#36
The Ancestor Cell
By Peter Anghelides & Stephen Cole
Here we are then: the season finale of The Eighth Doctor Adventures. It’s all been building to this. Allegedly.
I’ve no idea what happened behind the scenes, but I’d like to think they at least asked Lawrence Miles to come and put his toys away.* The Ancestor Cell is all about patented Miles stuff like Faction Paradox, the unnamed Time Lord “Enemy”, the bottle universe, human TARDISes, Fitz’s other life as “Father Kreiner”, the Doctor’s premature death on Dust, his infection with a slow-acting Faction disease, and then the ensuing interference (!) in all his intervening lives. There’s also the Compassion-vs-the Time Lords stuff, but then that’s clearly based on Miles’s mythology as well. It just feels weird to outsource a book that’s so obviously entrenched in one guy’s ideas.
Hey ho. For whatever reason, Miles didn’t come back. (Perhaps, not unreasonably, “tie up all your plot threads and then don’t start any new ones” didn’t sound like fun.) The thing to do now is to engage with what The Ancestor Cell is, or at the very least how Anghelides and Cole manage in Miles’s stead.
To answer both questions: not great.
It certainly hits the ground running, picking up the “Time Lords chasing after Compassion” thing straight away. When the Doctor and co. narrowly evade capture they encounter a new threat, the Edifice: an enormous plant-like construction made of bone, orbiting Gallifrey. (It’s the thing on the front cover.) The Time Lords are worried about it; Faction Paradox, who have impressionable young agents on Gallifrey, are curious about it. There’s a good chance this will be the thing to finally ignite the conflict between the two forces.
The book continues from there at quite a lick, with lots of action crammed into short chapters. (46 of them!) It’s highly readable, and I wouldn’t describe it as boring as such, at least not in a page-turning sense. But the actual content of the book is rather dull, since we are so obviously here just to put toys away — as quickly as possible in some cases.
A lot of that comes down to how the EDAs have handled their story arc(s). For a positive example, look — surprisingly enough — at Sam Jones. Yes, that character was riddled with shortcomings, but the actual arc was introduced by Miles, kept afloat by Blum, Orman and Leonard, and then resolved by Miles. There weren’t a lot of plates to spin, so in hindsight it didn’t necessarily matter that the intervening authors weren’t doing much more than mention the arc. (If we were lucky.)
Now go back to that list in the second paragraph. There’s a lot more in the pot this time. We’ve at least had intervening novels that added to the mythology — The Blue Angel, The Taking Of Planet 5 and The Shadows Of Avalon. But the existing ideas haven’t got much further along in the meantime.
Take the Big Two from Interference: the Third Doctor’s immediate future being in flux because of his early death, and the Eighth Doctor slowly becoming a Faction agent. These seemed at the time to be major turning points for BBC Books, and yet somehow The Ancestor Cell has to resolve both of them from a standing start. Why? From interviews it seemed that the whole point of that Third Doctor thing was to introduce some uncertainty into the PDAs. Why even bother, if none of the PDA authors are going to run with it? Also — and look, I know how snotty it is to armchair-criticise a series like this, but how hard would it have been to at least hint that the Eighth Doctor was gradually changing for the worse, or even that the trigger was imminent? Multiple authors could have worked that in!
There’s inevitably a sense of anticlimax when you do all of this stuff at once. In order then: it turns out the Doctor’s TARDIS isn’t dead after all (another lacklustre arc thread incidentally), but it is in a bad way. One of the reasons for this is the Dust fiasco causing it to go mad keeping the Doctor’s right and wrong timelines separate, but it has done that successfully. So in essence, the PDA “interference” could never have happened anyway. Terrific. Toy put away. Then we have the Eighth Doctor’s transformation, which we’ve heard precisely zip about since it was introduced. This week, Faction Paradox turn up and start the countdown. Well hey, at least they didn’t forget about it altogether! The Doctor spends a chunk of the book being told he definitely, positively, almost certainly is going to turn into a Faction guy… any minute now. Just you wait. It’s terribly exciting. Much convince. Many worth the wait. Seriously though: that’s not a story arc. It’s a pause button.
You’ve almost got to admire the amount of stuff The Ancestor Cell tries to cram in, but rarely does it tie something off in a way that works. I’m not convinced that we even needed to resolve Faction Paradox and the Enemy, seemingly for good, right this second. Yes, Justin Richards wanted a clean slate, but you could have just gone easy on these things until someone had a good idea about what to do with them later. Instead we dump the parts like an airplane in trouble.
