The Taking of Planet 5 by: Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham

 

The Taking of Planet 5 is a complex novel.  It attempts to tie together several plot threads from the previous twenty-seven novels and to act as a blueprint and further explanation for the War in Heaven and the goals of Faction Paradox.  It’s a look into a potential future history of the Time Lords and their place in the war.  This is also the second Doctor Who novel from one Simon Bucher-Jones cowriting with Mark Clapham, and is one of those novels where there’s a lot going on in its plot, so the book is stuffed full of ideas almost to the point of breaking.  The title describes much of the plot aptly: a group of Elder Things are attempting to break the time loop around Planet 5 to release the Fendahl from their imprisonment to aid in the war effort.  While this is a simple outline, like Bucher-Jones’ previous work there are added layers of complexity with different parties having different goals towards winning this war.  Faction Paradox in particular doesn’t have a full arc in this book, instead being implied in the background behind many of these things, there is an expectation that the reader is familiar with their developments up to this point.

 

Bucher-Jones and Clapham present the reader with an incredibly dense novel filled to the brim with purple prose.  There are beautiful descriptions of everything from Antarctica, to Gallifrey, to the eldritch abominations which inhabit the novels, and with that dense prose one of the book’s flaws: it simultaneously says a lot while really saying nothing about anything in particular.  While Bucher-Jones’ previous effort The Death of Art suffered from themes that were buried under prose that ultimately meant little, The Taking of Planet 5 has the opposite problems.  The themes are there on the surface as the book deals with identity, cosmic horror, and change in various ways, but there isn’t enough time spent on any of these themes to really flesh them out completely.  Bucher-Jones and Clapham do an excellent job of filling this book with an interesting cast and fully fleshed out characters.  The perspective of this book shifts every so often allowing an insight into both Fitz and Compassion in such a way that the reader can now understand much of who they have become from their previous adventures.  Compassion is presented here as this truly alien presence in the novel, communing with the TARDIS in a way and becoming reliant on the Doctor’s trust to inform her actions.  She is ruthless and the reader can really feel her dead connection to the Remote and her previous life.  There’s something incredibly stilted about the way she is written here to give her dialogue that alien effect.  Her connection with the TARDIS is something that really hasn’t been explored and it’s interesting to see the implications of what she is in the greater scheme of things.

 

Fitz, on the other hand, is also in an interesting position here as he is clearly the reconstructed version that we saw at the end of Interference to avoid becoming Father Kreiner.  As portrayed here, it doesn’t feel like this is a replicated Fitz who has the memories of his former self implanted, but the original Fitz which is where Bucher-Jones and Clapham fall flat with the character.  There’s also just a lot of emphasis put on Fitz being the terrible ladies man who smokes cigarettes, especially apparent in his conversations with one of the Elder Things as it puts on a female human suit to make him feel at ease.   And yes, that scene is just as disturbing as it should be.  Much of The Taking of Planet 5 is cloaked in Lovecraftian horror mixed with humor in some of the odd ways mixing the tentacled abominations with concepts like the Museum of Things That Don’t Exist mixing with the idea that the Time Lords will eventually become these abominations.  Overall, The Taking of Planet 5 is a very mixed bag of a novel where ideas clash: one part At the Mountains of Madness, one part sequel to Alien Bodies, and one part meta commentary on Doctor Who there’s almost too much here and the book suffers for it.  It’s a good book, but some work could have made it a lot smoother.  7/10.