A review by brnineworms
Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

2.5

I wanted to like this one but it really does lack substance. There are a lot of tropes just thrown together. For example:

Soylent Green zavát is people! And it’s also a drug which keeps people placid. And it’s also able to wipe specific memories. Somehow. The Second Doctor appears as a force ghost to solve the mystery which he shouldn’t know the answer to or be aware of in the first place. There are too many characters now so uhhh here comes a sea serpent!

It very much feels as though the author was making it up as he went along.

Despite all this stuff, there’s actually very little to connect these ideas together, and not a lot of momentum to drive the story forwards. Things just kind of happen. The Doctor in particular doesn’t do much. The villains mostly stand around being sinister while monsters chase the protagonists until they’re killed or scared away. The Timewyrm is sidelined yet again,

concealed within the mind of another villain (the Grand Matriarch this time) until she’s released at the very end. Only this time she isn’t mentioned during the story and when she is eventually present she doesn’t even get a line.

I’m starting to feel bad for her.

While I’m talking about the Grand Matriarch, I have to ask... why is she evil?

Rather, is she Lilith or is she the Timewyrm? Lilith is described as a “reluctant host” but it’s unclear to what degree she was being influenced or controlled. Terrance Dicks made a point of telling us Hitler was a fascist before the Timewyrm entered his mind, and she only amplified his psychic powers (I love Doctor Who) but here? Robinson presents us with a sweet little girl and a Matriarch intent on creating and controlling God and I suppose ascending to godhood by proxy – are they the same person, or is the Timewyrm merely puppeteering that body?

The Doctor blames himself for unwittingly infecting Lilith with the Timewyrm when he met her as a child. There’s also some emphasis on the contrast between the Second Doctor saying “Everything gets old and falls apart in time [...] But most things can be fixed” and the Seventh Doctor saying “Everything must at some time die. It’s part of the natural order of things.” Am I supposed to think the Second Doctor was wrong to fix Lilith’s broken doll and that he should have instead used it as an opportunity to teach her to accept death as inevitable? Is the implication that this small act of kindness was directly responsible for the millennia of subjugation which followed? Or is that irrelevant and it’s all the Timewyrm’s doing?

The politics of this story are a bit naff.

The novel’s answer to propaganda-fueled authoritarian rule seems to be rugged individualism; after calling the Kirithons “wimps!” for being oppressed, the Doctor offers them “the chance to be dependent on no one but [themselves]” and later reiterates that they’ll “have to fend for themselves” from now on. Coupled with the message that acts of kindness create dictators, it suggests that thinking for yourself is good (I agree), but moreover you should trust no one and help no one. I don’t like that.

Am I expecting too much from a 200-page Doctor Who novel? Maybe. But if Robinson wants to get political enough to say wake up sheeple, he might as well go all the way and write something actually radical.

Not that any of this matters even within the fiction. As soon as the God machine is introduced, what happens on Kirith is immaterial. Who gives a shit?

In the end, Timewyrm: Apocalypse is just weak. I really did want to like this book, but as the story went on and the clichés piled up I started to lose interest. I can only hope Revelation will give the Timewyrm arc a satisfying conclusion.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

human experiments, torture, body horror (with some ableism tangled up in there), racism, cannibalism, violence (including gun violence), death, dissociation