#16
Matrix
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker
This one’s quite ambitious for a Past Doctor Adventure. That’s not to denigrate the ones we’ve had so far — if anything, I’ve found them consistently more enjoyable and better at embracing their format than the Eighth Doctor books. It’s just that the kind of characterisation you get in Matrix feels more appropriate for characters that are the “main” ones in your range, rather than rotating guests of the week. Which I suppose is another way of saying that Matrix reminded me of the New Adventures.
Perhaps that’s not surprising as Tucker and Perry (or in this case, Perry and Tucker — is that significant?) are so far the only BBC writers working in that period after the TV series ended. Similarities will suggest themselves. Their earlier Illegal Alien covered similarly familiar ground after so many other writers had spent time in that sandbox.
The familiarity isn’t quite so literal this time, although for a few reasons Matrix does end up recalling Nigel Robinson’s Birthright. (Another Doctor-lite story set against Victorian squalor with a malcontent Time Lord pulling the strings.) It’s the general sense of weirdness I’m talking about.
We open with a mysterious hooded figure in an unknown location being all ominous. (Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!) He sends a clay fish monster after the Doctor and Ace. It finds them already in odd moods, the Doctor feeling so out of sorts that he expects Ace to leave him at any moment. (Ooh, moody! What does that remind me of…) When the fish guy assassin doesn’t work out, mysterious hooded guy communicates through the TARDIS before seemingly blowing it up, except that was only a vision (weird visions, you say?), followed by a nightmare hallucination of dead soldiers who are all actually Ace. (Guilt about what the Doctor has done to Ace? Interesting…) Around this point the Doctor removes the TARDIS telepathic circuit, fearing it was helping the malign presence.
All of this is in the first 30 pages, by the way, and we’re not done with the setup yet. Next there’s a stopover in 1963 (hey, the 35th anniversary was coming up) where it appears that history is out of whack: there’s no longer a TARDIS in Totter’s Lane, but London does have marauding evil spirits, packs of youths with blades strapped to their fingers and an armed curfew. Initially seeking to leave Ace with his earlier self (don’t even get me started) the Doctor miraculously bumps into Ian and Barbara, who helpfully fill in some blanks. It seems there were now more than five murders by Jack the Ripper, to which Britain responded somewhat excessively thanks to a vaguely-defined spectre hanging over them ever since. The Doctor decides to go back and sort this out.
(We’re nearly done with the setup.) On arrival, the Doctor loses his mind and tries to kill Ace. Tossing the telepathic circuit, the two then separate, Ace to find some degree of safety and the Doctor — now amnesiac — to hopefully find himself. But it’s a particularly nasty Victorian London they find themselves in, and it won’t be pleasant for either of them.
And that’s Matrix, or at least the majority of it: a saunter through a dreary and dangerous city with murder in the air. The bonkers list of events that got us to that point feels like a fever dream once you’re actually past it, which in its way also reminds me of the New Adventures. They often swerved into wonky, slightly overreaching oddness in character and setting, especially in the early days where you were more likely to bring up character beats from TV episodes, which of course Perry and Tucker also love doing. It’s all a little bit messy in that “we haven’t quite figured this out” way.
The pace slows considerably once we’re into the story proper, although the authors keep it moving superficially with the use of short chapters and frequent scene changes. (I think I’ve made my feelings clear on this type of pacing: my attention span no-likey.) Ace has a fairly terrible time, ending up in a circus against her will because of an apparent relapse of the cheetah people virus from Survival. (Ooh, TV continuity! See also London 1963 = Remembrance Of The Daleks, creepy Victorian dresses = Ghost Light, circuses = The Greatest Show In The Galaxy. There are also a couple of Time And The Rani and Paradise Towers refs for the true collectors.) Probably the best stuff here is Ace’s growing camaraderie with Peter, a browbeaten young man working for the dreadful ringmaster Malacroix, along with the freaks and circus acts. Nevertheless, Ace’s animalism never comes under particular scrutiny beyond a surface aversion to behaviour like that — the authors more than once revisit the Survival line “if we fight like animals, we die like animals” and that seems to be the extent of it. Ace committing an actual murder is swept aside in the book’s closing pages; if we were back in the New Adventures there’d be a chance to pick up on that later on, but as it is we’ll have to hope Perry and Tucker find it interesting enough to revisit next time around. (Given the Doctor’s loosey-goosey reassurance that neither of them was in their right mind at all this week, I doubt it.)
