin to open up to him almost instantly, and another at the end when he saves them all and 'gets all the glory'. It makes sense, since Fitz has moments of feeling inadequate even without a Time Lord to compare himself to.

After the fun of 'Demontage', 'Revolution Man' is a slap in the face. In the same fashion as Paul Leonard's 2 previous EDAs, 'Genocide' and 'Dreamstone Moon', this is a quite bleak adventure, and probably the darkest of the three. The story begins very fast, no time for fun and games: the Doctor detects an anomaly in the vortex rooted in the late 60's, changing history. Unless they put things back into place, the Earth will be destroyed in an atomic WW3. It's a pretty simple plot, actually, and effective. A group of (mostly?) well-meaning flower-child revolutionaries got a hold of a mysterious plant in Nepal. The plant, Om-Tsor, gives them near unlimited, god-like power, including mind control. The group, under the lead of the 'Revolution Man', start using these powers to attack major powers, leading to world to the brink of war as everyone starts blaming everyone else for the attacks. The book uses this to be very critical of the revolutionaries of the 60's and their naivety and unfocused, self-centered efforts.

All this right up Sam's alley. I like the way Leonard writes her, as he actually does something with her political beliefs and activism. These traits are the core of her character, and it's good to see them appear prominently in the plot and drive her actions. She's deeply dismayed by the methods of the Revolution Man and his followers, and annoyed by their aimless and rash protests. Sam's quite in control here, which is a nice change.

The Doctor is almost a specter in the story, giving Sam and Fitz directions, but staying out of the center of things, mostly just showing up for major rescues and the big finale. I'm pretty sure he stole that motorbike, by the way. Dick move, Doctor, I hope you payed for it later, at least.

A big theme going on here is the Doctor's different relationships with Sam and Fitz. He and Sam have been traveling together for so long now that things come easy, and her trust in him is absolute (more on this later). Fitz is still very much the new guy, and he's a needy guy to boot. He's feeling a bit left out, and unsure if he actually wants to keep up the life of danger of a full-time companion. He does trust the Doctor and relies on him, and is rewarded for this when the Doctor brings Maddie back from the brink of death, but he's still not full on on board.

It's crazy convenient that they pretty much randomly meet Maddie, the one person who can tell them more about Om-Tsor and Ed Hill. Even more convenient is how Fitz immediately attaches himself to her, basically just because she's pretty. If he hadn't decided to pursue her, the Earth would be in shambles, I guess. In an incredibly hasty decision, he leaves the TARDIS to stay with Maddie, a girl he met 1 day ago. And he stays gone for two years! I don't think this was necessary at all for his development as character, but okay, I guess. The only reason we get him back is because, since he stayed behind to be with Maddie (who he literally just met!!!), who is deeply involved with the Revolution Man, the Doctor leaves him with a special call card to the TARDIS (I've never come across this call card business before). When Fitz and Maddie go to Nepal to track the source of Om-Tsor, he gets kidnapped by the Chinese army, and is brainwashed, I believe, for a whole year. Maddie calls the Doctor, and agrees to help him and Sam investigate the Revolution Man cult, gets brainwashed.

The TARDIS keeps skidding around in time because of the mess in the time vortex, so whole team (Sam, Fitz, Maddie and the Doctor) only really get all together for the grand confrontation with Ed Hill/Revolution Man. This is where all goes to sh*t. Both Maddie and Fitz are still out of sorts due to the brainwashing, Sam's being held back by Ed's followers, and it's 1 minute before the bombs hit and WW3 begins, and ends everything. The Doctor needs to get to the Om-Tsor, but Ed, all powerful, won't let him. Ed's messing with the Eye of Harmony in the TARDIS, which adds another layer of 'the Earth will be destroyed if we don't stop him now'. Then he's in Fitz's face and is 100% going to kill him, so Fitz shoots the guy in the face. But he's still in god mode, only making even more of a mess because, well, bullet to the brain will mess you up, won't it. There's seconds to go. So the Doctor takes he gun and shots Ed in the head again to finish him off, takes a looot of the drug, and saves the day. I guess he stops the bombs and contains the damage to the TARDIS. The news reports in the following pages indicate that he does not erase the Revolution Man from history, but all international powers somehow calm down enough to not go into war anymore.

