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')

Charming, but a bit too slow for my taste. Nothing very deep or complex, mostly comedic. The ending was lackluster, but it was a lighthearted story anyways.

Things make a lot more sense when you realise this was written by Jim Mortimore, who also wrote BF's 'The Natural History of Fear'. A lot of it is just... atmosphere. Nightmare vibes. Complex questions are presented, pushed around and not really answered, the setup makes less and less sense as more is revealed, and I'm not sure any of the characters really learned much of anything. Mixed metaphors, the book. A lot of the discussion is based around life and death, responsibility, and parents and children. The paternity/maternity bit was, for me, used interestingly to explore Sam and the Doctor's relationship. 

Well, the more I think about the book the less I like it as a story, but, as I said, vibes. I liked the vibes.

Sam was a whole character for most of the book, until she's possessed once more, and it's revealed she had actually been used by the aliens even before that. But in the beginning of the book, probably up until she gets the first telepathic message, it was all Sam acting on her feelings. 

Sam and the Doctor's first conversation in the TARDIS beach already starts setting up the question: does Sam want children? She's always tried to act more mature, capable, wiser than her age, and now she really is an adult; it makes sense for this idea to start popping up. She's still a very young adult though, in the threshold between fully mature (which in her mind is connected to being responsible for another's - a child's - life) and being a child herself. She wants maturity, respect, but is scared of responsibility. She wants to be done with child Sam, Sam who needs rescuing and protecting, but she does need rescuing and protecting a lot of the time. Obviously, the Doctor is her opposite: he has the age, the wisdom, the capability. He can handle the responsibility (we know this, Sam knows this), even though she sees him as irresponsible. He acts like a child on purpose ('a rich kid with too much money and no common sense, abandoned by irresponsible parents to amuse himself at the expense of the local townsfolk'), but he is, for all intents and purposes, her dad: the one responsible for her, the one who will come to her rescue, the one that will fix things for her. She knows he often sees her like that, like a child he's taking care of, raising, even, and resents him for it, because he's not her dad. 

Their relationship ping pongs between so many things between these books. They are friends, she had a massive crush on him, but it's now a platonic love with a smudge of 'if he ever wants to, I'm game'; he's her father-figure, her tutor, showing her the Universe so she can grow up and learn. She wants to be on a more equal footing, more like a team of two adults, and he does play along a lot. However, it can come off as patronizing, and it just makes her, immaturely, lash out like a kid. Their messiness is what makes these companion relationships interesting. All that being said, though, it does feel out of place, like it should have happened before. People say she’s acting too much like a teenager again in this book, but I don’t think we saw her as a grown up much after ‘Seeing I’ anyway. However, yes, I do believe this type of story would have worked better if it was right after 'Seeing I', or 'Placebo Effect'. Maybe even before the ‘Lost Sam’ arc? Not sure.

Sam has even more going on, though. She meets Saketh, a guy that can’t die and can make you also not die if you participate in a literal perversion of the Holy Supper (‘eat of my flesh and drink of my blood’). She also meets Delani, who’s a priest for a death worshiping cult. The question of choice and the role of religion is brought up a lot, along with the role of religion in shaping people’s choices and beliefs. So we end up with this theme: when you accept responsibility for someone, you are held accountable for the choices you make for them; what right do you have to decide if they should live or die based on your own beliefs? This comes to life quite clearly in Sam's nightmare where she runs over a child, who dies because her father, a Witness, does not allow for a blood transfusion. When Saketh offers her eternal life and his power, she’s terrified: it’s the ultimate position of responsibility for another’s life. She can save everyone if she accepts, but it will take away their right to choose. Sam herself fights the whole time for her right to choose, it’s one of her defining traits (one of the few, thanks to the way she’s characterized in these books). In the end, she accepts the power, and uses it to its max. This is when I get a bit lost: at what point do the nanites, the alien source of Saketh’s power, take over? How does that undermine her choice? 

