Customer Reviews

The Fall of Yquatine (Doctor Who (BBC Paperback))

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Following from the surprising conclusion of Shadows of Avalon, the Doctor attempts to avoid his pursuers by fitting a randomizer into the TARDIS. Of course, things don't go quite as planned (do they ever?) and the three time travelers are separated. The Doctor finds himself coping with the carnage unleashed by an apparent invasion of the planet Yquatine, while Fitz finds himself trapped a month in the past, determined to get off-planet and escape the future he has already seen. And Compassion? Compassion is . . . somewhere else.

I felt nervous as I began reading this novel. I hate trying to remember all the details about alien civilizations, and Nick Walters throws in so many names and descriptions of different races, I knew I'd get lost. Fortunately, it wasn't necessary to remember all that stuff to enjoy the story. Walters does a good enough job reminding the reader of the important stuff that I never felt lost or confused. He was also very good at keeping things clear, even though the story jumps constantly between settings and time frames.

Walters does a particularly nice job with Fitz's sections of the story. The characters Fitz interacts with seem fleshed-out and real, and I felt genuine concern towards them. I knew what was destined to happen to the planet they were on, and hoped that they would find some way to escape the destruction. As with his previous novel, Dominion, Walters accurately captures the character of the Doctor.

After a number of stories (Interference, Blue Angel, Shadows of Avalon) that have pushed the Doctor Who format envelope, Fall of Yquatine seems almost tame by comparison. While it definitely ties in to the ongoing series developments, it also tells a very traditional Doctor Who adventure. It's fast paced and fun, without being too taxing. It may not be an example of Doctor Who excercising its fullest potential, but it's still an enjoyable read.

Almost everyone has moments in their life where they wished they could go back in time and relive them, in order to get a chance to do it right, or differently. Unfortunately, that's not as desirable when you don't get to pick the moment and the moment that is chosen for you happens to be right before a planet is destroyed.

Such is the dilemma that Fitz finds himself thrown into this time around. And while he hasn't reached record levels of suffering yet, he certainly is giving it his best try.

The new TARDIS crew (with Compassion as the new TARDIS) wind up landing on the planet of Yquatine. The Doctor is there to pick up something from an old friend, a device that winds up being a Randomizer (TV show fans will remember the Fourth Doctor using one after the whole "White/Black Guardian" season) and needless to say, Compassion doesn't take too well with one being installed inside her new form. Which would be fine for the crew to discuss, except just before this all goes down, the planet is attacked and all life promptly destroyed on it. Oh, and war is about to break out between all the previously peaceful races that live in the system. What a great time to throw yourself into a different time entirely and wait until someone else sorts it out!

Except everyone gets separated, with a panicked Compassion dumping Fitz in the worst possible place outside of a brothel designed for Daleks . . . he winds up stuck on Yquatine about a month before the events he just witnessed are about to go down, meaning he has to find a way to get the heck out of Dodge before things get ugly. Compassion, meanwhile, is fighting with the Randomizer, which is working true to its name and sending her all over time and space. Nobody's day is going well, and this is all before breakfast.

I gave Walters a tentative thumbs up when I last reviewed one of his novels ("Dominion") and he shows great progress here, instantly grasping the new status quo and running with it. He shows his strongest hand in the scenes with Compassion. Previously she was the hardest to grasp of any of the "Who" regulars, abrasive and a bit of a blank slate, but aware of the blankness of her slate at the same time. But her change from companion to living time traveling machine is by far the weirdest thing to have happened in the book for a while, replacing the familiar blue box with someone you can literally walk into and is still discovering what she can do. Walters runs with those scenes, giving us a sense of Compassion's alienness and the fact that she's still engaged in on-the-job training. She's confused and angry and upset (the Randomizer thing really doesn't go over well), almost killing Fitz in one scene, still processing all her new senses and abilities. It seems like her newfound TARDISness is going to unbalance the books and the authors are going to have to find reasons to sideline her to some extent to keep her from easily solving all their problems (once she gets going she's almost hideously effective), but considering that Walters basically gets her first (Cornell might have kickstarted the change but that was toward the end of "Shadows of Avalon" so he barely got a hold of her) he does a lot to setting the template for future writers.

The structure of the book is also interesting. While the other novels in the series often come up with contrived ways to separate the crew (generally by having someone wander off and get captured), here it feels organic because while they haven't gone anywhere, there's a gap between all three of them that none can reach. Fitz once again has to blend in with an alien society and he still reveals himself to be a more interesting character than Sam ever was, seeming more and more vulnerable as the books go on (he gets very emo in this novel) but still managing to be capable. The situation is fairly dire, with a sentient organism trying to kill everyone in the system while the aliens are at each other's throats . . . it could have easily been a confusing mash of races but Walters manages to keep them all straight. Oddly enough, it's the Doctor who feels sidelined in this novel, running about and doing standard Doctor stuff but more often than not simply going through the motions.

