#62
The Domino Effect
By David Bishop
Right then. What happened here?
The EDAs are once again doing an arc. Time Zero told us in no uncertain terms that Earth’s timeline had gone wrong. Anji specifically could not go home until this was sorted. The gang followed their only lead to hunt Sabbath — agent provocateur of this crisis — on an alien planet. That bit resolved, they then headed back to Earth.
Pop quiz: how is Earth’s timeline doing? Is everything ready for Anji to go home? The Infinity Race had, at best, one line towards the end suggesting that this might be the case. I’m not sure why an entirely separate attempt by Sabbath to Make Time Work Like What I Want It To, on an alien planet no less, would have any effect — but sure, why not hope for the best. Even so it’s an unproven theory.
Enter The Domino Effect, in which Anji decides on arrival that Edinburgh 2003 is close enough to be getting on with and once more bids the TARDIS farewell. The Doctor and Fitz are sad but they acquiesce. No one wonders if this is the right version of Earth.
Uh, guys? The arc?
Oh, Anji spots some anomalies. Her money doesn’t seem to be legal tender any more. Her friend’s business doesn’t exist. There are no computers or signs of advanced technology beyond the 1950s. And the British Empire still seems to be a thing, whereas the concept of a Pakistani-descended Londoner is (quite racistly) not. Anji’s conclusion? These individual people must be crazy! I’m sure if I keep asking I’ll find the normal Edinburgh at some point! I’ll keep trying to pay for things with the same money! Meanwhile the Doctor has holed up in a library to look for clues as to what’s going on here, because something’s definitely not right. In time he realises that a sinister plot has distorted the history of Earth.
I feel like I’m going insane. Did they forget to tell David Bishop about the arc? Timelines in flux was literally Earth’s status quo the last time we were there. Incorrect money was a signifier of this! The Domino Effect, with its entirely separate What If Time Went Wonky plot, reads like Bishop was handed “Earth’s history goes wrong so Anji can’t stay there” and thought, okay chief, I’ll write that, instead of following it. Reading these in sequence the main trio’s utter failure to join the dots makes them seem like they’ve had a memory wipe, or worse, like they just aren’t that bright. (And yes, this appears to be an unrelated crisis to the first one so the dots wouldn’t join — but they’d still notice the similarity, surely?) It’s a baffling editorial choice that somehow ends in The Domino Effect rebooting its own version of the arc from scratch. Hopefully someone told the next author that we’re all good now, the arc has started, please just do the next bit, or never mind infinite Earths – we’ll have infinite bloody arcs on our hands.
While it adds unnecessary confusion for the constant EDA reader there is still something to be said for The Domino Effect working as a standalone novel/jumping on point. The basic setup of a world gone wrong hadn’t yet been done to death in Doctor Who, with Inferno being the main offender. There’s an excitement in finding yourself in the wrong version of history, perhaps more so in tracing how things got to this point, and arguably the most of all in finding a way to get out of there.
Bishop quickly establishes some ground rules for Earth 2.0 with his generally backward British Empire in full swing. This soon expands into a police state in action, where even good people are so hopped up on propaganda that they’d sooner trust the television than their own senses. There’s a vivid sense of injustice to the whole thing, with Anji treated as less than a second-class citizen and Fitz instantly blamed for a terrorist act based on only circumstantial evidence. It’s a mean story that offers little respite, which perhaps gives it a certain edge.
Bishop’s structural choices also work in its favour. To start with he fills in narrative gaps while Anji sits under some rubble, letting us know how she got here and what led to the explosion. It helps raise and then keep the reader’s interest. (Fear Of The Dark is another recent example of this device, aka the Dreamworks “you’re probably wondering how I got here” opening.) Bishop then forgoes chapters, sequencing The Domino Effect in days with occasional cutaways to historical moments that helped shape the present, similar to how he wrote Amorality Tale. The text does a lot of “hop over here, hop over there” paragraph-breakage but we’re rarely away from one group long enough to forget them and the groups are mostly not so disparate that we can’t see a common purpose in the narrative. It all hares along nicely, aided by a generously-spaced font size that makes it easy and quick to read. The writing style helps with that too, hewing closer to an easily digestible Target novelisation than anything dense or difficult; the characters tend to say what they mean and their actions are followed very shortly by consequences.
The A-to-B simplicity of The Domino Effect is perhaps its greatest strength, but that only takes it so far. There is a lack of complex inner workings to these characters which cumulatively makes them less interesting, with the good being innocent until their unquestioning obedience kicks in and the bad just being consistently awful. Some are secretly double agents, but all that means is that they act completely outraged by the world around them until it’s suddenly time to twirl their figurative moustache and let us know how great it actually is to kill people and be awful all the time. Villains such as Hastings, who imprisons and tortures Fitz, would scarcely seem more dastardly if they tied helpless girls to train tracks. The dialogue suffers as a result, rendering all of these people into jolly one-note caricatures. “‘Get her to the hospital as quickly as possible. We can still save this one.’ ‘But she’s not one of us,’ one man replied. ‘Shouldn’t we save our own kind first?’” / “My men will be along shortly to beat a confession out of you.” What good is spending time with them if they don’t get progressively more interesting?
