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A review by modernzorker
Doctor Who: Timewyrm-Exodus by Terrance Dicks
4.0
Last month, I re-read Timewyrm: Genesys for the first time in two decades. John Peel kick-started the New Adventures with the first of a four-part series, and while this resulted in a Doctor Who story that would have easily earned an 18+ certification if filmed, it didn't quite fulfill the promise for taking the Who-niverse in a more mature direction. Bare-breasted teenage prostitutes and hacked-off limbs can only take one so far, and after that you need a story that rises to the occasion. Peel's work isn't bad, but I was amazed the responsibility for carrying on the franchise essentially fell on his shoulders. He's an author whose previous works revolved mostly around writing the Doctor's comic book adventures and a couple Target novelizations of Terry Nation's older Dalek stories once all the rights on those were sorted. Again, nothing against the man, but you'd think launching a paperback line would have warranted a writer more experienced in both long-form prose and Who continuity.
Well, apparently so did Virgin, because a mere two months after Genesys hit shelves, Exodus arrived penned by none other than veteran chronicler of Whovian adventures for the Target line (and writer of numerous Who teleplays) Terrance "Uncle Terry" Dicks. This comes not a moment too soon, because even if one loved Peel's entry, it was going to take someone better versed in the television program's history to reassure readers that Virgin really were taking this seriously. Gone, for the moment, are the nudity and graphic violence which Genesys wore like a gauche scarf, and in their place is a fantastically uncomfortable adventure set in the middle of World War II.
As if the title didn't give it away, the Timewyrm wasn't disposed of at the end of Genesys. In fact, thanks to a miscalculation on the Doctor's part, she's actually more powerful and more dangerous than her original incarnation in ancient Mesopotamia. Scattered into the time stream after her first confrontation with the Doctor, she's fled through the corridors of time and re-emerged on Earth several thousand years in the future. Gilgamesh and his ilk were too primitive to create the sort of long-lasting disturbance the Timewyrm seeks to manufacture. But history has shown there to be a man who amasses almost godlike power and a cult-like following among his countrymen; a petty tyrant and despot of the highest order who drags the entire world to the brink of destruction for the sake of his insane ambitions. The swastika on the cover should give away the mystery, but just in case you need the spoiler, it's Adolf Hitler.
It's astonishing to think that, for all the different places in Earth's timeline the Doctor's shown up, everywhere from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 to the OK Corral eight centuries later, he'd never investigated anything involving the single largest military conflict in our planet's current history (Yes, Curse of Fenric is set during that time period, but takes place in Northumberland, well away from the Nazis and their war machine). Maybe it's because, especially at the time of the show's premier, but even up through the 1980's, World War II was an enormous and personal part of history to a great many people. Here, today, more than seven decades after the fighting stopped, there aren't many from the so-named "Greatest Generation" alive to personally recall its horrors. Yet even those of us who were born decades after shiver at the thought of "what might have been", playing games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, seeing films like Dunkirk and Saving Private Ryan bringing its nightmares to life. It's too fresh in our cultural memories in ways that other historical conflicts like the Punic Wars, or the American Civil War, are not. Plus, having the Doctor meet Adolf Hitler opens up all kinds of temporal worm cans with wriggly bits like, "Why not just kill him and spare the planet all those years of agony, genocide, and conflict?"
Dicks, of course, is all too ready with his answer when Ace tries to do just that and argues with the Doctor when he attempts to stop her. Not only would killing Hitler before his rise to power create ripples upon ripples throughout the time stream that no one could either foresee or correct, it would, as he has the Doctor explain, be just about the worst misfortune to befall the planet:
For all the damage the Reich did, for all the havoc it sewed across the continents, all it takes is to imagine a military commander who doesn't stop the siege and Dunkirk, who doesn't try to take Stalingrad in winter, and suddenly I'm writing this review in German, probably about a totally different book about Herr Doktor Wer and his efforts to spread National Socialism throughout the galaxy. Man, apparently I can imagine something worse than the Human Centipede franchise of horror films. Who knew?
Right, um, back to the story.
