This is just one of those
stories that really feels like it belongs in the middle of the Divergent
Universe Arc. It’s a story that takes
place on a planet where everything is regulated by the concept of time. Everyone is forced to work in a specific
shift and live until their assets to society are determined no longer useful to
society which is when the clockwork men come.
Steve Lyons does a great job at making this planet just feel alien very
much in the same vain as Conundrum
and Head Games which of course just
gets you wrapped up in the setting and the characters of Time Works and just how the mechanics of this world works. What really becomes striking when concerning
the way Lyons writes the story. It isn’t
done in the traditional plot point A to point B to point C, but mixed up scene
by scene as time on this planet isn’t working as a line from cause to effect,
but almost events running parallel with Tracey Childs’ magnificent Figurehead manipulating
the events from behind the scenes which actually makes it feel a lot like a
spiritual successor to Head Games in
that it comments a bit on the Seventh Doctor.
Paul McGann is great as the Eighth Doctor but there are points in this
story that Lyons goes out of his way to show the Doctor has changed from the
manipulative man that was the Seventh Doctor was, but of course his time came
and he died.
Lyons is great at
crafting the supporting cast of this story as they are all really interesting
and have fleshed out characters, but this actually causes Charley and C’rizz to
suffer. Now India Fisher and Conrad
Westmass are both doing their very best in this story to be engaging, but they
don’t really have much to do except explore.
They’re both doing a lot of enjoyable things in the story but it almost
feels like their parts were meant for Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester from the
novels, not because they are out of character, but they just have things that
feel more like those characters. The
story’s style also causes the pacing to suffer early on as Part One is pretty
much divided into little snippets of story before it actually allows us to go
on.
Time Works is
just an extremely difficult story to talk about, even more so than The Natural History of Fear and Creatures of Beauty, as it does a lot of
the same style of storytelling in the nonlinear fashion. It is done for a really good story that
wouldn’t feel out of place in a lot of different ranges, especially the
Divergent Universe Arc which was sadly cut severely short or the Virgin New
Adventures. 87/100
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