Customer Reviews

Placebo Effect (Doctor Who Series)

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This book starts with great humour as we see a Foamasi alien discuss human sexual behaviour. We have those ominous scenes which tell of a thrilling adventure to come...but it all subsides in a whimper. Gary Russell's problem as a writer in this story is that he is too self-indulgent, having so much fun with old ideas and concepts that he forgets to pace the plot nicely. The end, which could never be called a climax, is particularly dissatisfying. When a book draws upon a TV show as heavily as this does and dabbles too much in homage, it can never hope to succeed as gripping fiction. But the humour gives the story its moments and Sam's recovery from her crush on the Doctor is a refreshing change. And Russell does deliver some nice moral arguments which, if emphasised over the schlocky plot, would have made the book a much better work.

A good story that reintroduces the Wirrrn. The book quickly becomes creepy and if you dislike bugs like I do it becomes downright icky!

The action takes place on an artificial world called Macawber's World where the year 3999 Millennium Olympiad games are about to take place. Add in corporate espionage, a fanatical religious group, a Royal Entourage (reminded me strongly of Diana at first and quickly degenerated), a wedding where the Doctor is the Best Man and green scaly aliens and you've got yourself a ripping good story. Makes you long for a really BIG can of Raid!

Sometimes the propensity of "Doctor Who" to take various elements and sort of mash them together and in the process create something that you'd never really be able to experience anywhere else. When this works properly you get works of near genius, such as taking the Daleks and sticking them inside an authentic Victorian house, or the more recent examples of jamming a spaceship and pre-Revolutionary War France together. But there are times when the pieces all don't come together properly and while you don't get a total mess, you get a work that isn't quite the sum of its parts. This is one of those works.

The Doctor and Sam show up on Micawber's World in time for the 3999 Olympics. Not surprisingly, bad things are starting to happen and nobody quite knows why. There's Foamasi on the planet doing their usual dastardly things, quite a few people are starting to act decidedly odd and somehow it's all sort of connected but not in the way you might think. And underneath it all an old enemy is really about to make life miserable for everyone.

Yeah, the Wirrn show back up, after having not been seen for like thirty years. This in itself is not a bad thing as they are surpremely scary monsters and actually do work fairly well when not on the screen. And a lot of the scenes where they are taking over people or their agents are spreading whatever mischief that the insects are up to are extremely unsettling because they seem implacable and unstoppable and nobody knows what the heck is going on. Having them in the book alone makes for a fairly gripping plot.

Unfortunately what happens is that six other things are going on and the Wirrn sort of get shoved into the background while the B-plots circulate in the foreground. And it's just too much. You have the Foamasi, who are very entertaining in their own right, running about and manipulating each other while the Doctor tries to sort out who is in the right and who is just causing trouble, meanwhile there are several other subplots devoted to various going-ons at the Olympics and Sam's run-ins with a church that thinks that aliens and people shouldn't breed. As you can tell, things start to get crowded.

It also doesn't help that the plot sort of meanders, we digress for a while to cover the wedding between two former companions that you've never met (who vanish anyway partway through, presumably on a honeymoon) . . . it's a cool concept to imagine the Doctor having years of adventures in the five minutes he's gone from Sam but there are times when I'd rather read about those adventures than the ones going on in the book itself. Also the book gets sidetracked briefly while Sam and the cult leader have a debate about evolution and creationism, which is neat and all but is never followed up on, so you get a "what does this have to do with the plot?" moment.

That doesn't mean the book isn't bad, it's just . . . not exciting. The Foamasi are actually a welcome addition to the novel, they are a lot of fun with their criminal logic and rules and they deserved more of an appearance than just "The Leisure Hive" . . . but as the old cliche goes, there's just not enough room in the book for all of them. The Foamasi on their own would have worked but with they and the Wirrn jockeying for key plot positions, it winds up that neither of them win. The Doctor isn't aware of the Wirrn until near the end and their plot gets wrapped up real fast with a "let's kill all the monsters!" moment.

And with all this going on, the Doctor and Sam unfortunately come across as a bit generic, they do all the right stuff and hit all the right bits but they never have any real standout moments and while Sam isn't as annoying as she has been, she's not a real go-getter either. Well written and not terrible, it's merely okay and for all the stuff that was crammed into it, it should be better than that.