The Doctor is turned up to 11 in this book. Literally, actually: he is acting a lot like Eleven at his ditziest, most manic. Flanderized, really, like Bugs Bunny or something. Not that Eight isn't flighty, he is, but he's usually more contained, a lot more refined, more logical, less of a babbler for the sake of babbling. He is entertaining, I’ll give you that, but the Doctor in a situation where millions of people will be saved if he can get to the TARDIS will make his point very clearly and seriously to get people to help him. Why on Earth did he let that nurse sedate him??? Looney Tunes Doctor was a weird choice, given the mavity of the situation the Bel system is in, another case of “Our Star is being Weird”. 

Like Sam, he’s faced with the morality of choice in the form of his right to interfere with alien affairs. Should he decide for these alien races what the right thing to do is? Again, there are billions of lives at stake, including the life of the baby planet thing and of the ancient Hoth. To explain the situation to him, the aliens (the Hoth, I think? This was a bit confusing) send him a telepathic dream as well. In the dream, he’s pregnant (wowzers), gets a C-section (wowzers) and the baby is put in an incubator that is a star. This scene altered my brain chemistry. He says ‘love you’ to the baby??? He wakes up completely disoriented asking where his baby is? Holy crap. Anyway, people are dying by the billions in this book because the sun is an incubator for a gigantic alien planet baby. It's a 'Kill the Moon' scenario, except it's the sun, and there are a lot more factors to consider. 

At this point in the story he’s calmed down a lot from his Looney Tunes antics in the first part of the book, which I appreciated. He just wants to get Sam and get the hell out. Sam’s corrupted by the nanites, “saving” (infecting) everyone she comes across. They talk, the Doctor and this Sam-shaped vessel for the nanites. He decides in the end to not interfere, to let the nanites try to do their plan: let the baby planet be born, use the gravity stabilizers he built to stabilize the star afterwards. There’s just too many races with their own reasons and rights for him to be able to push them to any decision that isn’t unilateral, and really, physically, there’s nothing he can do anyway. He just asks for Sam back; she is, after all, his base responsibility. If he can save only one person, it has to be her. The ending (how did they get to the TARDIS, I wonder?) is quite ambiguous. He’s moody, Sam’s not sure if she’s back to being herself or not. A lot of people died, but not everyone, and that’s that.

Structurally, this book is a mess. Characters teleport from place to place, there are way too many planets (if I might add, it's impossible for 23 planets in the same star system to be in the habitable zone). But I was engaged from start to finish. The dream sequences were fantastic, and the moral questions were compelling. Sam, while maybe acting too young for her 21-22 years, got some emotional development. It’s one of those stories where the Doctor doesn’t really “win”, because there is not an easy solution. In the end, I did like it. It was trippy in the way Doctor Who can’t afford to be on TV, and that’s why I’m on this ride.

*taps mic* I like giant spiders a lot.

Very solid adventure that I really enjoyed. Much less ambitious than 'The Scarlet Empress', but it hit the mark for me: cool setting, good characters, giant spiders, weird disease, moral conflicts.

The TARDIS is pulled out of the vortex by a weird "fold" in space-time, landing the Doctor and Sam in Janus Prime. They are immediately shot at ("this must be a record even for you"; "well, there was one time in San Francisco...") and soon separated in a conflict between the soldiers working for Gustav Zemler and the colonists of Mendan, another planet on the system. The two planets are linked by... the Link, a weird thingy that can used as portal to jump between the planets. The Doctor is taken to Mendan, while Sam is captured by the soldiers. If she's not rescued soon, the radioactive nature of Janus Prime will kill her, just as it is killing the soldiers stranded there.

Sam, sadly, doesn't get many wins here. As I said, she's captured, shot, and spends most of the story getting sicker and sicker. At this point, I'm filing a missing person report for the Sam of 'Seeing I'. Like in the past 3 or so books, she doesn't get to do nearly anything of her own accord. She's either being pushed around or following someone else's plans. Honestly, I don't need much. If she had even a good moment of giving a rousing speech, or convincing someone of... something, anything, or a strong connection to one of the other characters, that would already be great. Just giving her one or two quips and an unwavering faith in the Doctor is not enough to make her a compelling character. The one scene worth noting here is when she uses the gun Lunder gave her, and starts feeling very guilty about it because Guns = Bad. She nearly kills the Doctor and Julya, and does kill most of the Janusians (the giant spiders <3), but she never learns this! Like in 'Kursaal', the Doctor decides not to tell her, making it more of a character moment for him than for her. Likewise, her death by radiation poisoning is another moment for the Doctor, as he refuses to accept it and bends the laws of time to give her the cure. How she feels about it, about being very sick and near death, is explored in a kind of basic and bland fashion, in a "I never thought I'd die in a hospital in another planet" way. Where's the "I'm never gonna see my parents again" angst? C'monnnn, give me more! Let me into her thoughts!

