#22
Dominion
By Nick Walters
New author! Fetch bunting!
Well, strictly speaking Nick Walters isn’t entirely new to this as he previously co-wrote a Bernice Summerfield novel with Paul Leonard. However, whilst I really liked Dry Pilgrimage I struggled to pin down a writing style that was uniquely Walters. He reportedly wrote most of it, so he should take credit for a good book, but it sounded like Leonard, delving into the moral greys of its characters and the oddity of its aliens. None of that is a bad thing — I guess the two writers were paired with good reason. It just means that I didn’t know what to expect from him the next time.
His first solo novel Dominion still doesn’t leave me sure of that. It does a few things very well and it’s clear that effort has gone into it — I believe this is a writer keen to get the EDAs “right”. But as a novel, a statement of what the writer is like, it’s not much to go on.
There‘s some memorable action at the start. A new character, Kerstin, wakes up to find her rented Swedish lake house half vanished, and her partner Johan MIA. Her landlord Björn barely survives an encounter with a terrifying predator that somehow materialises on his farm. And Sam Jones — moments after her final disagreement with Fitz in Revolution Man — is torn out of the TARDIS by some sort of anomaly, crashing the ship in the process and expelling its two remaining occupants so it can recuperate. The Doctor and Fitz wander around local Sweden looking for help and, so they hope, Sam, but as we’ll find out later Sam is nowhere nearby.
I doubt I’m the first or even the fiftieth person to say that a lot of this feels like The X-Files, with spooky forests, weird alien manifestations and people disappearing into special effects. (Well it was 1999.) We bolt on even more of this when it appears there’s a conspiracy to contain these events, but this swings us helpfully back to Doctor Who as the shadowy force is revealed to be UNIT, or rather, UNIT-and-C19: the even shadier bunch first seen in the Virgin books (Who Killed Kennedy) and then ported to BBC Books (Business Unusual).
You’ll have noticed a fair bit of continuity so far. There’s quite a lot of that in Dominion, but I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm: references don’t seem to be made here in order to bolster the writer’s fan card, but rather to pull the worlds of these stories closer together and serve a purpose here and now. It’s UNIT and C19 because that then creates a specific tension when you add the Doctor into the equation. A nod to UNIT’s troubles in Kebiria is therefore a nod to Paul Leonard’s Dancing The Code, sure — and therefore to Virgin still being canon — but it’s also a usefully violent text to back up the mindset of the character in question.
We get stuff like the TARDIS butterfly room, because that’s a great EDA staple, but also because it can serve a specific purpose when some aliens need a zero-gee hideaway, as well as the “soul-catching” ability introduced in The Devil Goblins Of Neptune (also seen in The Taint) which further pulls together the PDAs and the EDAs, but also helps underline a specifically “Eighth Doctor” skill. He was established as clairvoyant in the TV Movie, a fact given rare scrutiny in Dominion as the sudden loss of that ability is a useful way to show us the effect of the Doctor’s separation from the TARDIS.
Walters seems very adept at characterising the regulars, but only up to a point. The Doctor is best served, being terribly but convincingly out of sorts because the TARDIS has locked him out both physically and mentally — he doubts himself, he can’t do certain useful tricks that have helped him before, and he is generally a bit of a raw nerve. The choice to have Sam and the TARDIS in mortal peril however means that it’s difficult to parse what’s actually bothering him at times, or rather, it’s difficult to believe that Sam is the major crisis for him when the TARDIS is so much clearer in his behaviour. When we do get nods towards the more human weight on his mind, particularly Kerstin wondering (based solely on his expression) if he’s in love with Sam, it doesn’t convince.
Fitz behaves more like a Doctor Who companion than we’re used to, which is great: he actively wonders what the Doctor would do in certain situations, then applies his own bullish equivalent. He seems fully mucked in for the most part, albeit he hasn’t learnt the Doctor and Sam’s weird little number codes. (Another little bit of continuity, usefully deployed to show that he still has progress to make.) Fitz is as haplessly horny as ever, immediately getting the inappropriate hots for the bereaved Kerstin whom he can’t help noticing looks like Sam. Paging Dr Freud. (For good measure, he later mistakes Sam for Kirsten.)