When the novel focuses on the plot things hum along in a more or less standard fashion, but it's when the story focuses more on the characters and their reactions to things it becomes better, especially with the TARDIS crew dealing with Compassion and each other. Those scenes form the heart of the book, as the dynamics of the main cast are shifting yet again. Walters handles this deftly, as events are run backwards and again, though things aren't as intricate as you might imagine.

But for a show that deals with separation, this plays into that nicely, giving us a story where the cast is isolated both temporally and emotionally. It could have used more emotional punch, feeling flat in moments where it should be gut-wrenching (the closest it comes is a scene where a secondary character quietly dies) but he keeps the various plot gears moving often enough that the pages keep turning. It's not a great book but it has all the signs of someone who knows how to write a great book and given some more chances, it's possible that he might produce it some day.

A pivotal story involving the whole Compassion turning into a TARDIS arc. The Doctor has done something pretty drastic to Compassion to avoid detection from the Timelords. Compassion's reaction is to strand the Doctor on the planet Yquatine, take Fitz 3 months back into Yquatine's past and then leave. Meanwhile the Doctor has to deal with a mysterious killer black substance that is destroying Yquatine plus political tensions between alien races, and Fitz is in jail knowing of the disastrous events that will occur but can do nothing about it (plus his usual girl problems). Well written, very exciting, characterisation is spot on. RECOMMENDED to all.

THE FALL OF YQUATINE was a bit of a disappointment to me. While Nick Walter's previous book (DOMINION, his first solo work) created a very detailed alien race with a culture all its own, in this book the many details feel unnecessary. Rather than coming together and forming a coherent picture of a different society, it feels more like a list of trivia facts about a solar system that he made up. The things we learn about the alien life-forms don't hold together to form a greater story and this really is a great shame, because that is something that Walters had done extremely well in DOMINION.

The plot itself unfolds rather enjoyably and is one of the few examples in Doctor Who where time travel itself is an important element. Fitz becomes stranded a month in the past and is forced to live for that month knowing the future and being utterly unable to stop the terrible events he knows are going to occur. Unfortunately, while the story at times is rather interesting, the narrative suffers from a great deal of telling and not showing, which is something that I find rather annoying.

One of the complaints I have about the characters presented here is that not one of them notices the larger picture of what is going on around them. I suspect that this was done deliberately, and in fact this strategy does have some potential. For example, one of the characters is presented slightly different depending on whose point of view we are seeing him through. It's an interesting idea of how no one can truly know the objective nature of someone else; we've rarely seen in this sort of thinking in the book range before. On the other hand, it doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the book. If every character had been presented this way, it probably would have worked better, but to limit it to just one made that particular character seem a bit strange. While other characters were drawn fairly objectively regardless of what any individual thought of them, the one anomaly seemed inconsistent with himself and everyone else until I figured out what was going on. It just didn't seem to match.

Another problem with having characters that don't recognize the big picture is that all of them end up acting like complete morons. No one has a bit of common sense about what the consequences of their actions are. Unfortunately the characterization of the Doctor is one of the worst examples of this. At the very beginning of the book, having physically and mentally assaulted Compassion (albeit completely unintentionally), he doesn't go for more than a page before he's changed subjects and started wibbling on about ducks. Then he gets back to the subject only start yapping about the ducks less than two pages after that. While I don't mind the Doctor being easily distracted, it feels completely wrong for him to be unable to focus his mind after having made such an enormously negative impact on one of his traveling companions. This should be a major event in his relationship with Compassion, but he can't even concentrate on it for more than a few moments. It's very unsettling. Fortunately most of his worst qualities disappear after the first hundred pages or so, but it still does not result in telling a story about a character that I care enough to read about.

Fitz's subplot is familiar to any regular reader of the EDAs, so there will be no real surprises here. Separated from the Doctor, Fitz must learn to survive on his own in an alien environment. He finds a job and a gal and must then leave the planet and the girl before a giant catastrophe occurs. Those last two sentences could describe the Fitz subplot in at least three EDAs, though, fear not, I'm still reviewing THE FALL OF YQUATINE here. The Fitz sections aren't terrible, but they aren't especially engaging either. Unfortunately, the fact that we've seen this exact scenario played out many times in previous books works very much to this book's detriment.

All in all, this is a book with several interesting pieces, but a lot of little flaws. It's exciting in some places, yet it never really feels like it gets going. Although I've spent most of this review pointing out the things I did not enjoy, there are some very entertaining portions of this story. The parts of the book that deal with Compassion and the changes that have occurred are quite well written and are far and away the best sections.

All I want to say is that The Fall of Yquatine by Nick Walters is a very good book. It far surpasses his previous Dr. Who novel Dominion in every category. This book is a must have for all Doctor Who fans. May Mr. Walters continue to write great Doctor Who!