The Doctor is using the TARDIS to track the Timewyrm through history, and the TARDIS alights on Britain in 1951 as a source of temporal disturbance. He and Ace disembark to discover an England under German occupation six years after World War II ended in Ace's timeline. The giant cultural festival expected by the Doctor is nothing more than a long-running affair celebrating the Reich's dominance over the island. The BFK, a volunteer British version of the Hitler Youth, stir up trouble in the streets while the police have no choice but to look the other way. It doesn't take long for the Doctor and Ace to be pegged as outsiders, and they're rounded up first by the Gestapo for questioning, then by the local resistance. Failing to find a way to undo the damage from the 50's, but seeing the damage to the timestream as too intricate for even a being like the Timewyrm to commit individually, they hop back in time to the 1920's to learn what happened to Hitler before his rise to power, where they encounter the first inkling of something besides the Timewyrm causing trouble, then skip ahead to the 1930's after Hitler's ascent to try and stop the German Wehrmacht from being too successful in spreading the swastika across Europe.
The thing I find most amusing about this story is the way Dicks basically tells the Timewyrm to sod off while he gets down to business. While seizing upon the strength contained in Hitler's oratory and her personal charisma, she mis-judges his mental power and spends virtually the entire book herself locked up in the mind of a failed artist, unable to do much of anything save cause Hitler distress and manifest some scary paranormal powers during these "fits". This hilariously allows Dicks to throw the one character tying all four books together under the bus while he gets down to business telling the story he wanted to tell in the first place. With Genesys, you had to have the Timewyrm: she was the catalyst behind everything. In Exodus, she's a side-note when compared with not only Hitler's Third Reich but also a second adversary hearkening back to one of the biggest stories ever told in the TV program. No, I'm not going to spoil it--read for yourself. It'll help immensely if you're familiar with the Troughton era, and understanding a modicum of German may clue you in before the reveal, but I was quite surprised.
For hardcore fans and continuity hounds, Dicks drops plenty of references to previous adventures. Ace dreams of Daleks in a post-Remembrance of the Daleks nightmare, the Doctor shows off an army knife once belonging to Castillan Spandrell from The Deadly Assassin, heals Ace up with a dollop of Sisterhood Salve from The Brain of Morbius, remarks on Borusa's fate at the conclusion of The Five Doctors, recalls his death due to radiation poisoning from Planet of the Spiders, and quotes his Fourth incarnation from The Talons of Weng-Chiang with the line, "Sleep is for tortoises." And those are just the ones I caught--there are likely plenty more that I missed, but this is a game Uncle Terry plays well, and one I enjoy playing with him.
Earlier in the review I described this story as fantastically uncomfortable, and it really is. This is a situation for the Doctor where he's literally caught between a rock and a hard place and has to straddle a tightrope with no give in either direction. Failing to fix the corruption to the timeline means an indomitable Nazi empire taking over not just Europe, but the entire planet. Fixing the problem, on the other hand, still subjects tens of millions of people to death under brutal, agonizing conditions. The Doctor makes a deal with the devil by chumming up with Hitler, gaining his confidence, and guiding his actions--actions we know will result in unimaginable suffering. There's literally no choice he or anyone else can make that improves the situation. Though not touched on, we know the Holocaust will happen, and the only check the Doctor can place on it is to see that it gets no worse than the already-intolerable number of murder victims recorded in our history books. It's a dark choice, one the Doctor does not relish, but one he must undertake anyway, and yeah, it's damned uncomfortable reading some of the scenes where he's getting buddy-buddy with Hitler, Himmler, Goering, or anyone in service to the Reich.
I didn't like it, but I wasn't meant to like it. It's goddamn terrifying, and that was the point. That's a mature take on a Doctor Who story, not the T&A and battle porn of Peel's entry. Of course, in true Who fashion, the Doctor and Ace manage to come out on top (though, again, there's absolutely no way for them to 'save the day'), the Timewyrm is loosed from her mental prison in Hitler's brain, and it's back into the TARDIS to try and track her down in Timewyrm: Armageddon, the next chapter of the saga. (What, no Timewyrm: Leviticus?)
If there's one thing I didn't like, it's the way Ace winds up playing the victim one too many times. In the 1951 part of the story, she's roughed up by Nazis, and once she and the Doctor get to the actual war years, she's kidnapped for use as a sacrifice during an unholy occult ritual. At one point she actually faints, and I had to roll my eyes. Was this the same Ace who firebombed Gabriel Chase, went toe-to-toe with a Dalek armed with only a baseball bat, conquered her bestial and bloodthirsty nature on the planet of the Cheetah people, and held and comforted a young girl who had only just moments before been trying to murder her? Ace is many things, but a fainter isn't one of them. Perhaps to atone for this, she does get to gun down a slew of real Nazis in the story's climax, but still...Ace don't faint.