The same applies to the revised version of Earth. Bishop gets all of his weird details out of the way early: there’s no computers, British colonies are still a thing, there are authoritarian cops. Now what? Anji and the Doctor are still able to flit around the side-lines until they can achieve their meagre aims, visiting various safe houses and cafes. There isn’t much about this perverted history that couldn’t slot neatly into any number of real ones with a few alterations. The lack of computers is more of a thematic idea than a practical one, since a character can quite easily get through a novel without checking their emails or paying with a credit card – and as to the concept that not inventing them would ultimately lead to all of this, while I get that we’re all about domino effects here, really? The “Empire” concept might have worked better if the novel wasn’t set in England; with a pointed absence of non-white characters besides Anji there’s no way to input how things are going over in the colonies, what any of it means, if there’s any resistance there as well. There just isn’t a wider story to tell, especially when any remotely savvy reader knows that all of this is eventually destined for the timey wimey bin.
There’s scarcely any plot, while we’re at it. Once Fitz is unjustly arrested for the bombing of a tea-shop his lot in life becomes a series of jail cells and torture scenes until he gets rescued. Thrilling as it is to put him through a kangaroo court, narratively it’s a dead end since absolutely no one will listen to him, meaning it’s just “oh yes you did!” ad infinitum. What is there to enjoy about that, unless you’re particularly diverted by scenes where (for example) Fitz is battered so heavily that he vomits and soils himself on the same page?
Meanwhile Anji – who eventually generates enough brain-power to realise that She’s Not In Kansas Any More, thank goodness – attempts to lie low after being falsely exposed as a traitor, then eventually reunites with the Doctor. There’s nothing much for them to do besides locate Fitz and the TARDIS, which (in a particularly pathetic display of Doctoring) gets towed away while the Doctor clutches a receipt. The Domino Effect has Big Ideas about timelines, which Justin Richards mostly already came up with but hey ho, but in practice it’s just a series of moody bus or train journeys down to London whilst trying not to get shot. There’s a fairly heavy duty finale but that seems more interested in the books that will come after this one, which conveniently gets The Domino Effect off the hook for any sense of narrative closure. (You can tell as the remaining page-count dwindles that we’re not going to put all the toys away.)
It would be nice if there was some character development to cling onto, but it’s not really that sort of novel. Anji ought to be able to rail interestingly against her surroundings what with the racism, but that seems like a one-stop argument, with the people she speaks to either not caring (angrily) or not caring (apathetically). She seems artificially dippy at first thanks to the arc mismanagement, then later has some bizarre temper tantrums at the Doctor for suggesting that they carry out different missions, which just seemed like a random drama-grab. (“You’re planning to leave us both behind, aren’t you?” What the hell is she smoking? Isn’t it obvious that he’s probably got some plan in motion, and on the whole he’d rather Fitz wasn’t executed?) She has every right to be miserable in these surroundings but nothing particularly interesting comes of it.
The Doctor catches the same “fails to spot what’s going on here” disease as Anji at first, but he’s hardly a force to be reckoned with afterwards what with the TARDIS removal men. Bishop also brings in that popular trope of Doctorly fainting fits, linked in this one to the mistreatment of the TARDIS, but it’s still a terribly overplayed beat. He at least gets to face off against the villains in the end, offering his usual “you didn’t need to do that”s and telling them their actions are wrong even though they’re plainly not going to listen. But then they wheel out Sabbath – of course they do, it was practically in the BBC Charter at this point – and what do they do with him, even though technically this isn’t the same version of the character? The two characters debate whose approach to history is correct. Again. Only for it to turn out that Sabbath, despite his almighty confidence, has been a dithering prat and has missed the obvious. Again.
Bishop’s Sabbath writing is perhaps not the worst of the series thus far (The Infinity Race loses extra points for sheer weirdness) but despite his protestations that he is not “a power-crazed megalomaniac” the big silly villain shoe undeniably fits. We are well past the point of diminishing returns with this character and I will not miss him when and if he eventually sods off.
The only other thing to mention about The Domino Effect is the violence. It’s a fairly numbing experience after a while, with Fitz getting mistreated so badly I wondered how his brain was still working by the end. There are also background tragedies and sudden reversals peppered throughout, with Bishop introducing characters only to matter-of-factly kill them off. Several authors have been fond of this approach, perhaps seeking to suggest that anything can happen and thus heighten the drama. I don’t think it works if you keep doing it, with character after character getting a quick gunshot death as opposed to any justice or closure – you stop being surprised and start rolling your eyes. Special mention however ought to go to Alan Turing, whom Bishop puzzlingly resurrects only to imprison for sixty years, then bump off at the climax as part of a wildly confusing “nexus point” explanation for the arc reboot. I thought Paul Leonard’s treatment of the historical figure raised too many questions in The Turing Test, but at least that novel also asked questions about good and evil which placed all of it in a context. Parading him around this menagerie of cliches and technobabble only to kill him all over again just seems like poor taste.
The Domino Effect lost me early on, let’s face it. I don’t quite see how an ongoing series can work if it’s going to keep resetting its resets. As a novel in its own right this is blunt and clumsy stuff, easily readable but offering no great rewards for doing so. There is perhaps something to say about a world where history took a different course and what we can learn from that – plenty is going on today that echoes The Domino Effect – but I was left feeling that it had been said before in greater depth, and judging by the current trajectory of the series it will likely be said again before very long. Without Sabbath, if we are astonishingly lucky.
3/10
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