Customer Reviews

The Face-Eater (Doctor Who Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Let's face it, Samantha Jones has GOT to be the worse companion ever for the Doctor to be saddled with and this novel just homes that point in. She's so annoying that I found myself skimming over her parts and getting back to the Doctor. (If I hear one more bit about her being against eating meat and against violence one more time I'll scream!) No, in fact I refuse to buy any more DW books until Sam gets kicked out!! If you like Sam, then get this book. If you find her an insufferable moronic idiot, do yourself a favor and pass this one up. You'll save your blood pressure! Otherwise this story is rather standard fare, nothing really spectacular.

THE FACE-EATER is not terribly original or innovative and does not take the reader anywhere that Doctor Who hasn't (metaphorically) gone before. It doesn't blaze any new trails like ALIEN BODIES, it doesn't redefine a companion like SEEING I, nor does it push the envelope towards a beautiful breaking-point in the way that THE SCARLET EMPRESS did. It is, however, mesmerizing and spellbinding, and I sped through this in about half the time it usually takes me to read a BBC Doctor Who book because I simply couldn't put the book down.

The plot skips along quickly and isn't overly complicated while not being totally straightforward either. This is actually used to great effect by Simon Messingham. When the action slows down, interesting character development takes place as well as some fascinating reflections on the setting. In case you didn't know, this book is set on the planet that is the home to the first Earth colony outside the solar system. There are some excellent passages concerning how isolated these people are, how much they sacrificed to come this far and just what exactly is at stake in this situation.

The Doctor is relegated to the sidelines through most of the story, though for the small amount of time that he is present he has some appropriate lines and great scenes. There are some good moments for him here, the best being when he is tied to a chair and literally spends hours trying to convince his captor that he isn't a shape-shifter. The premise is simple enough, but the scene is wonderfully written and shows that Messingham really has the hang of this Doctor in a way that very few other EDA authors have demonstrated.

Sam, on the other hand, for the first portion of the book, is at her most annoying - worse than she's ever been. She whines, she moans and she complains. She's mean and she's witlessly sarcastic to people who she has no reason to be mean and witlessly sarcastic to. In short, it's everything we've come to know and loathe about her since she joined the Doctor. Fortunately, she tones it down in the middle and end of the book so that she actually becomes somewhat tolerable. I suspect that Messingham wanted to make her over-the-top in her assertiveness to compensate for the events of the previous book but was forced by reason of her love interest in this story to mellow her out a little. It would be far beyond the realms of possibility to believe that anyone could gain an admirer if he or she was continually carrying on in the manner Sam was at the start of this book.

Fortunately, what saves the opening of the book from being a complete Sam-infested failure is the great mystery that Messingham has set up. There's a suspected psychopath on the loose and people are mysteriously being killed. They're all fairly standard Doctor Who elements, but the execution is so superb that it all feels very fresh and new.

One of the highlights for me was watching the commander of the colony going slowly insane as the story progresses. From the very start she's nervous and unsure of her command. There is a conspiracy, she is convinced, that is intent on usurping her authority and destroying the civilization that she has worked so hard to build. Her paranoia gains more control of her mind and eventually she is reduced to setting up trip wires around her office with pieces of string tied around containers of pens in an attempt to find a fictitious intruder (who she imagines is a disgruntled worker out to sabotage her colony and can be identified by wearing, appropriately, a red arm band). The slow progression from slightly neurotic leader to full-blown lunatic is well handled and intriguing. Excellent, well-written stuff.

This is definitely a good book and comes highly recommended despite the painful Sam moments at the beginning. It's not earth-shattering or groundbreaking, but it accomplishes what it set out to do and that is to tell a wildly entertaining story.

Proxima II is the first human colony to be founded on another planet. There are five thousand inhabitants attempting to build a new home on this barren plant. When the Doctor and Sam arrive, they find that not everything is running smoothly; people are being murdered... Chaos reigns as the leader of the colony calls for strict martial law, and the police are brutally murdering people. Fears buried deep inside come to the surface, and even the Doctor is not immune... The native inhabitants can only mimic others, but they hold the key to unravelling the mystery that threatens the human population. Overall this was an enjoyable book, with many unexpected plot twists.

I kind of expected to not like this book. Going by the title, I figured it would just be gruesome for the sake of being gruesome, and we'd go through the motions with some typical "Who" setpieces before finally calling it a day and moving onto the next story.

Yet. None of this is particularly new or original, and somehow the author manages to keep it all hanging together through deft plotting and a little slight of hand. We get the usual stnadard setup . . . the Colony in Crisis. On the Proxima colony, one of the first of its kind, someone is killing off the colonists. Or, we think its someone, one of their own having gone mad and picking off people one by one for reasons that nobody can fathom. And not just stabbing them . . . but DISSOLVING THEIR FACES. Ooh. Local law enforcement is trying to figure it out, the head of the colony is slowly going mad as control slips away and hey, while we're here why not throw in some working class tensions? Why not have a blue box carrying an eccentric man and his overeager companion show up to complicate matters further?

Roll credits. As you might expect, the story starts to veer toward the all too common cause of the colony really being menaced by Alien Forces Beyond All Understanding and it all comes very close to being cliche. But it doesn't and I really can't explain how. Once I figured out the basic premise, I fully expected to be bored, and I wasn't. It may be the subtle touches, while we've seen the colony leader going nuts before, she takes it to a whole new level here, setting traps and tripwires in her office for people. The author pulls off a fairly decent switcharoo part way through that actually did catch me by surprise. He manages to make the aliens both cute and alien at the same time. He gives us characters that are painted in little strokes so we get a sense of their history without being subjected to a lot of exposition. The colony feels like a real place, even if it never feels totally like an alien world. Its got several creepy moments and even a few where he lulls us into thinking we know how this is going to go before yanking it into a different direction.

Don't get me wrong, its not perfect. For a book called "The Face-Eater", it's not very graphic at all, for its part "Janus Conjunction" was far worse in that respect, and while it was probably wise to not make that the focus of the book, you do wind up expecting something a bit more horrific. It does resemble an actual "Who" episode more in that sense, by keeping the violence and blood sort of off to the side. There's a bit of an Idiot Plot going on at several points (why does everyone keep going back to the place where the bodies are found, when all that does is make more bodies appear?). After several books in a row where Sam isn't that annoying, she abruptly switches back to very annoying again, in all her more righteous than thou glory, and just injecting herself needlessly into every situation. She recovers a bit by the backhalf, making you wonder if the author intended that to be the case, or he just realized how he was writing her early on. There's also several hints of romance with her that aren't really followed through on, although the Doctor comments on this in one sparkling bit of dialogue: "She likes rugged men with difficult histories. You'll get on like a house on fire."

But I give the author credit for taking a lot of stuff we've seen before and keeping the plot moving quickly enough so that we don't realize how second-nature this all should feel. Is it a classic? Nope? Was it a more entertaining way to spend a few hours than I had hoped for? As it turns out, it was, and sometimes that's all you're looking for.