As for the Doctor, who in many ways this book is about — well, is it, though? The villain is intensely invested in the Doctor and determined to break him, but after his upsetting swerve into potential homicide (with an honourable mention to his very odd mood at the start) the Doctor practically exits the story, the telepathic circuit seemingly taking on the role of the cricket ball in Human Nature and keeping his Doctorness tantalisingly out of reach. (As in that novel, a secondary character here becomes fascinated with the Time Lord totem. You’ve got to assume Perry and Tucker read that one, right?) Instead we’re in the occasional company of “Johnny,” who is taken in by Joseph Liebermann, a kindly Jewish man of indeterminate age who knows a thing or two about regret. (He thinks Johnny is the Ripper, feels sorry for him and takes him in anyway.) Plenty of hints are dropped that Liebermann is more than he seems, and certainly older than any human, including in interludes sprinkled through the book. It’s a nice idea but I never really saw the relevance. He mostly just keeps “Johnny” out of harm’s way until, due to sheer circumstance, the circuit finds its way back to him and the Doctor is finally back in.
Unlike Human Nature, which to be fair isn’t much of a parallel to Matrix beyond a few loose plot points, the Doctor hasn’t learned much or grown in the intervening time. He just didn’t do the ending yet, and then he did. Which brings us to there not being a lot of actual story here. Atmosphere, certainly: try setting a story in Ripper-era London and not having sickly fog seep through the pages. But I was mostly waiting around for Johnny to get his groove back. Ace, for her part, seemingly does the same. She has no real plan here except to kill time; she doesn’t, and perhaps needn’t fully reckon with the idea that the Doctor might be off his rocker for good. (To be fair, she’s right to have faith, but that’s only obvious to us because we know he’s the main character in a series — in a previous-continuity story, at that.) The only person here consciously moving things along is the bad guy, and even he’s taking his time.
The villain in Matrix is clearly meant as a twist, so I’ll be a good sport and not say who it is. What I will say is that I think making it a twist hurts the book. This is a character you could do more with — this whole thing is a rematch so clearly the authors agree on that — and yet holding back who they are, and holding back any character recognition of who they are until that moment, doesn’t leave much room to work. What can you squeeze into forty or so pages? Doctor, it’s me, I still have my pre-existing grievance but this time I’ll definitely win? All that earlier wiffwaff involving spectres and clay monsters only becomes interesting once the novel puts a name to it — in particular, the identity of the villain’s gang opens a huge can of worms, the contents of which we’re simply not going to investigate. Spoilers in books have value, but this one might have been more effective if they had ripped (Rippered?) the plaster off, stuck the baddie on the cover and kept the Doctor in his right mind. Making it a little bit of a fair fight is surely more interesting than no fight.
The implication that the Doctor to some extent committed the Ripper murders is only marginally more tasteless than writing an SF reason for the murders in the first place, but in any case, thanks to the time crunch it’s as effectively meaningless as the murder Ace commits. Matrix has by this point already shown its quality at dispensing information, with a truly diabolical info dump about Ian and Barbara’s alternate history early on and some clunky exposition about Gallifreyan technology near the end — not to mention the crazy pacing of the first act. You can see the skeleton of a dark and disturbing story about who the Doctor is and who he could be, but the book’s choices simply don’t take us to the centre of that, instead ticking off creepy images and famous murders to speed-run a bit of atmosphere. Matrix is hardly terrible (it has that atmosphere after all) but it makes the sort of awkward missteps that a full series might later course correct. The Past Doctor Adventures simply don’t have that luxury.
5/10
