#35
Festival Of Death
By Jonathan Morris
For a show about time travel Doctor Who is surprisingly shy about its mechanics. There aren't a lot of Groundhog Day-style time loops to be found, or Bill & Ted paradoxes, especially in the days before Davies and Moffat. Of course we know that's because time travel isn't really the point of Doctor Who: it's just a handy way into whatever story you'd like to tell. The TARDIS could be a wardrobe to Narnia or the Starship Enterprise and many of the plots could still work. If you were new to Who though, you might expect more (nyurgh) timey-wimey.
Jonathan Morris is perhaps a bit over-excited in claiming (via his Introduction) to have done all of this stuff first. (He at least goes on to credit The Sands Of Time as an early adopter, though he omits The Left-Handed Hummingbird which came even earlier. Tut tut.) Regardless of who dunit first, Festival Of Death probably does time travel shenanigans the most up to this point. It finds the Fourth Doctor and Romana stuck in something like a time loop, where their involvement in a crisis always seems to follow another still-in-their-future intervention. Thus they have to work backwards, parsing as little information as possible along the way to avoid breaking the laws of time, whilst still somehow being effective at solving the problem. It's a pickle and no mistake; Morris, like Richards before him (and perhaps like Orman, but who knows) had to use a flow-chart to keep it all straight.
The problem I have with these kind of stories – including, to be fair, Sands and Hummingbird – is the baked-in reassurance that the characters will get out of scrape A because we know they're going to pop up in scrape B later on. (Or should that be scrape -A?) Yes, the safety of popular characters is generally something you can assume, and it’s a downright certainty in canonical tie-in fiction, but suspension of disbelief still needs to work in individual stories; actively shooting it down with foreknowledge doesn't help. Morris neatly solves this problem by making it clear early on (as well as in the blurb, before anyone shouts about spoilers!) that the Doctor is going to die at the end. Is the reader likely to believe that, in a story that prominently features death and resurrection? Well, perhaps not, but the Doctor and Romana seem convinced. Drama is therefore assured, and the Doctor's knowing journey towards his own doom keeps the tension up, despite his increasingly comical responses to characters x, y and z having met him before, even though he's on his second or third or fourth trip further into the past.
It's not an especially confusing read, although some deliberate scene repetitions (no doubt meant to refresh the context) occasionally gave me unhelpful déjà vu. Morris grounds the story by allowing the Doctor and Romana to be as out of the loop as we are; although they're both brilliantly versed in the technical terms for things (well, Romana is anyway) they're essentially just doing their best to remember which bit of the plot slots into which other bit, which is exactly the experience we're having. There are moments when it threatens to become too much, with all sorts of Doctors and Romanas running about, but Festival Of Death is a light enough read that it doesn't feel as though you'll need to pass a test afterwards. For contrast, I had to make notes while reading Heart Of TARDIS simply to stave off a headache. (I made notes about Eye Of Heaven for fun.)
That's probably the other significant thing to take away: Festival Of Death is a funny book. Perhaps that's not surprising where it's set during the Douglas Adams years, but Morris is keen that it feels authentic to all that. (Indeed, you can point to City Of Death for an example of "Doctor Who already did timey-wimey stuff".) This Doctor/companion combo easily lends itself to comedy, hence the comedic focus of their Missing Adventures, and there are lots of opportunities here for more of that. The Doctor at one point bumbles about disguised as a conveniently mute guard. He clashes multiple times with Metcalf, the small-minded controller of the derelict ship/space station that houses all the trouble, and he makes short work of two unpleasant policemen. The Doctor's "death scene" is a long day's journey into ham, throwing in as many quotes as he can think of until another character gets sick of hearing it and helps him shuffle off. Romana, for her part, is more concerned than acerbic in this, but she enjoys playing along with various fibs that (thanks to all the paradoxes) she already knows about.