I did like the other characters. Lunder and Moslei were specially good, and Julya gets her moment when she decides to save Mendan at the cost of Janus Prime. Zemler was a weird villain; I get that the radiation poisoning was driving him crazy, but the reason for the fighting with the Mendans and for activating the doomsday device were not very solid. The Doctor was great and very Doctor-y the whole time. I love it when he puts the lives of weird/scary aliens on the same level as human lives, and he does that brilliantly from the very start here with the Janusians. His adversarial relationship with Lunder, big violent soldier man with a good heart, was a highlight for me. Nothing groundbreaking, sure, but it had a nice development, and I was very happy when Lunder went to Janus Prime to save him.

Bottom line, this was fun, and would make a very good episode on TV!

Man, I don't know what to tell you. This is a well loved one, but it didn't click for me, and no one is sadder about that than myself. I didn't hate it, but it was just 'okay'.

Sam and the Doctor are on Hyspero, a planet of the fantastical and mystical. Quite by chance, they meet with the Doctor's old uh... Time Lord friend? acquaintance? person that you don't particularly like, but keep meeting in random places, and since they like you, you have to play along to be polite?... Iris Wildthyme. Iris is in trouble and the Doctor and Sam decide to help her our in her quest to reunite a gang of 'mutants' under the orders of Hyspero's ruler, the Scarlet Empress.

Since this is a quest, they travel a lot around the planet (in Iris' double decker TARDIS bus), meet a lot of people, get in a lot of trouble. There's always something happening. However, the feeling I got was that a lot was happening just for the sake of it, not in the service of the plot. There is such a thing as too much information: while introducing places/people/elements make for a richer story, doing too much just makes things confusing and, paradoxically, less interesting. For instance: oh no, they're gonna torture and kill Iris! What will the Doctor do? He'll... summon a hydra from a story book about that's vaguely about the Master? I don't like it when there's not much of a logical thread to follow from setup to conclusion. The Scarlet Empress is tyrannical, evil and we don't like her for some reasons I didn't quite get. She wants Iris to get the gang together because she knows one of them stole old empress Cassandra, okay. So they depose (read: kill) the current empress and Cassandra takes her place as the new empress... I don't think much has changed for the people of this planet, in the long run. I don't know, man. I kind of feel like this was like someone who's a decent cook cooking with no recipe for the first time. They get excited, use all of the spices, eyeball all the measurements. The result is not bad, but you can tell it's incoherent somehow, and there's too much cinnamon.

Moving on to the characters. Iris was interesting, albeit a bit annoying; I was just as frustrated with her as the Doctor was. The best parts of the book for me were exactly their quiet moments, conversations, and disagreements. Yes, Iris, he does have all the right to be mad at you for taking his life experiences and re-framing them as yours in your diaries!!! She means well, though, and she is very very fond of him. Kinda like a blend of River and Missy, but less murderous and more infuriating.

Sam... sure was there, I guess. The mutant gang were all super cool concepts... that I didn't care in terms of their personalities and plots. The Doctor was not the generic Doctor from 'Vanderdeken's Children', thank God, although (courtesy of Iris) he was more out of his depth than usual.

I did really enjoy the narrative framing and POV changes throughout the book. That was very interesting, particularly when Iris was narrating and telling us (if not her actual companions) what she was doing and what her motivations were. I'd be remiss not to mention the classic comments on the Doctor's gender and sexuality in this book. The weird starfish aliens try to convince Sam that the Doctor is a man, and doesn't care for her (why they do this I couldn't tell you). Sam's answer is along the lines of 'first of all, he's not a man, so jot that down, and he's beyond sex'. The topic of her feelings for him come up again when she realises that she does still love him. I'm pretty sure her love has now galvanized into a more platonic, but still sexual, feeling.

