I have to say however for
the worrying feeling it wasn’t really justified. Now The
Dark Path is by no means perfect.
McIntee’s novel is way too long with large sections that are inserted to
pad out the run time without adding any characterization to the Doctor or the
Master. There are sections there just so
we can have a bit of Craig Hinton style fanwank. The story itself is an interesting idea for
the Master and is, thank goodness, not mutually exclusive with the origins as
seen and discussed in Big Finish’s excellent Master. McIntee sets us on
the Darkheart, a planet where sinister goings on are occurring with the
Adjudicators. Koschei and his companion
Ailla arrive on the planet and want to stop a war going on. Yes this novel actually starts with the
Master as almost one of the good guys for the early portions of the story. The idea that this is where he dissents into
madness and evil, while not done to total satisfaction, is a good idea and
seems like this is where Death was able to get her grip on him. I have to say that McIntee handling Koschei
in this novel works as a preamble to Terror
of the Autons where he first appears proper. The character actually shows that he was good
friends with the Doctor at one point to allow us to have somewhere to start on
when moving forward. He shows right on
the off that he isn’t nearly as moral as the Doctor, resorting to hypnosis for
infiltration and charming Victoria into doing his dirty work, but McIntee
excels at writing the character and every line just oozes a performance from
the legendary Roger Delgado.
Ailla is also an
interesting character as she plays the companion to the Master, but halfway
through the novel we get the revelation that when shot she didn’t die, she
regenerated. She’s actually a Time Lord
working for the Celestial Intervention Agency to manipulate the Master into
doing the Time Lord’s dirty work. It’s a
great idea and you really see Koschei grow at least as a friend to Ailla until
he goes down the titular dark path to evil.
She also is a great example of what I like to dub the Romana effect,
which is when the Doctor comes in to a person’s life, shakes up their world,
and makes them a better person because of their experiences with him much like
Romana’s departure in Warriors’ Gate. Ailla’s a bureaucrat through and through and
even by the end wants to bring the Doctor in to the Time Lords, promising a
fair hearing if he complies, but he leaves her at the end and her final lines
show just how much she’s grown. She’s
resigned to her fate of helping people recover from the death and
destruction. Maybe it’s guilt because
Koschei goes insane once he thinks she’s dead, but it’s still a good portrayal
for the character.
McIntee puts in an
admirable effort when it comes to the characterization of the Second Doctor,
Jamie and Victoria. The Second Doctor is
a Doctor difficult to get right in prose due to Patrick Troughton’s often manic
performance. My problems with The Menagerie, Invasion of the Cat-People
and Twilight of the Gods stem mainly
from an inability to adequately characterize the Doctor. McIntee doesn’t do it perfectly, but the
character shines through when he’s talking to Jamie or even Koschei. He uses wordplay and selective information to
get his way into the plot which is something Troughton’s Doctor would do, but
the charm is a little lacking when it comes to the prose. Jamie on the other hand is handled as if
Frazer Hines himself was guiding McIntee through the writing process. You get to see into Jamie’s mind in such a
brilliant way and how he interacts with the future is a joy to behold. He’s even got the same chemistry with the
Second Doctor. Victoria, while written
well by McIntee, is just a bit too supplementary for this novel as she spends a
lot of it hypnotized. Koschei does tempt
her over to the dark side with the ideas of being able to save the life of her
father, but other than that there isn’t much for her to do in this story.
To summarize, The Dark Path may not be worth all the
hype of the Master’s origin story, but it still turns out to be a good book
from David A. McIntee. It gets its
characters down very well and can communicate a good story, but there are just
sections of the novel that are a slog to get through and almost too much
fanwank for anyone’s tastes. 80/100.
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