But yeah, let's go back to that point where the Doctor shoots a man in the head to save the day. Like, wow. He's very distraught at this, of course, and it really seems like there was no alternative, but damn. Moving to the real world for a sec, this was bold choice for Paul Leonard. Let's not delude ourselves: we've seen the Doctor kill plenty of people before. But like this, gun in his hand, point blank shooting a guy, blood splattering on his face, 'there was no alternative'? Oof. Thankfully, he is very affected by it, along with Sam and Fitz, even in the next book, 'Dominion'.

Back to the finale, Sam's in shock, angry at the Doctor, and he's trying to rationalize things, to explain, rambling, mostly to make sense of things for himself. Paul McGann would have acted the sh*t out of this scene, by the way. A while later, in the TARDIS, she's discussing this with Fitz. While the Doctor is clearly very upset about what happened, apparently mopping somewhere in the TARDIS, Fitz is more defensive. He shot Ed because he was on him and he panicked, and while he's not happy about it, he can't really regret it either. Sam's interesting in this scene. Ed's murder shocked her, but when she starts yelling at Fitz we can see that the crux of her issue is actually that Fitz made the Doctor finish the job. Fitz argues that she can't put the whole blame on him, because the Doctor did have a choice in the matter. But for her, the Doctor 'is a hero, and he never never never does anything wrong, you don't understand!', so blaming Fitz completely is the easy way out. Sam Sam Sam, careful with that absolute trust and devotion! Fitz, on the other hand, is shaken and isn't sure if he wants to really go back to traveling in the TARDIS. This was not a fun time for anyone. There's no happy moment. Even Fitz's normal year with Maddie is tainted. There's a point where someone offers Sam a pistachio ice cream, in Rome, and she declines. No happiness whatsoever.

So, did I like it? I'm not sure! I liked Sam, I liked Fitz (even though I don't see why they chose to give him this timeskip, as he just joined the team). The true alien origin of Om-Tsor is never revealed, and I don't really see how exactly the Doctor puts things to right after the geopolitical mess the Revolution Man caused. And Maddie just goes bonkers at the end. As I said, the Doctor is in the background for most of the story, and mostly in control, and then shows up and kills a guy. I think it was interesting and shocking. I've already read 'Dominion', the next book, and I do think what happens here is a big influence on how he's acting there, so the ending wasn't just for shock value, which I appreciate. It also served to highlight both how Sam's got the Doctor firmly on a pedestal (worrying!!!), and how Fitz's opinion of him is still uncertain. So, all in all, it's interesting and well written book, and I was engaged throughout. Let's see how things develop from here!

This serial had the obvious problem of the Doctor and Jo being captured and escaping way too many times. However, it was a lot of fun and the political intrigue was compelling. Jo is great in this one, specially in their escape from the Master's cell in the ship. Then she resists his hypnosis! And escapes using a spoon!!! It was part of the Master's plan, but still she one ups him by stealing the mind control thingy. I just really like Jo. And hey, the Master's back! Very good to see him again, and I love the twist when he shows up, and the twist that he's working for the Daleks (gasp!)

Some other minor comments: loved the look of the Draconians, loved the cliffhanger of having the Doctor call the Time Lords for help at the end (we know it's serious when he calls Gallifrey). They used the building of the Brazilian national congress as a stand in for the Earth Presidential Palace and wow, that was a huge surprise for me, as a Brazilian. It really is a very cool looking building.

