#32
The Fall of Yquatine
By Nick Walters
Once again the Eighth Doctor Adventures have changed. From introducing Sam, then losing her for a bit, then bringing in Fitz, trading out Sam and then bringing in Compassion — not to mention the stuff on the back-burner like The Enemy and Faction Paradox — you can’t really fault their ambition to keep things fresh.
There’s a gulf between that and how it’s all executed, though. Take Sam’s lacklustre introduction, her equally on-the-spot decision to leave, Fitz and Compassion both officially joining the team off-screen — not to mention the general abundance of EDA tropes established by this point. So there’s good reason to be concerned about this latest seismic shift, however exciting it is, and to what degree the series will follow it up.
I hope you’ve read The Shadows Of Avalon, because 3, 2, 1: the TARDIS has been destroyed, Compassion is a TARDIS now and the three travellers are on the run from the Time Lords. What, quite simply, the heck do you do next? I half expected them to gloss over it and just do another normal EDA adventure.
I was half right.
The Fall Of Yquatine is very interested in the new dynamic. (Hooray!) Is it a good dynamic? Well, we don’t know that yet, but we’re off to a rocky start. The Doctor doesn’t seem entirely able to communicate with Compassion now that she’s also a mode of transport — he’s familiar to the point that it’s a tad uncomfortable, and that’s before he adds a Randomiser to her console without asking. The thinking here is of course to evade the Time Lords, which is in her best interests, but she has vehemently argued against this by the time we rejoin the gang after Avalon, so this is a serious violation of trust. A Randomiser cancels out her free will and stops her really becoming the thing that she is — and where does that leave her, since she didn’t even ask to become it?
I’ve seen the Doctor’s actions criticised quite heavily in fandom, and I mean, yeah, they should be. But they’re criticised a lot in the book too: it’s questionable behaviour and it is presented as such. The Doctor certainly regrets taking away her autonomy like that, reflecting (somewhat bluntly IMO) that what he’s done is no less a rape than what the Time Lords intend. When his actions cause him to lose his two companions, potentially to their deaths, it’s not really up for debate whether he knows that he’s messed up.
Why aren’t I running screaming from this awful behaviour? Well, it is awful, but I think there’s an opportunity for mistakes in the current story arc — and mistakes are interesting. The TARDIS is gone! (Again, I know, but bear with me.) Who is the Doctor without it? He’s clearly not playing with a full deck since he’s taken Compassion and Fitz to a world that’s presumably famous for its downfall, arriving willy-nilly on the day of its big disaster. That’s something he’d normally plan for, but he’s clearly on the hoof now. That fact speaks to a desperation that I think, if not excuses, maybe explains some of his callous disregard for Compassion’s feelings. There is a huge gulf between a travelling machine that is in a sense alive and one that can call you an arsehole to your face, and the Doctor hasn’t had long to fill it. I think, compounded with the loss of his ship/his oldest friend, a degree of discombobulation is understandable here. (Admittedly the degree to which he’s affected by the loss of the TARDIS is my inference. I would have liked that to be in there more clearly, because why wouldn’t it be?)
This betrayal also puts Compassion in an interesting light. She is a character with, I think it’s fair to say, not many distinguishing features until very recently, although her detached matter-of-fact attitude has marked her out from the more gung-ho Sam. (Her Remote nature is also interesting but the writers have been pick-and-choose about that, and now it’s quite possibly gone forever.)
Now she finds herself powerful beyond imagining, yet also violated by someone she trusts. She completely spirals, going so far as to almost kill Fitz when urging him to remove the Randomiser (which he can’t), then dump him in a different time-zone and leave him there, and later actually kill someone while they’re trying to remove the Randomiser because she’s so out of control with pain. Despite all of that she’s still fundamentally committed to going back to Fitz and the Doctor — because she knows, deep down, that the Doctor was trying cack-handedly to do something useful — and she ends up suffering even more for it, spending “years, decades” in the time vortex first.
Compassion is unquestionably a victim here, but it’s nonetheless eyebrow-raising how out of control she is, particularly when she is ostensibly usurping the safest character/location in Doctor Who. It would be unthinkable for “the TARDIS” to casually threaten murder, or accidentally commit it, or dump people wherever it likes in time and space. It’s also hard to picture the TARDIS casually saving the day, using a mixture of the chameleon circuit and a complete absence of morals, or very nearly rewriting history and creating a paradox without any apparent qualms, both of which Compassion does here. You simply have no idea where you stand with her, beyond the broad sense that she’s a goodie.
Introducing this kind of fallibility completely redefines what travel means for the ongoing series, and the Doctor/companion relationship will bear some re-examination too. I don’t love that this has happened to Compassion several books down the line — and I’m no fool, I know this also isn’t going to last — but it’s definitely a positive that the book directly after The Shadows Of Avalon has committed to, and then built upon the boldness of its ending. The three characters are in a very interesting place, and that’s just what you want in an ongoing series.
Arguably less interesting is the plot of the week — and I do mean “arguable”, because I quite like it anyway. Much of it just feels a bit familiar. With an intergalactic threat targeting a relatively harmonious solar system it’s difficult not to recall Beltempest. but for my money The Fall Of Yquatine paints a more detailed picture of the different planets involved, who occupies them and how it all works. The representatives of each world feature somewhat prominently, which helps us to picture the plethora of species in this solar system.
