The first two installments of the Cat’s Cradle trilogy,
while being good stories, don’t have any real overarching storyline except a
mysterious silver cat that appears and the TARDIS malfunctioning. It is standard mystery box storytelling that
happens in the New Series and fails when reveals don’t live up to the
hype. It didn’t work with the three
Clara Oswald’s identities in Series 7B or the reveal of Missy in Series 8. Moffat loves these kinds of stories but they
rarely ever work and this trilogy is no exception. The cat’s true identity being revealed is
saved for the very end of the novel and has no real impact on the story being
told. The cat is a way for the TARDIS to
heal itself from the damage it sustained from Time’s Crucible and that’s about
it. Now I believe that the ending of a
story is the most important part of the story, but when an ending has nothing
to do with the story itself it can be forgiven if there is a good primary story
attached to it.
Well Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark doesn’t have that good of a
story. It feels much like the Series 8
episode In the Forest of the Night which used classic literary allusions as a
framework for the story. Witch Mark does
pretty much the same thing, but singles out the literary work of two best
friends from the 1950s. These are The Chronicles
of Narnia by C. S. Lewis and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien with
many classic mythological creatures showing up for good measure. What Andrew Hunt tries to do is to weave
these creatures together with a portal to a different world in Wales of all
places. The story tries to have the
childlike whimsy of Narnia combined with an epic quest like Lord of the
Rings. The plot becomes a rambling mess
with a lot of self-references to some of the oddest stories. Hunt references Ace becoming a Cheetah Person
in Survival and that beekeeper in Delta and the Bannermen. None of them really make any sort of sense
and the story doesn’t flow. This is
especially apparent when you read the first four chapters and prologue which
are extremely dull and extremely long.
Again a lackluster story can be made up for if there are interesting
characters to become attached to, but none of the supporting characters are
particularly memorable in any real way.
You would think with a cast comprised of Centaurs, Unicorns, humans, an
investigative reporter, a werewolf-like creature, and some comedy Welshmen
thrown in for good measure would have something to latch on to. The only bit of intrigue is the climax when
one of the human characters shapeshifts and saves the day. The Doctor and Ace also get very little to do
in the story except letting events play out before them. Hunt also doesn’t really understand the
character of Ace. She doesn’t really
feel like Ace at all, but just a random character. Her dialogue is atrocious with weird 80s
colloquialisms that I don’t think people actually said during that decade. The Doctor also is hurt as he resembles his
clownish persona of Season 24 and not the master manipulator of Seasons 25 and
26. So all in all I can give this story
40/100 as it doesn’t really know how to be a Doctor Who story and feels out of
place in the series of novels.
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