Ace is
dead, long live Ace. Mike Tucker and
Robert Perry are for all intents and purposes the architects for the Seventh
Doctor novels in the Past Doctor Adventures line. From writing the debut to penning most of
them (with Tucker taking Prime Time solo), their direction formed the
basis for a story arc not only for the Seventh Doctor and Ace as an alternative
take on Season 27 but also tying into the continuity changing hijinks of the
later Eighth Doctor Adventures. Loving
the Alien is the culmination of that arc in this range, Dale Smith’s Heritage
being a lead into this final showdown. The
Doctor fails. Ace is shot dead after falling
in love. The Doctor can barely keep it
together with added medical torture. The
rest of the novel plays out with the idea that she is not actually going to
come back, or at least not in the way that we think. There is explicitly a shift in the timelines,
the reason for resurrection left vague and the Doctor not caring because his
best friend is back He is not going to
question the gift, even if deep down he knows that this is not the Ace he met
in Dragonfire. Tucker and Perry
structure so much of Loving the Alien around this central event yet what
propels the first half of the novel is setting up for the reader the idea that
Ace’s own decisions: rebelling against the Doctor and falling in love with a
boy called Jimmy, is going to somehow subvert her death.
There is a
world where this is a television story, and Sophie Aldred has decided to leave Doctor
Who. Being a novel, the timeline is
corrupted somewhat and there is a slight uncomfortableness with the Ace that we
have here because the Past Doctor Adventures won’t return to this arc. Tucker and Perry leave the reader on this
implication on where the Doctor and Ace will go from here, though there is an
argument to be made that their story is going into its own new, adventurous
territory. After all, Ace has already
left in Set Piece. She even died
in “Ground Zero”. Tucker and Perry’s
portrayal of the Doctor in Loving the Alien is particularly excellent. The Time Lord is taken by the grief of losing
Mel in Heritage and the very real possibility of losing Ace, bringing to
the surface his worst impulses. His
decision to plant a bug on Ace so he can track her is the final straw to push
her away. Loving the Alien is a
look through the Doctor’s past mistakes, with several footnotes reminding
readers to check the other Past Doctor Adventures that have been leading to
this moment. Tucker and Perry examine
the Doctor as over planning, the sequences in the TARDIS where he is
emotionally distant from Ace are great as are the haunting description of his
autopsy of her corpse. The Doctor is planning
for something far bigger than him but Loving the Alien despite being explicitly
a sequel to Illegal Alien, isn’t actually all that big in terms of
stakes. Yes, there are timestream
diversions that need to be put right, and they are put right at the end, but
the extent of the diversions still leaves the setting of the late 1950s London
looking like the late 1950s London.
Above
everything else Loving the Alien is Mike Tucker and Robert Perry’s
tribute to the atomic monster genre of film with a particular love of Nigel
Kneale’s Quatermass serials.
While not taking the plot from a Quatermass serial, instead using
giant ants as our primary “monster” threat until Cyber technology can reenter
the plot as the book becomes more of a sequel to Illegal Alien over
anything else. The British Rocket Group
and the space program seen in The Quatermass Experiment and its
subsequent film adaptation take center stage in the plot for the first half, there
even is a character named Kneale as tribute.
Tonally this is great for the novel, Tucker and Perry setting it in a very
specific period of history and the pacing of the book takes on the pace of a
very early science fiction serial with flashes of film noir. Cody McBride and George Limb are our two
major returning characters, McBride now being an older private detective being
hired by American reporter Rita Hawks to investigate a classic case of adultery
that isn’t adultery. The book keeps the film
noir elements until the timeline slipping becomes slowly more and more apparent
but having McBride and the Doctor both fill a detective role leads to some of
the lighter moments of the novel which are particularly great. George Limb doesn’t fare as well. He works well as the villain of the novel
being run on survival instinct and an accrual of political power.
This is
where the larger issues of Loving the Alien comes through. Itis packed to the brim with ideas and
plotlines that are constantly shifting and twisting. The atomic monster plot of the giant ants is
resolved so it can shift to explicitly use Cyber technology for political gain
that is incoherent. The explanation of
the Waverider as being responsible for everything is also far too quick after a
lot of buildup. Loving the Alien does
set up its many twists and turns, however, outside of the central Doctor/Ace
conflict it becomes a mess. The most egregious
is Ace becoming pregnant with James Dean’s child. Yes, that James Dean who slipped a timeline
and didn’t die in the 1955 car crash. The
actual pregnancy happens almost too quickly and Ace’s own feelings on
potentially having a child are not explored before her death and when
resurrected it is undone. Jimmy as James
Dean is a twist that feels more like an idea that Tucker and Perry had without thinking
it through.
Overall, Loving
the Alien works best in the first half with the mounting sense of dread in
the reader as Ace goes slowly to her death.
This is a novel where Mike Tucker and Robert Perry take some big swings
that really do pay off by the end, even if that ending becomes all too
cluttered with the resolution not entirely involving the Doctor’s actions
enough. The characterization is fantastic,
and it does feel like a season finale to the several books leading up to this. It’s also a book that is begging for Sylvester
McCoy and Sophie Aldred to star in an adaptation as a pair with Illegal
Alien. 8/10.
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