The only real downside with Fitz is that while Walters is very aware of Revolution Man, and keen to pick up the threads of Fitz’s experiences and turmoil in it — particularly his closing disagreement with Sam, traumatically curtailed in their first scene here — he never really runs with it. Fitz never reckons with his years of brainwashing and (Kerstin hots notwithstanding) he doesn’t have much to mull over about Sam and where she fits into all of this. He’s a likeable presence better aligned to the series than before, and Walters knows his stuff, peppering in references to what happened to Fitz’s mum in The Taint. But the story evidently can’t do it all.
Sam, of course, draws the “no two companions may occupy the same story” card — because god forbid we ever build this three character dynamic — and she spends fully 100 pages out of sight. When we pick up with her in the Dominion (the strange world that is inadvertently stealing people and replacing them with aliens) it’s a decent showcase for Walters’ world-building skills, conjuring something not unlike the stuff Jim Mortimore was doing in Parasite. But aside from making friends with a local and trying not to die, there isn’t much for Sam to do. You’d be forgiven for empathising with Fitz who, on page 231, realises he’s forgotten all about her.
I don’t know if Walters was consciously writing towards Sam’s departure but there seem to be hints towards it. There’s Kerstin, the pseudo-Sam who goes the whole hog and considers signing up to the TARDIS life at the end; she even theorises that she has two “selves”, one of which is destined for adventure, which has specifically been a “Sam” thing since Alien Bodies. There’s Sam’s room in the TARDIS literally being lost which, I mean, maybe we don’t need Freud for that one. And when she’s finally reunited with the Doctor in a moment of possible death, despite everything in their past she kisses him — surely an implied “we’re almost done so why not” finality there.
This stuff is as close as Dominion gets to thoughtful character work, though. There’s the supporting cast, such as Björn and a long-suffering police officer keen to give obvious whackos like the Doctor enough rope to hang themselves with: they have reasonably interesting inner lives but they exit the book so abruptly that you might forget they were ever in it. There’s the military contingent at the heart of the plot — Dr. Nagle, the mind behind the teleportation device that has caused all the chaos, and Major Wolstencroft, the UNIT leader trying to contain said chaos — but they’ve both got such tunnel vision that there’s no progress for them to make. Nagle earns our sympathy by gradually understanding the Doctor’s fury over what she’s done, but her insistence on salvaging her work is an obvious death sentence from the outset. And Wolstencroft is the worst kind of one-note military blowhard, stubbornly refusing to believe that the Doctor might be useful and impeding him throughout just to keep the action rolling, leading to the Doctor’s applause-worthy lamp-shading: “Not again! We’ve been through all this before!” He mostly seems to be here to muddy the waters between UNIT and C19, making the former seem as bad as, if not worse than the latter, but in the end all that does is make you wonder why we’re seeing both.
That leaves Kerstin, and it’s fair to say I don’t get what Walters was going for there. If she’s a signpost towards Sam’s departure then okay, up to a point, but having a pointedly Sam-esque character eating up all those pages instead of Sam will inevitably feel as much like a parody of her obsolescence as a sincere attempt to prepare us for it. Even worse, when the time comes to say no to her future aboard the TARDIS it’s handled as abruptly as possible, with the Doctor (mentally back together again by this point) snapping rudely that she has her own life to live and anyway, they’ve got dangerous work to do. (Walters here bookends his follow-up to Revolution Man with a prelude to Unnatural History — only what looked like a means of characterisation the first time feels more like a cheap way out the second time.) The book ends with Kerstin wondering what the hell just happened, and it’s hard to imagine readers being a great deal more satisfied than she is. What a strange, rushed note to end on.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that there is no great summing up at the end of Dominion. One of the reasons it took me so long to read and, I suppose, the real problem here is that it’s not about much of anything. Okay, these are Doctor Who tie-in novels, general sci-fi business tends to take priority over deep and thematic explorations of character, but Dominion is truly a “stuff happens” exercise outside of what it’s doing with the Doctor and Kerstin/Sam. It’s a sci-fi problem to be solved — a wormhole accidentally taking away people and things and replacing them likewise — but there’s nothing particularly rich about that as a conundrum, beside how unfortunate this will be for the Dominion. The figureheads of the problem are just some intransigent scientists and soldiers or some (academically interesting) aliens with no agenda and mostly no dialogue. It’s all much of a shooty exploding muchness, happy to trundle on until it’s time to stop. I didn’t egregiously dislike Dominion — did, in fact, appreciate the author’s attention to detail and his interest in the regulars — but I suspect the story’s heart has disappeared through a wormhole.
5/10
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