Who are the Enemy? They must be pretty bad to be worth the appalling behaviour of Romana and her agents in response; they must also be pretty impressive to be worth pointing at Faction Paradox and saying, you think those guys are bad? The Ancestor Cell includes a somewhat convoluted Faction plan to resurrect an obscure Time Lord President, Greyjan, who happens to have theories about the Enemy. These theories are then presented as fact. In essence, the Enemy are some sort of offshoot of the oldest life in the universe, and the Time Lords’ method of travel has upset them. You may or may not find that satisfying as a concept; in either case, the Enemy still aren’t actually in the book, so this (like the Doctor’s feeble Faction conditioning) just feels like tell-don’t-show. The Enemy are lamely described, their influence is shown, and then we’re probably never going to hear about them again. Great. What a pay-off. Incidentally, I’ve no idea how a human TARDIS like Compassion would have helped that particular war effort in the slightest.
Then we have Faction Paradox. Honestly, this might be worse. Getting them right is clearly difficult: Miles wasn’t happy with the way they were handled in Unnatural History, but at least that was colourful and demonstrated how strange they could be. Faction Paradox in The Ancestor Cell are mostly represented by a few bumbling Time Lord kids trying to impress girls, plus a couple of grinning megalomaniacs who want to destroy all the things. They barely demonstrate their awesome powers and freaky practices, and in such small numbers it becomes a bit implausible that they can hold so much sway over the Time Lords in the first place. (Probably the only reason that works is the thoroughly unimpressive and human-seeming Gallifrey we have in the book; grandeur and brilliance are largely missing there too, and all the people are small and malleable. The only one acting like she owns the place is Romana.) Their constant references to the Doctor’s impending transformation aren’t very convincing, since he’s so good at staving it off. Then in the end they’re just swept away, presumably forever. If Miles disliked Blum & Orman’s effort then he’d surely hate this.
Probably the only Faction point of interest here is Father Kreiner, since his existence speaks to actual character development: “our” Fitz is a copy, this embittered Faction guy is the original, and he’s desperate to avenge himself against the Doctor. There’s even a bit of a broader theme here, with the Doctor’s actions having consequences against other people. Fitz (both) has reason to worry about that; there’s a pseudo-companion called Mali who wobbles in and out of his orbit; most of the deaths on board the Edifice can be traced back to the Doctor; and in the end he makes a decision that destroys Gallifrey, presumably killing Romana, Mali and millions more. Probably the best scene in the book is a quiet reckoning between Kreiner and the Doctor, the old man begging the Time Lord to break the timelines to fix his life, and the Doctor refusing. Kreiner’s story is resolved inasmuch as he begins to mellow, but then it’s suddenly over in the most offhand and unsatisfying way, making you wonder (not for the first time) why we’re even bothering with this stuff.
The Faction, in their race to be written out, do at least show us something new: we establish who Grandfather Paradox is. The trouble with that is twofold: no one actually asked, so it’s not a satisfying reveal to suddenly get the answer, and the answer we do get (you can probably guess) just feels like a boring repeat of Kreiner’s story, underlined by Kreiner himself being there. It seems to be an effort to give the Doctor a Big Bad to face off against at the climax, but that feels like a misunderstanding of the kind of threat they represent. The Ancestor Cell just doesn’t seem very engaged with their mythology, and then — or so it seems anyway — they’re over and done with. What a waste.
It’s tempting to focus on the big arc stuff because all the other stuff is a bit pedestrian. The Edifice could be an interesting idea, with a suggestion that it is “affecting causality” — but a suggestion is all we get (tell don’t show, again) leaving us with a big boney spaceship full of killer spiders. That isn’t really anything to write home about — literally, with descriptions such as “The gross, contorted, ivory bodies of the huge spiders” followed on the same page by “Their gross bodies cast huge shadows.” Scintillating.
The supporting characters are largely fodder, to be dispensed with for quick shocks, but even before that they seem unusually ordinary for Time Lords, with altogether dull aspirations like impressing pretty girls. (This must be at least partly deliberate as — unlike Virgin canon — these Time Lords are explicitly made up of parents and children. A line has been drawn there.) Romana continues to be thoroughly awful, which is at least consistent from The Shadows Of Avalon, but the suggestion that her heroism at the end of Warriors’ Gate somehow led to her current fanaticism is a ridiculous reach. Show your working.
