Lance Parkin's The Gallifrey Chronicles is a conclusion, in the way that "All Good Things..." is a conclusion to Star Trek: The Next Generation -- this era of the adventures end, there's a resolution to various dangling issues, but the adventures themselves don't end. The Gallifrey Chronicles actually jokes about the different and contradictory threads of the eighth Doctor's life, as one of the characters looks in a Time-Space Visualizer and sees that the eighth Doctor has three different ninth incarnations (Atkinson, REG, and, at the time, Eccleston). There have been a number of different ways of fitting the different threads together proposed over the years -- fitting years of adventures into the middle of Sam Jones' Greenpeace festival has long been a popular kludge -- but I don't think I need to know anymore how the pieces slot together.
I've only read a smattering of 8th Doctor novels but some of them establish things about the lore that are incompatible with the new series even if you erase the actual events of those novels from history. Spoiler: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, some later books, and a little bit of Season 12 In that novel, the Doctor has to have his 2nd heart removed because it was somehow tied to Gallifrey. Once Gallifrey was destroyed, the heart became dead tissue and had to be removed so as not to kill him. At least, I think that's what happened. It's a very confusing novel, told from the perspective of someone who doesn't really know the Doctor or totally understand what's going on. I don't think the story makes total sense unless you're very well versed in tantric philosophy, which I am not. But given that Gallifrey has been destroyed a couple of times on the new series now and it didn't require the Doctor to have his/her heart removed either time, that pretty well refutes the whole premise of this book. (But then, I think a later book established that Gallifrey was never destroyed at all but was just shifted out of sync with the main timeline or something, so why did any of this need to happen anyway?) Plus, the Doctor said in "Cold Blood" that removing his 2nd heart would kill him, so there's also that.
The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out, with the first part of the Time Lord Victorious comic strip and a feature article on the whole event. The comic is fun. It doesn’t capture the voices of the Ninth Doctor and Rose quite as effectively as the Titan comic channels the Tenth, but it comes close, and there’s some interesting continuity stuff. Plus vampires. There’s not much in the article that we didn’t already know, though it does state in no uncertain terms that Echoes of Extinction is two separate stories with narrative overlap, not a multi-Doctor story.
I read the comic. It was alright as it was just the Doctor teaming up with the Daleks to face another old threat. Odd to do this right after the Ravenous but I suppose the difference is they are after the Daleks first this time round. I did like the Prime Strategist character
James Goss' short story "The Dawn of the Koturrah" dropped today, which introduces us to the bringers of death. And they're basically anti-Ood.
The first TLV novel is officially out today. I have it on Kindle. It’s very short. Like, “long novella” short. About a quarter of the way in, it’s fine. Definitely feels more in line with the overall TLV premise than the Titan or DWM comics.
I assumed the novels were the "spine" of the story since that's where the multi-Doctor stuff is happening.
The comics aren’t (yet, anyway) dealing with any of the stuff that makes TLV distinctive: the Kotturuh, Brian the Ood, the Tenth Doctor going rogue. The first novel dives into all of that. That definitely gives it more of an “event” feel, but there’s something hollow about the book. It’s not very novelistic in style, with very little sense of place, point of view, or anything else that extended prose narratives can do. Cole doesn’t capture the Tenth Doctor’s voice: he gets a couple of the verbal tics, but the rhythms of the dialogue are wrong. The Tenth Doctor’s state of mind ought to be central to this story, but all we get are a few glancing references to Adelaide’s suicide in “The Waters of Mars” and a late speech where he abruptly turns megalomaniac. There’s some nice horror imagery around the Kotturuh, however (though the prose is too focused on telling you how gross they are and not enough on making them intimidating on a level of atmosphere), and Brian the Ood is an intriguing character who I’m looking forward to seeing/hearing elsewhere. The interludes are a nice touch; I wish there had been more of them. Overall, The Knight, the Fool and the Dead does what it needs to in solid, unspectacular fashion, as you might expect from a book by Stephen Cole. In some ways it feels like an extended prologue to All Flesh is Grass, which I’m hoping will be a meatier experience.