On the list of the Doctor's injuries and torments, I think I should count that scene with the hydra since I did count the bomb and broken fingers in 'Kursaal'. He does faint, and it's the reason Iris drives them away leaving Sam behind. He also gets a few minor injuries throughout this book for no particular reason.

• Memory Loss:1 (in 'The Eight Doctors')
• Serious Injuries/Near Death Experience:6 (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)
• Torture:2 (in 'Genocide', 'Seeing I')

PS: It was one line, but yikes, please do not imply that the Doctor and the Master are brothers ever again. Please.

I am of two minds with this one. On the one hand, this is very good scifi. The whole mystery was well set up, believable, and interesting. On the other hand, it's written in a dry fashion and the characters don't pop, including Sam and the Doctor. I don't think there was a single humorous scene or even exchange in the entire book. It's all very serious.

The Doctor and Sam find a weird and seemingly abandoned ship adrift in space. Two other ships also find this derelict: the Nimosian warship Indomitable and the Emindian cruise ship Cirrandaria. Not only do these two ships want to claim the derelict for themselves, but they also already have bad blood and any incident could ignite a war between them. The Doctor is unusually prepared to step into the situation, taking many steps to quickly establish himself as major player by pretending to be a Moderator for the Galactic Federation (with fake papers, of course). This is a story where the Doctor (TM) & the Companion (TM) are just cardboard cutouts of these characters. With only very minor dialogue changes, it could be Three and Jo. It could be Ten and Martha. It could be Thirteen and Yaz. You get my point. Still, the story was intriguing enough that I didn't mind it much. It's really a very solid and quite sad closed timeloop. If only it was a bit more dynamic in terms of characters.

Not much else to say this time. The Doctor uses his real name to get the crew of the Cirrandaria to trust him, but honestly, we have no reason to believe he gave them his actual name, and it's 'unpronounceable' anyways. Sam believes it, though. Once again the Doctor manages to not get seriously hurt (two books in a row! #safetyking). Sam gets turned into a little kid for all of 5 minutes, and is otherwise also unharmed. 

Great, great, great fun. A lot of cool stuff apart from the obvious sublime happiness of a (the!) multi-Doctor story. Time Lord lore! Omega! The Doctor being forgiven! The Brigadier adamantly refusing to believe he's a character in a scifi show! UNIT family (minus Yates) finally together inside the TARDIS! Quite a bit of cool shots in this story as well. The 'mental fight' between the Doctor and Omega was very clever, the anti-matter creatures looked great. That shot where we see the Doctors behind Omega when he lifts his mask and there's nothing there? Cinema.

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

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

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

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

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

The apex of "must it be good? isn't it enough to just be fun?". Many hilarious bits such as baby Benton, the Doctor doing a torero bit with the Minotaur, "I'm sorry for your coccyx, Miss Grant", Jo basically killing them all at the end, the Master pretending to be attracted to a woman for maybe 2 full minutes, the TARDIS button labeled "extreme emergency", hyperspeed Bessie, "TOMTIT". On the other hand, the scene where the Doctor tells Jo a bit about his childhood was unexpectedly tender, and the Brigadier going from "Yates, can you hear me" to "Mike, can you hear me" when the bomb dropped on Yates' team really got to me. So, as you can tell, the tone is all over the place in this story, and so is the plot, but it was a good time. And we got some Established Lore moments, with the mentions of the TARDIS being alive and the telepathic circuits.

Man, this one hard to get through. A couple good ideas, like the metamorphosis being supposed to happen and the whole colonialism+Apartheid analogy, but God the characters were terrible and the science (particle inversion?) was noticeably wonky, too silly even by DW standards. I think this story would work better as a tighter 4-parter rather than the 6-parter it is. I lost count on how many times they go from the planet surface to the Skybase and back again. The main villain, the Marshal, was just so over the top evil and despicable his motives weren't even interesting, and his communicator stick thingy was dumb. This is the first Pertwee story that didn't click with me, which is a shame.