Messingham, Simon
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
1.3 out of 5
(3 books)
TOP PICK:
Doctor Who: Zeta Major
Doctor Who: The Doctor Trap
An original adventure featuring the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) and his companion Donna. When Donna is kidnapped, the Doctor is lured to Planet 1 where he is intended to become the target of the universe's most ruthless and deadly sport hunters.
Franchise-based fiction is usually somewhere between 'okay' and 'good', with familiar characters and scenarios being expanded on for the benefit of people who are already fans. Then, every once in a while, a franchise novel transcends its nature as merchandising and becomes a genuinely good book in and of itself, whilst also delivering lots of what fans want. This book falls into neither of those catagories. Because sometimes franchise fiction is just garbage, where those familiar people and places are badly mishandled and where the original elements are badly conceived and poor executed. That's the catagory that this book falls into.
The blurb at the top sets the stage for a derivative but potentially enjoyable story of the Doctor staying one step ahead of trophy hunters in a Most Dangerous Game sort of way, but this book soon chooses to ignore its own premise and dive off the deep end into a rambling, nonsensical series of plot misdirections involving characters pretending to be duplicates, actual duplicates and robot duplicates pretending not to be duplicates at all. Messignham throws everything at the wall and not only does nothing stick, but the mish-mash pile of slop it leaves behinds is all but unrecognisable as a Doctor Who adventure.
Really, just do yourself a favour and don't read it.
1 out of 5
Doctor Who: The Indestructible Man
This Past Doctor Adventure features the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his companions Jamie and Zoe. 2096 AD and Earth is still recovering from a clandestine war against the mysterious Myloki. The arrival of the Doctor and his companions sparks a frenzy of paranoia that could herald the return of the alien invaders.
If I had to write a four word review of this book it would simply be; 'Sadistic, boring and weird'. But I will break it down further than that here.
Firstly, 'sadistic'. It's a common theme among some of the Past Doctor Adventures to try to play to an adult audience by having the characters go through experiences that you'd never see on the TV show, something Messingham takes way too far here. In this book Jamie joins a gang of fascist enforcers, beats a teenager until the boy's face caves in and then suffers a psychotic break that causes him to see everyone as evil duplicates. Far worse; Zoe gets kidnapped (possibly raped) and sold into slavery, only to fall in love and see her beloved shot to death right in front of her. And the Doctor? Well, he starts this book by getting shot in the head, spilling his brains, and then spends six months in a coma. Honestly, sadism is the only explanation I can think of for why the author would include all of this, because it serves next to no narrative function.
Once you get past the horrifying situation the familiar faces find themselves in, the 'boring' sets in. The vast majority of this book was tedious and uninteresting, with poor pacing and unengaging characters. Slogging through it was almost painful at times.
Finally we get the 'weird'. For reasons again known only to the author, this book is basically a crossover between Doctor Who and the worlds of Gerry Anderson's puppet-based TV shows (Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Stingray etcetera). Sure, all of the Anderson references have their names changed but it's done with a singular lack of subtlety, so 'Stingray' becomes 'Manta', 'SPECTRUM' becomes 'PRISM', 'the Mysterons' become 'the Myloki' and so on. Now I used to enjoy all of those shows as a kid, but their appearance here is so jarringly out of place, and their characters are treated with the same sadism as the Doctor and company, that it certainly wasn't an enjoyable mash-up in any way, shape or form.
This is the third Who book by Messingham that I've read and I've hated them all. I hated this one the most though.
1 out of 5
Doctor Who: Zeta Major
A Past Doctor Adventure featuring the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his companions Tegan and Nyssa. A sequel to the televised story 'Planet of Evil' (novelised by Terrance Dicks) in which the next incarnation of the Doctor re-encounters the Morestran Empire two millennia after their last meeting. Here the Doctor and his companions discover that the Empire, whose power is split between church and state, has been building a vast Energy Tower which, when activated could endanger the entire universe.
An author whose other work I've loathed writing a sequel to a TV story I never liked, featuring my least favourite Doctor and some of my least favourite companions. With all those prejudices in place, it's safe to say that this book needed to be really, really good in order to win me over. It wasn't.
The vast majority of this book it tedious. The familiar characters do very little of note and the new characters are so ill-defined as to be totally unengaging. Messingham has tried to develop some complexity with the internal politics of the Morestran Empire, but it all comes off feeling like a poor imitation of Frank Herbert's 'Dune' books. I really struggled to get through this book and was immensely relieved when it was finally over.
The one redeeming factor it did have was the fact that I enjoyed the concept that not only has the Doctor's previous encounter with the Morestrans entered their collective mythology, but that he is not seen as a particularly benevolent figure in that mythology. I did enjoy the scenes where characters realised that the Il Dottore they learned about in church is the same individual standing in the room with them.
2 out of 5
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