Peter Darvill-Evans is a writer who should understand
what makes Doctor Who work. He
edited most of the Virgin New Adventures and Virgin Missing Adventures,
contributed Deceit as a test to see if he could constrain himself to the
requirements. Yet, he didn’t write for
Virgin after Deceit, but BBC Books would contract him for a Seventh
Doctor Past Doctor Adventure, bringing him back to Doctor Who with some
fanfare. Independence Day is a novel
with a plot that should work on every level, Darvill-Evans plays around with a
mix of science fiction and historical fiction with a binary planet system where
a space station hangs while the society below doesn’t have the technology to
make a space station. Invaders arrive,
capture and drug the locals, ready to bring them into slavery. This should be the perfect setup for a story,
and from one of the minds involved in bringing the Virgin New Adventures
together means the Seventh Doctor and Ace should be great, but Independence
Day falls flat at almost every turn in the tale. The odd trend of including the Second Doctor
and Jamie McCrimmon in books for small cameos in prologues with a prologue
which really isn’t necessary for the setup, if this were a television story it might
be mentioned in passing near the beginning.
Sure Darvill-Evans has a handle on their characterization, but once we
move into the Seventh Doctor and Ace, there’s less of a spark in the writing
making the reader long for more of the prologue.
There isn’t any direction in how Darvill-Evans
characterizes the Doctor and Ace here which is one of the problems with the
book. Now I wasn’t expecting anything to
be referencing the Virgin New Adventures development or characterization, but
the blurb on the back says this is a long time after Survival implying
that a lot of time has passed while the Doctor is barely recognizable as the
Seventh Doctor and Ace is barely recognizable as Ace. The Seventh Doctor is the Doctor, the one
helping out wherever he can which is great and the scenes where he takes
control of the situation, analyzing what drugs are in the soup and rallying the
people behind him are there, but you never get the sense that he is in control
of the situation. He doesn’t really have
a plan, despite the implication that the situation which the prologue lays out
as something the Doctor meant to come back to, but he doesn’t actually know
anything that’s been going on throughout the book. It comes across more as a generic Doctor,
perhaps closer to the Fourth Doctor, but the expectation was that Darvill-Evans
would write for the Seventh Doctor, so for the Seventh Doctor Independence
Day becomes.
Ace is perhaps treated somehow worse. Now for the first third of the novel she’s
fine, portrayed as if we were still around Season 25 or 26, but fine. There’s some great little moments where we
get inside her head and see how she’s reacting to travels with the Doctor and
how their relationship is changing, one of the few things that makes this feel
like a Seventh Doctor book, but then she’s just kind of pushed aside and forgotten
about. Well not forgotten about, but
hypnotized and brainwashed and possibly assaulted. Darvill-Evans’s biggest issue in Deceit
was perhaps the portrayal of sex and LGBT characters, something I didn’t
mention in my original review due to ignorance and the folly of youth, and that
hasn’t actually improved here. Ace,
spending much of the book in essentially a trance where the either becomes
really docile or really aggressive depending on the scene ends up having sex
with a character and the vibes of that scene are off. It feels like it bleeds into some issues with
consent and once again Darvill-Evans makes the reader in a very odd position as
this is a very weird book to read. His
prose is also incredibly dense, making the 280 page novel feel all the longer. This is not in a larger wordcount, but in a stylistic
manner where there is the sense of little movement. The chapters are also incredibly long when
they really don’t need to be, contributing to the pacing issues.
Overall, Independence Day is a novel that
should at least work as a decent Doctor Who story but it falls flat
through some generally poor characterization and a plot which treads stories
that we’ve seen before and done better elsewhere. There’s also Darvill-Evans’ issues with Ace
and her subplot which contributes to a book which already suffered from pacing
issues. 4/10.
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