There's a second, rather potent, problem with one of Exodus's story elements as well, but it veers into spoiler territory if I get too in-depth with it, so I'll say one of the major players on the bad guy side absolutely should not exist due to circumstances surrounding his own father portrayed in the TV show. I saw nowhere in the book where Dicks was able to side-step this paradox, and to be fair it'll slide right past you if you've not seen the episode this story is using for that particular continuity grab, but I caught it right away. Ultimately the rest of the story is so satisfying that I'm willing to hand-wave this one away. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Well, apparently so did Virgin, because a mere two months after Genesys hit shelves, Exodus arrived penned by none other than veteran chronicler of Whovian adventures for the Target line (and writer of numerous Who teleplays) Terrance "Uncle Terry" Dicks. This comes not a moment too soon, because even if one loved Peel's entry, it was going to take someone better versed in the television program's history to reassure readers that Virgin really were taking this seriously. Gone, for the moment, are the nudity and graphic violence which Genesys wore like a gauche scarf, and in their place is a fantastically uncomfortable adventure set in the middle of World War II.
As if the title didn't give it away, the Timewyrm wasn't disposed of at the end of Genesys. In fact, thanks to a miscalculation on the Doctor's part, she's actually more powerful and more dangerous than her original incarnation in ancient Mesopotamia. Scattered into the time stream after her first confrontation with the Doctor, she's fled through the corridors of time and re-emerged on Earth several thousand years in the future. Gilgamesh and his ilk were too primitive to create the sort of long-lasting disturbance the Timewyrm seeks to manufacture. But history has shown there to be a man who amasses almost godlike power and a cult-like following among his countrymen; a petty tyrant and despot of the highest order who drags the entire world to the brink of destruction for the sake of his insane ambitions. The swastika on the cover should give away the mystery, but just in case you need the spoiler, it's Adolf Hitler.
It's astonishing to think that, for all the different places in Earth's timeline the Doctor's shown up, everywhere from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 to the OK Corral eight centuries later, he'd never investigated anything involving the single largest military conflict in our planet's current history (Yes, Curse of Fenric is set during that time period, but takes place in Northumberland, well away from the Nazis and their war machine). Maybe it's because, especially at the time of the show's premier, but even up through the 1980's, World War II was an enormous and personal part of history to a great many people. Here, today, more than seven decades after the fighting stopped, there aren't many from the so-named "Greatest Generation" alive to personally recall its horrors. Yet even those of us who were born decades after shiver at the thought of "what might have been", playing games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, seeing films like Dunkirk and Saving Private Ryan bringing its nightmares to life. It's too fresh in our cultural memories in ways that other historical conflicts like the Punic Wars, or the American Civil War, are not. Plus, having the Doctor meet Adolf Hitler opens up all kinds of temporal worm cans with wriggly bits like, "Why not just kill him and spare the planet all those years of agony, genocide, and conflict?"
Dicks, of course, is all too ready with his answer when Ace tries to do just that and argues with the Doctor when he attempts to stop her. Not only would killing Hitler before his rise to power create ripples upon ripples throughout the time stream that no one could either foresee or correct, it would, as he has the Doctor explain, be just about the worst misfortune to befall the planet:
"In history, the real history, Hitler's Thousand Year Reich lasted from 1933 to 1945. Twelve years and that was it. Finished. The main reason was that Hitler was an incompetent madman. You blow him to bits and maybe a competent madman takes charge. Someone who really can make the Reich last for a thousand years."
For all the damage the Reich did, for all the havoc it sewed across the continents, all it takes is to imagine a military commander who doesn't stop the siege and Dunkirk, who doesn't try to take Stalingrad in winter, and suddenly I'm writing this review in German, probably about a totally different book about Herr Doktor Wer and his efforts to spread National Socialism throughout the galaxy. Man, apparently I can imagine something worse than the Human Centipede franchise of horror films. Who knew?
Right, um, back to the story.