In my review for SEEING I, I stated that I was happy at the increase in quality and that I was left wanting to read more in the series like it. As the book immediately following, PLACEBO EFFECT was not exactly what I had in mind. Don't get me wrong now, I did not think that this was a particularly horrible book - just an average one that's let down by one or two poorly thought out parts.

As is revealed in the introduction to the book, this is the long-awaited story that features the return of not one but two old Doctor Who villains. Perhaps "long-awaited" is not quite the correct way to phrase the return of the Wirrrn (Gary Russell insists on using the novelisation spelling) and the Foamasi, but I was quite curious to see how they would turn out. To my great surprise, I found myself quite enjoying them in this setting. As the book is set during the Olympics in the year 3999, I was half-hoping that we would be treated to the sight of the Foamasi running around in track-suits getting ready to compete in the 100m hurdles. Alas this was not the case.

The majority of the book plows ahead confidently, never being too flashy or too hideous. However, there are one or two points where the book skids to a complete halt leaving the reader to wonder just what was going on. The most glaring example of this is an evolution versus creationist argument that suddenly comes from nowhere to blind-side the reader. I'm really not sure what the point of including this was. The background of everyone involved in the debate had already been explained and gone over repeatedly, so there wasn't anything new revealed with that. The religious overtones have already been set up, so we're just getting more repetition rather than further insight. And worst of all is that the argument itself relies on the fact that neither side knows very much about the other's viewpoint, or even about the details of their own. So we're just left with a rather superficial and silly argument about evolution that adds nothing and goes nowhere. I doubt that the intention was to show both sides as shallow, yet that's exactly the impression that one is left with. This really should have been cut from the book.

In the previous book, Sam spent most of her three-year separation from the Doctor growing up and learning about the universe and herself. Unfortunately, very little of her maturing seems to have stuck with her, as for the majority of it she seems to be more of a generic companion than the Sam who left in the TARDIS in SEEING I. There are one or two places where the new Sam can be recognized, but for a majority of the story this is not the case. This is a real shame, as the Sam that rejoined the Doctor in the previous story was well on the way to becoming an interesting character that was more than just a few cheesy catch-phrases.

The descriptions of the Wirrrn taking over peoples of different species are far and away the best part of this book. The Wirrrn and their human agent are genuinely frightening, taking the best elements from the series and bringing them to life again. Unfortunately they hardly appear in the story at all, often disappearing for chapters at a time. The book would have been far better with more of these passages and it's rather telling that the Doctor doesn't even know about the Wirrrn's presence until thirty pages from the very end of the book. The conclusion to the Wirrrn section of the book (which one assumes is the main plot) is therefore rushed though and ultimately feels very unsatisfying. One wishes that Russell had taken more time in crafting this portion of the book, as there was a lot of wasted potential here.

Overall, this is a fairly flawed work that's enjoyable in some places and tedious in others. A lot of the right elements are there for this to be a far better book that it is. With some generous editing and more effort, this could have been a really good story.

One of my all time favourite episodes of Doctor Who is "The Ark In Space". Placebo Effect revisits the main monsters of Ark, the Wirrrn, in an adventure thousands of years before they were first encountered by the Doctor. The problems with the book stem mainly from a lack of respect for how the Wirrrn acted during the Ark in Space; in the original, Noah's struggle between his human side and the dominance of the Wirrrn proved crucial in the resolution. The possibility of holding out against the Wirrrn never seems to cross the author's mind. Instead we have the Wirrrn determining the rate of absorption of the body, something that seems completely against the intent of the original story. There are also some absolutely unbelievable scenes. If you have two humans surrounded by Wirrrn larvae, wouldn't you think that the larvae wouldl attack and absorb the humans? I have no idea why this doesn' t happen. (Except for the cop-out of: "You can't harm the Doctor's Companions!") This is not a good Wirrrn story. This is a story which tries to say: "The Wirrrn did the Borg first, better than the Borg." While there are some excellent scenes and passages in the book (one of the best is Sam first meeting up with Gar), I found this ultimately a disappointing book, which did not live up to the suspense approaching the original Ark in Space.

The eighth doctor and Sam go to a wedding on Micawber's World. The year is 3999. What was to be a wedding ends up a disaster. It is a great book. There are many alien species in this book. I recommend this book to any science-fiction lovers.