The Doctor, Sam, and new companion Fitz Kreiner go to a space casino called Vega (hilarious) and get caught in the middle of a complicated web of intrigue that involves a hired assassin, conspiring politicians, spies, hairy monsters, art dealers, and forgers. With a setup like this, it could not have gone wrong. And it doesn't: this book slaps. It's has lot of twists and turns, it's full of colorful characters, has a pretty solid plot, and it was funny!

The cast is large, but the characters are, thankfully, all 1) necessary, 2) very well outlined and 3) interesting. Some are better than than others, but everyone that has a name has a reason to be named, and something to do in the plot. Hazard was effortlessly cool and badass, Vermillion was compelling, Bigdog Caruso was awesome, etc. etc. Special mention to Forster and Rappare, scheming, cheating (married? they were to me) old men, who were a delight in every scene.

The plot keeps you guessing in a good way, like a good mystery should. The whole gotcha with the paintings was super cool to piece together, and so was Martinique's identity. The Doctor having won so much money at the casino years ago (back when he was the Fourth Doctor) that he basically owns the whole place and the manager wants to kill him was goooold. I love it when he gets to play cards, by the way; poker fiend fits him better than chessmaster any day. How the Doctor was not affected by Martinique's scanner is not explained, but I assume it's his multi-dimensional nature as Time Lord doing its magic, which was also very cool.

I have to talk about Fitz. This idiot has my whole heart. His personality is very well delineated already; it's really incredible just how well I can say I know him after just 2 books, specially considering how long it took for Sam to become a defined character in this series. He challenges the Doctor to see who can win more in the casino, which only a new companion would do. He dresses up as James Bond, bets and loses all his cash in the first game he plays. He is too embarrassed to admit it, so he just lounges at the bar and pretends to have a plan. He orders martinis "shaken, not stirred". He accidentally gets hired to kill the Doctor. How can anyone not like this character, it's impossible. He's incredibly entertaining, and you can tell Justin Richards, the author, agrees, giving him a lot of great moments.

One of the good things of having Fitz around is that Sam has someone more on her level to bounce of off. She rolls her eyes at his stupid jokes and gets to hold her superior understanding of space stuff and adventuring with the Doctor over his head a bit. She is the one that connects them to the plot regarding the Martinique exposition. However, she doesn't get nearly as many cool moments as Fitz. She gets stuck in a painting for a bit and is kind of sidelined, while he gets to scheme with the Doctor and have run ins with Hazard, Bigdog, and the Devourer. But all in all, it was nice to see that this new TARDIS team in action, and it was particularly nice to see how much Fitz already cares for Sam. They are giving 'loser older brother with intimidating younger sister' energy, a dynamic leagues more in line with their characters than their poor attempt at romance in 'The Taint'. I hope they keep this vibe going forward.

The Doctor escaped unscratched from this adventure (doesn't even faint!), and got a life-sized painting of himself as a souvenir. I mean, they send an assassin to kill him, but he doesn't actually get hurt, which is a massive win for him. Congrats, babe!

Michael Collier's (a pseudonym for Stephen Cole) second entry in the EDAs has a lot of the same issues as his first, 'Longest Day', but also a lot of the same merits. The setup is nice and simple: a group of people suffering from a seemingly shared delusion in the 60s is under the care of the well-meaning and ambitious Dr. Roley, who wishes to understand their mental illness; aliens ensue. There are fewer characters than in 'Longest Day', but it took me until 70% of the book to be able to tell Russell, Watson, and Taylor apart, as I just kept messing up their names. My biggest issues are with the pacing of the third act, which is all over the place, and with action scenes that are quite difficult to picture (very weird use of the TARDIS, to move from one room to another???), and the way Cole writes his female characters and their interactions with the male characters.