Big Finish has announced a fourth Doctor addition to Time Lord Victorious, Genetics of the Daleks, in which the fourth Doctor battles the Dalek Time Squad.
I doubt anyone chose "Genetics" at random. And I wonder if it will tie into "Genesis of the Daleks" in some way, as this morning a Blu-Ray of television stories that tie into Time Lord Victorious was announced, with "Genesis" as part of the set. Considering that the description of "Genetics" says that the Doctor is battling the last survivor of the Dalek Time Squad after the event, then we have some timey-wimey shenanigans going on -- the earliest "participating" Doctor takes part in the chronologically latest story (that we know of). What if "Genetics" ended up being a prequel to "Genesis"? Or maybe that's a fanwank too far for even Big Finish.
Yes, it's obvious that's it's an homage, but it's a bit of a clumsy one, of the sort that could too easily breed confusion. My Star Trek Adventures campaign The Gravity of the Crime was originally going to be called The Prime Detective, since it was a detective story on a pre-contact alien world, but I changed it when someone I showed it to misread it as The Prime Directive and thought it was a dull title. I realized if one person missed the pun, others would too. With only two letters' difference in the middle of the word, it was easy to miss, since people tend to recognize words mainly by their first and last letters. This is also a two-letter difference, although it does add a letter to the length.
Big day for TLV releases: the second issue of the Titan comic and the Big Finish Short Trips are both out. The comic remains very good on its own terms but still doesn’t have much to do with Time Lord Victorious; it feels more like Titan found a way to squeeze some of their own ideas for where to take Jody Houser’s series under the TLV banner. The ending raises the possibility that yet another strand of the narrative might make it feel more relevant, so we’ll see how that goes. Houser definitely writes great Tenth Doctor dialogue. The Short Trips are both read by Jon Culshaw and feature the Master, but the first is Delgado while the second is Ainley. Neither impression is up to much to my ears: I can’t hear Delgado at all, while the Ainley is passable but sounds like an elderly version of the character. Culshaw makes for a decent narrator, though, which matters more. I don’t know what, if anything, the Delgado story has to do with Time Lord Victorious, but it’s a strong story that offers Big Finish’s take on a missing piece of the Master’s personal history. The Ainley story features the Kotturuh, but the stronger link to TLV doesn’t stop it from feeling underdeveloped for its length and inconsequential. The Master is written well enough, but barely anything happens. At this point it looks like the core narratives of TLV will be the novels, the Eighth Doctor audios, and the Ninth Doctor comic strip, with everything else more tangentially connected, but we’ll see how the tapestry continues to unfold.
I may be wrong, since I’m not fully up on the Master’s continuity, but I believe this is Spoiler Big Finish’s first explanation of how the Delgado Master wound up in the decayed body. Apparently the connection between the Delgado story and the rest of TLV is made clearer by the Eighth Doctor audios.
I'm deeply surprised that the Pratt/Beevers Master has come to be accepted as the same incarnation as the Delgado Master. The idea was that the decayed Master was his 13th life, that he'd burned through his regenerations quickly by leading his violent life (or even using regeneration to disguise himself, if you go by the novelization) and his last body was deteriorating and on its last legs. And they never said the Delgado Master was on his last life -- you'd think that would've informed his behavior, made him more cautious or more desperate. So it seems far more logical to me that there are at least a few incarnations between Delgado and Pratt/Beevers. For that matter, Lonemagpie's Master origin novel depicted "Koschei" as Delgado, which would've made him the first Master, not the 13th. Although I gather that Big Finish has introduced a pre-Delgado Master played by James Dreyfus; as usual, the audios and books follow distinct continuities.
I was too. But Big Finish only recently turned toward recasting/impressions, so they haven’t really had an opportunity before. The sequence is ambiguous, leaving room for this not to be that, but it’s definitely a substantial moment for the Delgado Master.