That sense of variety also helps to overcome the initial sense of “here we go again” about an EDA set on an Earth colony world, not to mention ye olde planet-killing horror. There’s somewhat a sense of a do-over of the author’s previous book, Dominion, which perhaps didn’t go into enough detail about its own wacky eco-system. The Fall Of Yquatine certainly supports the idea that Nick Walters is following on from Paul Leonard in terms of authors fascinated by different species and keen to celebrate their differences. The Saraani from his and Leonard’s earlier Dry Pilgrimage also get a cameo.
The catastrophe happens quite fast, as mysterious ships appear above the planet and rain down an unforgiving black acid. There are few survivors and it initially seems that the vengeful and warrior-like Anthaurk are responsible. However they are soon joining the effort to gather up survivors. Compassion and Fitz have fled by this point, the former in a rage about the Randomiser; the Doctor meanwhile is in a small spacecraft with only a friend, Lou Lombardo, and a wounded woman whom he tells “You’ll thank me for this later” about leaving behind her doomed husband. (I’m sensing a theme here with the Doctor’s confusion around what other people want. I’m enjoying the concept that the Eighth Doctor is just as dreadful as the Seventh, but he’s more up front about it, and is then baffled when it blows up in his face.)
The rest of the book mostly splits between the Doctor trying to figure out what happened and stop it getting any worse, Fitz making the best of a bad situation after being unceremoniously dumped a month in the past, and Compassion flitting around trying to get rid of the you-know-what. It’s one of those books that changes scenes quite often, but Walters is one of those authors who keeps these changes on track and aligned to the same character, so it’s exciting rather than disorienting being swept along. There always seems to be something interesting going on; it has a good pace.
That impression peters out a little as it goes on, mostly because the supporting characters aren’t a lot to write home about. We open with a brilliantly self-contained chapter about Arielle, a visitor to Yquatine who begins a whirlwind romance with the ruling President Vargeld. But then we leave Arielle for a large chunk of the book, skipping whatever was compelling about their romance and arriving after it’s turned sour. Our main impression of Vargeld is that he’s an obsessed, abusive, short-sighted blowhard, leaving us mystified as to his initial appeal. He never gets any better, right up to the last chapter when the Doctor has finally calmed things down. We do pause along the way for an argument/reconciliation between him and the Doctor, both mad at the other’s actions, but it’s too little and far too quick to convince. And Vargeld is awful again soon enough.
The Anthaurk are similarly intractable. While not responsible for the attack, they’re itching for an excuse to change the local power balance in their favour, and are soon behaving about as sympathetically as Selachians. Their way of life has its interesting bits, but the general murderousness ends up putting them in the realm of watered down Ice Warriors or Klingons.
The impression begins to dawn that while Walters has put some effort into populating this solar system with weird and wonderful creatures, he hasn’t made many of them easy to care about. This extends to the threat itself, which we learn is a form of artificial weapon made by someone (footage not found) and capable of doing better if only someone would reprogram it. The Doctor tries, it goes predictably, and then you sort of wonder what it was all in aid of.
Fitz is presumably here to help, and his part of the story is compelling, but I mean — Fitz on his own, separated from the TARDIS and forced to make his own way for a while? We’re really doing that again? There’s the potential to make it fresh because he alone knows what’s going to happen on Yquatine in a month’s time, and he agonises about whether to tell anyone, but that hardly matters in the end — although I did enjoy the bit where Compassion seemed happy to undo the whole mess without a thought for the timelines. (It doesn’t work, so the inevitable tête-à-tête with the Doctor doesn’t happen.)
Then there’s his love story. He meets a down-on-her-luck Arielle just when she’s breaking it off with Vargeld. The two become fast friends and they try to flee the planet. Now, there’s a very fun (and kind of awful) brain-teaser here about whether Fitz’s choices are what ultimately dooms Yquatine — although by that logic it was really the Doctor’s idea about the Randomiser that started it. And there’s a fun sort of chemistry between the two. But Fitz Falls In Love (and its inevitable sequel, Fitz Loses Girlfriend) is threatening to become parody at this point. He even references Filippa from Parallel 59 a few times, just to remind us that that situation was important to him, but also reinforcing that it’s happened before. Then we go ahead and make Arielle another tragic affair he’ll need therapy to get over anyway. It’s like Sam totting up failed attempts at activism.
None of this is bad in isolation, but for a range busting a gut to do something new it’s… well, it’s a choice to mash that “again” button, isn’t it? And it’s not as if the story beat even does Arielle any favours, since by virtue of spending most of her time with Fitz she gets written with a-man-wrote-this-isms such as “The way she carried herself wasn’t how beautiful women usually carried themselves, with a knowing, superior air.” (Arielle’s too-perfect looks are a major character point, but there’s nowhere much to go with that.) There’s some compelling imagery around Arielle thanks to Compassion’s “forest room” — a sort of spookier update to the TARDIS’s butterfly room — but in the end it feels alarmingly close to a copy and paste.
I’ve ended up sounding quite negative about this one. I think part of the reason is that I more or less finished the book (and started my review) a few days ago, and now my memory’s started to fog a bit on the finer details. Or that might be a sign that The Fall Of Yquatine can’t sustain interest throughout, with perhaps too many elements that we’ve seen before.
What’s good about it is the arc stuff. The status quo has changed, and it shows no real signs of becoming as reliable and stable as the good old days. The Doctor’s relationship with Compassion is unlike any he’s had with a companion before, which keeps the interest up for where the series will go next, but Walters also prioritises making it interesting now, which is a basic necessity some of your fancier Lawrence Miles-types might overlook. For that reason, I’m still happy to recommend this one. Although seriously guys, you don’t have to make things more interesting one thing at a time.
7/10
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