Lucy and Nurse Maria Bulwell are completely defined by their sexual and romantic relationships with men. It's implied that Lucy's mental illness led her to be a sex worker (yikes), and her character falls neatly into the "crazy sexy and childish killer" trope. Like all of the other patients, Lucy is not developed beyond her f***ed up backstory, which is fine, but it does make her possessed/crazy sexy act seem even more dated. Bulwell is a cruel and bitter nurse who hates her patients, obsessed and fully devoted to the oblivious Dr. Roley; she's a bad person, not a bad character, but she is 100% defined by her pinning for Roley. Mrs. Kreiner, Fitz's mom, is a just a sweet little old lady whose job in the plot is to be just that, and to get possessed, so that's fine. And then there's Sam, who gets to make 01 decision (to go out with Fitz), and is immediately 1) sexually harassed, 2) nearly killed, 3) sexually harassed again, 4) kidnapped and infected with alien leech thing, and 5) sidelined until the Doctor cures her. Credit to Collier, he does, like in 'Longest Day', gives us insight into Sam's feelings and rationalizations, but she's just not a very active player in this story, and does not get to shine at any point. Nevertheless, he writes interesting scifi, with a cool concept that slowly comes together, even if the final act was messy.

The best part of the book, hands down, is the introduction of new companion Fitz Kreiner, a much needed shake up to the TARDIS team after 19 books. He comes to life already in his first scene, with an immediately apparent personality: he's a dreamer, a charmer, a loser, a quick thinker, clever, plays the guitar, and he's bit of a coward, but not as much as he thinks. And he's funny, which I really appreciate, given how unfunny Sam is (sorry, Sam). The one taint (ha!) in his character intro is in his interaction with Sam. I get it, I get it, he's a working class 27yo loser from 1963, not a gentleman. Sure, I get that he would spring a kiss on her after their "date"; not classy behaviour, but I get it. I don't get why on Earth he would strip naked to sleep next to a concussed, unconscious, semi-nude Sam. Make him a bit of a sexist, fine: I can deal with a character starting out as flawed, I welcome it! But c'mon, that was just straight up weird.

I did quite like the Doctor here, as he refuses to treat the Beasts as an evil that must be destroyed, and really tries to make all parties collaborate and understand each other. Doesn't really work because the possessed patients won't have it, but he does try. In the end, as the very last resort, he has to kill the patients (Mrs. Kreiner included), but it felt like there was no way out. He's very much not having Sam dying on him. That's come up in the last couple of books, how he's willing to bend rules and bargain with many people's lives to keep Sam safe; I'm sensing some light Charley and Clara vibes here. Bulwell notes this nicely when she says he's prioritizing Sam over the lives of everyone else, doing what's best for him. And yeah, he is, which is a choice I really like. Let the Doctor be a bit selfish and put his friends first! We know the narrative will punish him for it eventually. He also has a couple of very good and funny lines, in particular when he's terrorizing Fitz at their first meeting, and his little "Please can I have my robot back" near the end. Big hopes for a more fun TARDIS team dynamic in the next books!

The Doctor gets smacked around a bit and knocked out, but nothing really major or worthy of going into the List of Torture and Pain. Sam gets the short end of the stick again, and even mentions it herself. Shot on the same shoulder as in 'The Janus Conjunction'? Ouch.

This book had potential, but it doesn't deliver. Not a bad read, but very meh.

The premise is simple: the Doctor and Sam answer a distress signal sent from Proxima 2, humanity's first ever colony outside the Solar system. There's been several murders, and Chief of Police Ben Fuller thinks the killer is not a simple human colonist. The beginning of the book reads like a noir mystery novel, but In Space, as we follow the POV of some of the colonists. It takes quite a few chapters for the Doctor and Sam to show up, in fact. Once they arrive and are appraised of the situation, they obviously offer to help in the investigation, with the Doctor handily producing some documents proving they are professionals (real documents!). The leader of the colony, Helen Percival, is very sus, though. Apart from the titular Face-Eater, she's the main villain here and, by God, she sucks. Not a single redeeming quality, just evil. The Face-Eater's telepathic power is putting everyone in the colony a bit on edge, but she's just off the rails 100% of the time. Decides early on that she doesn't trust the Doctor or her own Chief of Police, and just absolutely loathes Sam on sight. The other characters are a mixed bag: some had potential, like Lopez and Joan, but they die super quickly. Ben Fuller, hot and troubled detective, has a whole 'The Mentalist' backstory, but also dies at around half the book, and Jake Leary only really shows up on the third act.

