Independence Day by: Peter Darvill-Evans

 

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.