At times it's too broad, or perhaps a little too eager to please. Take this Monty Python paraphrase, which is as likely to elicit a groan as a giggle: "My card is marked, my number’s up, my goose is cooked. I’ve cashed my chips and have ceased to be. I am an ex-Doctor." Yes, this should all be a bit Douglas Adams-y, but we don't need a character to reference "life, the universe, and everything!" on top of that, or have a far-out character actually named "Hoopy". The space station's computer, ERIC, is a fairly obvious mish-mash of Eddie the upbeat computer from the Heart of Gold and Marvin the depressed robot, depending on the date when we meet him. We're not talking Slipback levels of "yes we know you're a fan", but it's not far off.
Sometimes it's a less specific broadness. Most of the supporting characters are somewhat lacking in depth, usually for comic effect. Space coppers Dunkal and Rige might be the worst offenders, with one of them mentally noting that "he was getting too old for this sort of thing. He couldn’t run more than twenty metres without getting a stitch. Drinking cheap coffee, slamming his fist on desks and roughing up suspects against fenders; that was more his style." Yes, all very The Sweeney; they drop out of the story after the first "loop" and are not missed. Metcalf is an awful guy for comic effect, which is fine as far as it goes but he never grows. Doomed spaceship commander Rochfort is another ghastly bloke, as well as being one of those bores who refuses to believe things so that we can stall the plot for a sec. Villain Paddox is eventually revealed to have interesting motives for what he's doing, but up to (and including) that point he's still just a creepy man in a lab coat. Harken Batt is perhaps the best example of a shady character: a disgraced documentary-maker with few scruples and fewer positive attributes who nevertheless endears himself to the Doctor and Romana.
Some of what I'm calling broadness might be because the story has to work so hard mechanically that there isn't time to focus on the finer details. Morris admits in his introduction that like a lot of first time authors he was anxious about never getting another shot at this, so he included as many ideas as possible. Consequently Festival Of Death has a couple of competing plots, even apart from the Doctor and Romana playing temporal catch-up, and they don't always chime exactly. For instance, Paddox needs 218 people to go into his "death and resurrection" machine in order to get what he wants. That happens to be the exact number of people used by the villainous Repulsion for its own ends, piggy-backing off of Paddox's work. (At one point it's suggested there's no such thing as coincidence, but I mean, isn't there?) It's hard not to imagine earlier drafts of Festival where he just used one plot or the other.
The structure of the story means that we have to wait a long time to find out what Paddox is up to, and it's a satisfying call-back once it comes, but we're waiting equally long to get to grips with the Repulsion, and that's about as standard a villainous force as you could imagine. We also get a mix of monsters, some of them memorable, some not. The Arachnopods are artificial killers that can reconstruct their bodies, each limb having its own intelligence, which is all fantastic but they're contained to one strand of the plot. Whereas we're also doing zombies again – man, they were really in vogue at BBC Books – and as well as being quite dull beat for beat, they come with the semantic nitpickery of being potentially more dangerous once they're being possessed, rather than merely remote controlled. Which, sure I guess, but it's not as if there are good zombies, is it?
It's worth saying that most of these complaints are themselves nitpickery. The process of following the Doctor and Romana (and don't forget K9) as they tumble through this ridiculous mess is a lot of fun, both in storytelling terms and because of the general light atmosphere. (Granted, it's debateable how light, given that the story revolves around a recreational suicide machine designed for temporary stays in the afterlife.) Morris is able to mine quite a bit of pathos out of the time loop – I'm not sure it is a time loop actually but I'm not sure what else to call it – with the Doctor and Romana both at points lying to people about their imminent doom, knowing that they can't change it. The story ends on a sombre, if slightly overwritten note as reality closes in on Paddox, and there's a lot to think about with the life cycle of Gallura and his people – ethereal creatures who experience their entire lives in loops. There's often a sense of pushing past the plot machinations to really think about what time travel means to people, what they can and can't do within it, and although Festival Of Death refrains from getting very heavy about any of it, I'm glad the story had that on its mind.
Jonathan Morris would go on to write a hell of a lot more Doctor Who, but it makes sense that Festival Of Death is still spoken of highly. It does a very good job of a seemingly chaotic bit of time travel, and it hews closely to the characterisation of its two leads, who pretty much guarantee an entertaining time just by showing up. I think the book makes life harder for itself than necessary, at least when it comes to finessing the things that live between the lines of a flow chart, but it's still very satisfying to make it through the maze.
7/10
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