#26
Twilight of the Gods
By Christopher Bulis
A sequel to The Web Planet? You had me at awesome.
Okay, so it’s the only telly Who story that literally sends me to
sleep. I still admire them for making it.
Memorable for having no supporting humanoid characters, The Web Planet
scores weirdness points over possibly all other Doctor Who. You’ve got to
wonder what would motivate someone to return to that.
Short answer, I still don’t
know. Twilight of the Gods plays strangely coy with its familiar setting,
plastering a Zarbi on the front cover and confirming it in the blurb, then not
saying it’s Vortis for 64 pages like we’re suddenly going to double take and go,
really? In order for the story to work Vortis has to
move significantly through space, Mondas-style, which is really rather odd but no
one seems to notice or care much. Shouldn’t
that be one of the main concerns? The
central conflict has much to do with our last adventure on Vortis – you get one
guess what sinister force is behind it all, okay it rhymes with Flanimus – but
the bulk of the book is about a civil war between the Rhumons, a society split
by revolution with both sides claiming the new world. They’re alien enough to require some solid
time in a make-up chair, basically human otherwise. They have weary leaders, religious zealots,
power-hungry lieutenants, thankless grunts, deteriorating marriages and old
family manservants – same as us and, just to bludgeon the theme in, same as
each other. Crammed between all this you
get the occasional Menoptera clearing its throat to be noticed, even less
frequently an Optera, and the Zarbi and larvae guns have what you could
generously call cameos. Bad luck, Web
Planet fans.
Call it a hunch, but I suspect
there was a working version of Twilight
of the Gods set somewhere else before someone leaned in and said “Pssst, change it
a bit and get some of that sweet Web Planet dollah”. It’s not as if I was dying to read 300 pages
about the Zarbi and the Optera – I doubt anyone was – but if you’re that
uninterested, why bother? I’m guessing for
the sheer convenience of not having to establish 1) a malign intelligence you
can wake up later (that’s your last clue) and 2) a society of native non-humanoids
to more clearly show colonialism, ramming home the difference between the
human-ish Rhumons and the rest. Shortcut
is a word that came to mind a lot while reading it.
You could also use the word authentic,
I suppose. The Doctor, Jamie and
Victoria are barely out of the TARDIS before they’re accosted by one lot of
Rhumons who accuse them of spying for the other lot, then before you know it
they’re accosted by the other lot who accuse them of spying for the first
lot! Trope points there. This routine served a satirical point in The
War Games (so hey, it’s era-appropriate), and a similar, more irritating point
in Frontier In Space, but it’s just filler this time. The TARDIS crew then get split up and move
between the two Rhumon camps and the Menoptera base; they play a forgettable
sort of catch-up for most of the book, before frantically making everything go
smashy-smashy at the end until the problem stops. For better or worse, this certainly feels
like a Troughton six-parter with time to kill.
During which, the Doctor uses local something-something-interference
in order to pilot the TARDIS properly; Jamie learns how to drive a lorry with
improbable ease; and most improbably, Victoria has an interesting time of it,
briefly going undercover for the Menoptera, then for one lot of Rhumons, then
unknowingly for the other lot. It’s over
too quickly, alas, and she’s back to worrying and fainting, which puts paid to
the novel’s aspiration of setting up her departure in Fury From The Deep. This is foreshadowed in that clumsy Missing
Adventures way, along with the Doctor’s need for his sonic screwdriver (which
wouldn’t-you-know-it shows up in the next story!), before being picked up again
right at the end to give the novel a coda.
Nice try, but nul points: just giving Victoria a life-or-death adventure
with a blob of autonomy and saying
this has somehow caused her to grow up more than any other adventure before it is just
another shortcut.
Sometimes the urge to skip ahead short-changes
the book itself, not just its characters.
The Rhumons are all concerned and/or in denial about “ghosts”, and
bodies disappearing from nearby graves; there’s a reason for all this, but we
mostly have to be told about it in passing rather than see it, and the main
thing we take away is the intelligence controlling them. Are you crazy? Dead soldiers skulking about is way more interesting than (literally) generic grey monsters showing
up a couple of times, or the political “struggle” between the Imperials and the
Republicans. Even that doesn’t get a
fair shake, as the last-act villain reveal (you’ll never guess who) causes them
to more or less resolve their differences off-screen, even with the
Menoptera. I kept expecting a reversal
of this, because it’s just too easy, and it sort of comes in the last few
pages… but by then it’s just bonus noise.
The build-up to the main villain and its frenzied, keyboard-mashing
death look sadly redundant when the stakes continue to go up after they’re
gone.
Twilight of the Gods isn’t completely naïve about the Rhumons
patching up their differences forever, with more ships on their way that don’t
know about the ceasefire. But the ending
is still as simplistic as you’ve come to expect, with the Doctor delivering a
waffly, page-long speech that rings about as true of the era as Jamie’s HGV
licence. (We know Pat Troughton liked to
improvise, so great slabs like this probably would have gone out the
window.) The Second Doctor is reasonably
well-written otherwise, embracing (deliberately?) the contradiction of letting
violent solutions take place but seemingly being upset about them. He’s mostly up front about his intelligence
and keeps on everybody’s good side as much as possible, which is all a bit off,
IMO, so call it a draw.
If you asked me what I thought
when I was still reading it, I might have been more favourable. Twilight
of the Gods is a mover, which I can’t sniff at: the characters are
straightforward and they say what they mean, the action is easy to
visualise. Younger readers would
probably enjoy it, and I had a heck of an easier time here than I did with The
Death of Art. That might seem an unfair
comparison, but oddly there are sections that reminded me of the Quoth: some
ethereal beings are up to something and they communicate in a bizarre,
off-kilter way, which reads like Christopher Bulis experimenting and doesn’t
fit at all with the rest of the book. No
thanks. “Ah,” you might say, “but didn’t
you want weirdness? It’s The Web
Planet!” To which I’d say, I think we’ve
established my preferences and limits as a reader – give me consistent
weirdness and I’ll think about it, give me random bursts of
what-the-hell-am-I-looking-at and I’ll count the seconds until we’re outta
there, thanks. (Incidentally, the ethereal guys
enable Bulis to retcon the history of Vortis, which is certainly a thing you
could do? Ditto the wholly unasked for
explanation for how a Menoptera can fly.
Dude, if you hate The Web Planet, just say so.)
Somehow, I still don’t hate this. It can be a lot like Classic Who at times, filler, quarries and all. But there’s very little to recommend besides
a basic level of competency and a quick pace.
Bulis has done better, and hopefully will do again. Meanwhile if you want to get your alien planet
fix, go and read Venusian Lullaby.
5/10
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