The Final Sanction by: Steve Lyons

The Murder Game introduced the Selachians in its second half as a warmongering race which has mutilated itself to look like sharks and force themselves into battle suits.  With this premise Steve Lyons creates the potential for a vast world of culture to explore, however, The Murder Game is primarily a base under siege mixed with a murder mystery.  This leaves the Selachians in desperate need of exploration and a year later, Lyons wrote a follow up that delivered on this premise.  The Final Sanction returns to the Troughton era of the show, but now near the end of this Doctor’s life and captures a different tone.  The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive at the end of the war between the Selachians and humanity, both sides are desperate, and war at this point is futile.  From its opening chapters, The Final Sanction manages to capture the bleak nature of a war that nobody will win without genocide.  The desperation seeps through the prose as the TARDIS team are tested to how far they will go to get out safely, as their worldviews are challenged and the usually fun team from 1969 are brought into the cold light of day.  Lyons isn’t actively forcing this team into a darker tone, but allowing the drama to arise naturally from the situations the characters have found themselves in.  This is far from a forced darkness of certain early novels of the Virgin run, but the natural development of those novels published two years after Virgin stopped.



Zoe Heriot is close to getting the Dodo treatment in The Final Sanction, as Lyons puts her through hell.  Near the beginning of the novel, Zoe is captured by the Selachians and held prisoner for the runtime.  There is an avoidance of the damsel in distress, as even on television Zoe is a character far from your typical damsel, as every attempt she gets, she’s attempting to make an escape to get back to the Doctor and Jamie.  The Selachians, being ruthless, torture Zoe at every turn from physical to the psychological.  Lyons does not relish in these scenes but gives them enough room for the reader’s mind to fill in quite a few of the gaps.  There’s even a point where she’s become so desperate to escape from the torture, she fails to stop her accomplice from killing a civilian.  This action has consequences, and of course once the Selachians discover the body, Zoe is quickly recaptured and broken even further.  It’s only at the very end of the novel, in the epilogue, where the Doctor is able to comfort her and set her on the path of healing.  It’s actually a really nice moment and harkens back to The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Wheel in Space.  While Zoe’s story is one of being broken by torture, Jamie’s story is one of being broken by the horrors of war.  Being the protector of this TARDIS team (and the Second Doctor’s era in general), Jamie’s immediate priorities once Zoe is captured is to get her back.  This leads him to being trained for war, something that has changed a great deal in the centuries between the highlander’s own time.  Lyons really provides the juxtaposition of who the character is as Jamie’s brash nature goes against the underhanded tactics of this war, nearly getting him killed in the end.



Putting the Second Doctor in the middle of an all-out war is also something rather new, Lyons adds to it by giving him foreknowledge of events.  The Final Sanction is essentially a pure historical from the future where the Doctor knows what the outcome will be, spends as much time as he can to at least get people to regret their actions, and essentially do nothing to stop it.  The book is building up to genocide, and throughout Lyons and the Doctor are showing the reader, and any character who listens, that the war is entirely the humans doing.  The Selachians were once Ockorans, a peaceful people with the most beautiful singing voices and a culture of high art.  They became warmongers because of people invading their planets and beginning to wipe them out because they couldn’t communicate.  It becomes heart wrenching as you watch the Doctor attempt to save someone, anyone, and only succeed in the more bittersweet of ways.  The supporting characters are also Lyons’ usual caliber of writing.  The most interesting is Dr. Laura Mulholland, the scientist responsible for the genocide in the end through her research.  She is an example of science without regard for consequences in a comment on weapons of mass destruction and certain aspects of the political landscape at the time that haven’t really changed.  Wayne Redfern is the other most interesting character as he is the one who actually presses the button to destroy the Selachians with the Doctor unable to stop them.  Overall, The Final Sanction is excellent, leaving plenty of questions and filling in quite a few blanks from The Murder Game.  9/10.