Sam begins the story wanting to make sure that the nanites that overtook her in 'Beltempest' are truly gone and that she's 100% herself again. This is mentioned a few times, but it's not a great source of angst or reflection; this is more of a plot book than a character book. By the end, we and Sam can be sure there's no nanites left, since she gets horribly hurt and almost dies twice: has a bomb explode on her (thanks, Percival) and is in a car crash (that she herself has to cause to get rid of one of the Face-Eaters). She had a some rapport with Fuller until he dies, and then connects with Leary, but it's a short-lived collaboration. She and Doctor spend most of the story separated, again. They split up for the investigation when they arrive, Sam with Fuller, the Doctor with Joan, and only meet again at the very end. The Doctor's part of the investigation takes him to the Proximans, kind of chipmunk/rat telepathic little creatures that I unfortunately spent the whole book picturing as 'Alvin and Chipmunks' from the movie. Yes, with the sweaters. Anyway. They kind of telepathically tell him that the Face-Eater(s) lives in the mountains and that it, not Jake Leary, is the responsible for the murders. One of the things attack him and Joan, she dies, he gets hurt and then disappears for half the book.

Part one is mostly about the investigation. In part two the focus shifts to Percival's paranoia leading to a manhunt for Sam and Fuller, and to riots in the streets. The Doctor is nowhere to be found, but washes up with a broken leg after a few days. Except it isn't the Doctor, it's one of the Face-Eaters! Gasp! The author doesn't want us to know that, though. We get his POV and he's mostly thinking things and saying things the Doctor would think and say, but there's something a bit off. He makes some mistakes, he doesn't anticipate some things he should, is too desperate when he talks to Sam in the hospital. Buuut I don't know, the twist wasn't constructed as well as I'd have liked. I particularly didn't like that it wasn't Sam to figure out it wasn't really him; the real Doctor sent Leary with the message to her and Percival. It would have been so cool to have Sam confront a fake Doctor, to have her realise it wasn't him by some small thing only a long time companion would have noticed! But no, Sam can't get a win like that, apparently. All her plans, as it more often than not happens in these books, are either failures (getting Leary's file from Percival's office -- Ben dies before they do anything with the info, the Doctor meets Leary himself) or inconsequential (trying to stop Percival from setting off the nuclear bomb -- Horton already did it). Her big win in this one was the car crash, poor Sam.

Part three is a whoooole mess. Giant tentacle monster attack mess. We get the real Doctor's POV on what happened and how he met Leary, then he goes to confront the main Face-Eater along with one of the chipmunk thingies. The only reason he doesn't die is because these books are called 'The Eighth Doctor Adventures'. He bluffs and confuses the Face-Eater a bit, but if it wasn't for the Proximans we'd be meeting John Hurt here. He gets thrown around and smacked a lot, and is nearly mind raped; he even says he 'thinks he might regenerate from bruising alone', my poor guy.

The day is... saved, ish, although a lot of people died, the colony is mostly destroyed, and the Proximans doomed themselves to extinction when they 'deactivated' the Face-Eater. A horrible week for all involved, Sam and the Doctor just want to get out of there and never think of any of this ever again. Fair.

Guess who's back? The list! Leary kiiiind of tortures/interrogates him, but his discomfort is mostly due to the broken leg, so I'm only counting that, and the Face-Eater doesn't quite get inside his head enough to count as torture (given that this is the Doctor we're talking about).

• Memory Loss:1 (in 'The Eight Doctors')
• Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:7 (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 here)
• Torture:2 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I')