#23
Killing Ground
By Steve Lyons
Did somebody say “video nasty”? Well, I hope so. Killing Ground is another book set in the Sixth Doctor’s wilderness years, between his unsuccessful swansong in the hastily rewritten Trial Of A Timelord and the actor’s unhappy exit via the thrillingly unusual medium of Sylvester McCoy in a wig. Steve Lyons has had two goes at filling that gap, and the possibilities are varied. Both times he’s turned the clock back to Season 22. The Sixth Doctor once again is brash, maudlin, doesn’t make friends easily, and violence follows him around. He even shoots a Cyberleader – four times, in the back. I can practically hear Eric Saward rubbing his hands with glee.
Not to say this is a bad thing, since there’s an audience for practically any sort of Doctor Who. It’s just that grimdark isn’t page-turner-fuel for me.
The Cybermen are back, and to his credit Steve Lyons does something different with them. Instead of attacking a world, space station or insert-base-under-siege here, the Cybermen have an arrangement with the planet Agora. They come, they convert some of the locals, they leave; the Agorans get to live so long as they replenish the “breeding stocks”. This is under the eye of the Overseers, Cybermen-appointed officials who sell out their own kind just to stay alive. No one is happy to see the Cybermen – they just don’t think a revolution will work because one has failed before. Officials like Madrox do a fair bit of rationalising to make it all seem right.
On a jollier note, the Doctor has already arrived (between Cyber-visits) and totally failed to help. The Cybermen anticipated his arrival and the Overseers locked him up. The plan is to interrogate him (see his black eye on the front cover) until he gives up his companion(s). The Cybermen know that he’ll have someone with him who may throw a spanner in the works, and they planned accordingly. 90 pages elapse before we even see the Cybermen (not including a flashback to set the tone), or before the Doctor gets a chance to stretch his legs or do anything of use. We’re on our own. Killing Ground is much more interested in life on Agora.
The absence of Cybermen makes them look better. Memorable monsters they may be, but they can’t hold too many scenes by themselves. Lyons builds up a sense of dread and resignation, heightened by the willingness of people to betray their own kind. (Think Day Of The Daleks meets The Best Of Both Worlds.) And they’re ahead of the game without even showing up. Standing orders to catch the Doctor are an unusually smart move, as is the breeding stock. I wasn’t ever sure how these things match up with the creatures from the series, but the Cybermen are in factions at this point (which is a cheeky way to explain their different looks), and they may work differently towards the same goal. When they finally arrive, there is a quiet violence to them. Absent a lot of exclamations (or god ’elp us, “DELETE”), the Cyberleader at one point says simply of a prisoner: “Break him.” (For good measure, the Doctor gleefully takes the piss out of the Cyberleader putting his hands on his hips.)
We get several perspectives on Cybermen – with so long before it all kicks off, we’ve got time – most notably via a couple of historians from the future. Jolarr is young and impressionable, Hegelia is his superior, with way too much investment in her subject matter. She views this as history and the people involved as footnotes; the Cybermen are myths to her and can do no wrong. (It was maybe a bad move not to give her a psych screening before sending her on her way?) It’s not a surprise when she ultimately wants to be a Cybermen, and record her transformation for posterity. She even rationalises it as, having shot a Cybermen in self-defence, she needs to sure up the numbers to fix history. It’s a perverse interpretation of the Doctor’s own respect for time. Hegelia’s transformation is inevitably revolting, but it’s also one of the high points of the book. She is academically interested to the end, despite the pain and gore.
There is inevitably the question of how Agora is going to fend off the Cybermen without the Doctor, and there’s an almost inevitable answer: they build their own. The Bronze Knights are semantically unlike the Cybermen, but still involve altering humans with mechanical implants. You can already see where this is going, and the book never really shies away from it, even capping it off with, god ’elp us, a “What have we created?” And yet, despite a brutal demonstration of their lack of tolerance for dissent, and the likelihood that the universe has just come up with another form of Cybermen, there isn’t time to address it. The Bronze Knights are potentially just as bad, but they help fight off the Cybermen, and in the end they shoot off into space to carry on the work. The Doctor remarks that the Agorans have more or less followed their enemies’ evolution and that’s that. It’s not a moral dilemma so much as dropping a bad thing in your lap and going, “What do you think of that, then?” Frankly, we have too many action scenes to get through for that sort of thing.
In amongst the carnage, and once it starts it doesn’t let up, we have our regulars. Now would be a good time to talk about Grant Markham: introduced in Time Of Your Life, he’s the first fully-fledged new companion in the Missing Adventures. There’s exciting – look at Bernice Summerfield! – but Lyons takes a rather odd path with it. Separating him from the Doctor doesn’t exactly show off his companion qualities, and indeed there are glib references (or snipes) to how well he’s doing. (“It’s a new chap – he’s not very good.” / “Oh, and by the way, thanks for releasing me. It’s just a shame you were partly responsible for my capture in the first place.”) He only came to Agora to address his demons, which seems an odd thing for this Doctor to enable – his successor would be all over it – and at one point he’s so despondent about the misery he’s uncovered, and possibly inflicted, that he decides to become a Bronze Knight. Then he changes his mind. To the extent the novel focuses on Grant, it seems to give him a vague purpose on Agora so we can write him out, but then the Doctor has him back at the end anyway. Yay?
We haven’t known Grant long enough for his catharsis to pay anything off, and Lyons never really brings him to life – a point oddly highlighted by the illustration on the cover. It’s very good, but it is literally the artist himself, as if nobody really minded what Grant looked like. The Doctor thinks of him offhand as a way to keep from meeting Mel and becoming the Valeyard. Frankly, that ain’t the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The Doctor, unsurprisingly given the state of him, is not in a great mood. (Again that Season 22 snippiness.) He’s angry at the Agorans for creating the Bronze Knights, he’s not pleased to see Grant because he didn’t rescue him sooner, and his showdown with the Cybermen becomes a strangely vicious shoot-out while he and they die slowly of radiation burns. Making his way back to the TARDIS, he contemplates suicide to permanently avoid the Valeyard problem, only to have an epiphany and come back springy and optimistic after recuperating in the TARDIS. Glad we addressed all that, then? (Admittedly, this sequence is worth it for his monologue. “I am the Doctor, whether I like it or not!”)
There are interesting things here. The sorry tale of Madrox, the Overseer who quite likes his job but is catatonic when faced with Cybermen; the madness of Hegelia, who sadly gets what she wants; the generally subverted expectations in the first half. But there’s also a lot of just slogging through it, as the Cybermen get into fights, the Doctor gets locked up again, Grant has internal wobbles and people die. We don’t meet too many Agorans and (understandably) those we do never crack a smile, instead juggling varying levels of anguish. You get used to the violence (except maybe Hegelia’s transformation), with one character gratuitously almost murdered twice before someone finishes the job. Lyons handles the menace of the Cybermen better than a lot of TV material, but in the end falls into their usual trap – a lot of stomping, blasting and corpses left on the landscape. You’d need to be a Hegelia-level Cyber fan to really love it.
5/10
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