The Dark Path by: David A. McIntee: There Is No Turning Back From the Path You Chose

The Master is always a character that I have an interesting opinion on.  I love the iterations as seen by Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley on television and Geoffrey Beevers and Alex MacQueen in the audios.  The New Series Masters I have love hate relationships with in general which is fine considering how spotty the quality of the New Series can of course be overall.  Delgado’s incarnation is my favorite simply because he is James Moriarty to the Doctor’s Sherlock Holmes and it was sad that he never got to be in The Final Game which eventually became Planet of the Spiders.  So it was always going to be a difficult sell when the Virgin Missing Adventures decided that they were going to take the Delgado Master, or Koschei, and put him up against the Second Doctor in the middle of Season Five.  The wary feeling returned considering just how much I love the Master and the writer they brought in to write the story.  David A. McIntee is by no means a bad writer, but his track record only has one real story that could be considered a Classic with Sanctuary and one that was a dud with Lords of the Storm, the only book from McIntee that featured a returning villain.

 

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.