The Last Resort by: Paul Leonard

 

Paul Leonard’s The Last Resort has one of those covers that just read as insane.  An enormous UFO over the pyramids while several TARDIS’s appear at various points, there’s an indication that this is meant to be a big novel.  The series of alternate universes and parallel realities plaguing the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji are coming to a close and Leonard decides to write a novel as a tribute to Groundhog Day.  Instead of time loops, the narrative switches between several alternate Earths featuring various combinations of this TARDIS team and Sabbath existing and falling apart.  The Time Police are an organization that stops time travelers, Good Times Inc. provides time tourism, and in some realities a new species of Martians are subservient to Earth.  A time traveling boy from Ohio called Jack has become Akhenaten after inventing a time machine, Sabbath has his own plans, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found.  Keeping the Doctor off-page for about half the book is a brilliant decision from Leonard, it helps keep the reader feel as disoriented as the many alternatives of Fitz and Anji are.  Reading The Last Resort is meant to be disorienting, the first four chapters actually repeat themselves with minor differences but the same chapter titles and end with death.  There’s a lot of death in The Last Resort.  Reality is falling apart and Leonard uses death as an attempt to communicate that idea.  Nothing is stable, one page Fitz or Anji will be dead and the next they will be alive again, plotting the next steps in whatever feeble attempt could save reality.

 

The Doctor reentering the narrative at the halfway point brings some stability to The Last Resort.  Before this point Sabbath was the closest thing to stability, at least in terms of implementing his plans, despite the several guises of the man.  The Doctor’s absence is actually where the novel is the strongest, it’s where Leonard can implement the most interesting imagery outside of the repeating chapters gimmick.  It is a gimmick that is abandoned after one repetition of the first two chapters, indicating that Leonard was unsure of his ability to tell this type of complex, nonlinear story.  Anji as a character is the only one outside of the Doctor to be emotionally stable enough to make a plan that has a plan that might just work.  She’s the only one who can see her life as disposable, there will be another Anji and Fitz coming by with another Jack to fulfil the plan.  Returning the Doctor to the narrative does not fix things but it does take away from the early portions of the book which do explore the idea of time tourism creating broken worlds.  Leonard also struggles quite a bit with the setting of the back half of the book, it’s where everything centers more directly on Egypt and the pyramids as a setting.  It’s where Sabbath becomes once again the outright villain of the novel, something that is fairly obvious from the beginning, however it’s reducing the story to a normal Doctor Who story.

 

Leonard also has a slight struggle in having to use The Last Resort for some further setup.  The actual cast is intentionally quite small, most characters are alternate versions of other characters and there are at least two characters revealed to be alternate versions of Jack.  Since Time Zero there had been hints that Trix stowed away from the TARDIS and this is the book where she actually reappears, though not to the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji, instead to one of the many Jacks of the novel.  She has a small part to play but her scene and the epilogue are very much setting up her to be a major player in the next book.  That’s where The Last Resort fails, Leonard is not writing a complete narrative for himself, or at least that’s what the book becomes after a point, instead writing the prelude to the next Eighth Doctor Adventures novel, Timeless, and that means he cannot take full advantage of his fascinating premise.  The satire Leonard attempts is lost in translation and the actual resolution of the novel falls into his usual trap of underwhelming endings.  The epilogue in particular feels like a cliffhanger of the Doctor discovering Trix in the TARDIS and a final confrontation with Sabbath is imminent, it just does not help the narrative of this book.

 

Overall, The Last Resort has the potential to be one of the greats, and for the first half it becomes at least interesting, but it eventually devolves into a stop gap narrative meant to get the characters to a point for the finale of this arc.  It’s a problem that much of this arc has had, Reckless Engineering leading directly into the finale as intended with this novel just as a weird little aversion where little actually changes for our protagonists.  It’s by no means a bad book, but it is a book that would work better were it separated from this point in the story arc, even if it swapped places with the previous book it would likely improve.  Dropping the nonlinear presentation gimmick so early on is also bringing it down quite a bit making it a perfectly fine little story that had more potential in theory than execution.  6/10.