It’s a fairly busy story for Fitz — as in “our” one — and he does get some fun interactions with Romana, bringing out her less awful side. He has some rather rudimentary internal back and forth about whether he can trust the Doctor, but at least it’s there. Otherwise he’s very “factory settings” in this one, always dispensing a quip, being inappropriately horny or both. (To be honest the horniness is getting a bit embarrassing. Yes, Fitz is a somewhat embarrassing character on purpose, but one or both authors still took time out to write that he was looking up Romana’s skirt and/or admiring her “shapely backside.” After a certain point the authors themselves [as in all the EDA ones, but also Anghelides/Cole here] become the creepy ones, just as the reader becomes more and more aware that BBC Books is mostly run by men. It risks reading as legit lechy.)
It’s a fairly significant book for Compassion, being — for all intents and purposes — the last time we’ll see her. The question of whether the Time Lords will break and control her is often the focus, but there never seems to be much actual debate about that; Romana and co. are implacable until the Doctor is able to offer alternative solutions, and when those fall through they’re right back to implacable again. Compassion sits out a good chunk of the book while she recovers from an early attack, and then she flits between Time Lord and Faction control. It’s commendable that at no point does she stop demanding her own agency — she’s a Doctor Who companion with no particular fealty to the Doctor, she will seize every opportunity to leave everyone else to deal with the mess. However, stuffing her into the background makes her demand a bit more meta than it ought to be. She escapes in the end, arguably kidnapping a Time Lord of her own to begin some new adventures. The optics of that are debatable (does he particularly want this?) but it’s still nice that our last sight of Compassion is her in control at last, mirroring the Doctor’s path.
It’s a shame, obviously, that her story had to end. Compassion clearly represented an effort to do something different. I suppose it’s at least themed that she wouldn’t want to be tied down longer than necessary. As an arc, it’s been eventful but wonky; yet again BBC Books can’t seem to get all their authors singing from the same hymn-sheet, so you end up with books like The Space Age which barely wrote for her at all, or The Banquo Legacy which contorted to write her as someone else. The excitement of Time Lords in pursuit, much like those leftovers from Interference, could have been a lot more exciting than what we got. I guess all that’s left is to hope that, as and when Justin Richards has a story arc, he has more success encouraging his authors to contribute. (Based on the arc that immediately follows this one, the plan is apparently to force them!)
The last and I suppose biggest piece of The Ancestor Cell is the Doctor, who must be made ready for his next phase of adventures. It’s a shame that more isn’t made about his relationship with Compassion, since that relationship has presumably been the cornerstone of the arc; it would have been nice to afford him a bit of closure there, as even Kreiner managed. He doesn’t see properly eye to eye with Romana either before the end when she, presumably, dies along with everyone else. And about that: it’s a curious choice to pair the Doctor’s imminent soft reboot (amnesia again — sigh — with a convalescence period on Earth while the TARDIS repairs itself) with the destruction of his homeworld. Yes, he’s got a clean slate, but (forgive me) at what cost? Is the deliberate genocide of his own people not going to bother him at all once he remembers it? This might just be the new series talking, but surely this will cause the occasional sleepless night? If the intention wasn’t to create more angst then this is overkill.
It’s a decent showing for the character, particularly in his too few scenes with Kreiner, but the overall structure of The Ancestor Cell inhibits some of his usual flourishes. It’s an enormously stand-around-and-talk sort of a book, only changing up the location from Gallifrey to TARDIS to Edifice and so on. At times it’s about as exciting as Arc Of Infinity, which is presumably where the generous action scenes and (I can’t stress this enough) short chapters come in. The Doctor at least manages to be an unknown element for all sides of the conflict, which is a pretty good summation of the character, even if there is no opportunity to reflect on what it has all meant to him. It also helps that Gallifrey is kept as an uncomfortable, hostile place even for the Doctor, since the intention is to do away with it at the end. I doubt you’ll miss the place. (It’s worth noting that there is some actual show-don’t-tell here — I know! Fetch the bunting! — as the prose carefully hints that the “nine Gallifreys” are slowly whittling down to one, and only the reader and Fitz are aware of this. See, they can do it.)
Despite a few bright spots — the pace, some of the writing for the regulars — it’s likely the chief takeaway here will be the sheer frenzied continuity of the thing. It’s very apparent that The Ancestor Cell is here to do a job, with little room for an actual novel to live and breathe underneath. In doing so, The Ancestor Cell shows up the flaws of the series leading up to it. I doubt even Lawrence Miles could have made it work, since he’d also have to reckon with the general lack of preparedness in the earlier books. It’s frustrating, because the second act of the EDAs has only taken bigger risks, displayed more imagination. The trouble is, your story arc’s only as good as the effort you’re able to commit to it, and The Ancestor Cell is where you end up when that hasn’t been good enough.
5/10
*Update: they didn’t. Sounds like they didn’t fancy the editorial back and forth that would have come with it. HEAVIEST SIGH.
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