The Doctor is using the TARDIS to track the Timewyrm through history, and the TARDIS alights on Britain in 1951 as a source of temporal disturbance. He and Ace disembark to discover an England under German occupation six years after World War II ended in Ace's timeline. The giant cultural festival expected by the Doctor is nothing more than a long-running affair celebrating the Reich's dominance over the island. The BFK, a volunteer British version of the Hitler Youth, stir up trouble in the streets while the police have no choice but to look the other way. It doesn't take long for the Doctor and Ace to be pegged as outsiders, and they're rounded up first by the Gestapo for questioning, then by the local resistance. Failing to find a way to undo the damage from the 50's, but seeing the damage to the timestream as too intricate for even a being like the Timewyrm to commit individually, they hop back in time to the 1920's to learn what happened to Hitler before his rise to power, where they encounter the first inkling of something besides the Timewyrm causing trouble, then skip ahead to the 1930's after Hitler's ascent to try and stop the German Wehrmacht from being too successful in spreading the swastika across Europe.
The thing I find most amusing about this story is the way Dicks basically tells the Timewyrm to sod off while he gets down to business. While seizing upon the strength contained in Hitler's oratory and her personal charisma, she mis-judges his mental power and spends virtually the entire book herself locked up in the mind of a failed artist, unable to do much of anything save cause Hitler distress and manifest some scary paranormal powers during these "fits". This hilariously allows Dicks to throw the one character tying all four books together under the bus while he gets down to business telling the story he wanted to tell in the first place. With Genesys, you had to have the Timewyrm: she was the catalyst behind everything. In Exodus, she's a side-note when compared with not only Hitler's Third Reich but also a second adversary hearkening back to one of the biggest stories ever told in the TV program. No, I'm not going to spoil it--read for yourself. It'll help immensely if you're familiar with the Troughton era, and understanding a modicum of German may clue you in before the reveal, but I was quite surprised.
For hardcore fans and continuity hounds, Dicks drops plenty of references to previous adventures. Ace dreams of Daleks in a post-Remembrance of the Daleks nightmare, the Doctor shows off an army knife once belonging to Castillan Spandrell from The Deadly Assassin, heals Ace up with a dollop of Sisterhood Salve from The Brain of Morbius, remarks on Borusa's fate at the conclusion of The Five Doctors, recalls his death due to radiation poisoning from Planet of the Spiders, and quotes his Fourth incarnation from The Talons of Weng-Chiang with the line, "Sleep is for tortoises." And those are just the ones I caught--there are likely plenty more that I missed, but this is a game Uncle Terry plays well, and one I enjoy playing with him.
Earlier in the review I described this story as fantastically uncomfortable, and it really is. This is a situation for the Doctor where he's literally caught between a rock and a hard place and has to straddle a tightrope with no give in either direction. Failing to fix the corruption to the timeline means an indomitable Nazi empire taking over not just Europe, but the entire planet. Fixing the problem, on the other hand, still subjects tens of millions of people to death under brutal, agonizing conditions. The Doctor makes a deal with the devil by chumming up with Hitler, gaining his confidence, and guiding his actions--actions we know will result in unimaginable suffering. There's literally no choice he or anyone else can make that improves the situation. Though not touched on, we know the Holocaust will happen, and the only check the Doctor can place on it is to see that it gets no worse than the already-intolerable number of murder victims recorded in our history books. It's a dark choice, one the Doctor does not relish, but one he must undertake anyway, and yeah, it's damned uncomfortable reading some of the scenes where he's getting buddy-buddy with Hitler, Himmler, Goering, or anyone in service to the Reich.
I didn't like it, but I wasn't meant to like it. It's goddamn terrifying, and that was the point. That's a mature take on a Doctor Who story, not the T&A and battle porn of Peel's entry. Of course, in true Who fashion, the Doctor and Ace manage to come out on top (though, again, there's absolutely no way for them to 'save the day'), the Timewyrm is loosed from her mental prison in Hitler's brain, and it's back into the TARDIS to try and track her down in Timewyrm: Armageddon, the next chapter of the saga. (What, no Timewyrm: Leviticus?)
If there's one thing I didn't like, it's the way Ace winds up playing the victim one too many times. In the 1951 part of the story, she's roughed up by Nazis, and once she and the Doctor get to the actual war years, she's kidnapped for use as a sacrifice during an unholy occult ritual. At one point she actually faints, and I had to roll my eyes. Was this the same Ace who firebombed Gabriel Chase, went toe-to-toe with a Dalek armed with only a baseball bat, conquered her bestial and bloodthirsty nature on the planet of the Cheetah people, and held and comforted a young girl who had only just moments before been trying to murder her? Ace is many things, but a fainter isn't one of them. Perhaps to atone for this, she does get to gun down a slew of real Nazis in the story's climax, but still...Ace don't faint.
There's a second, rather potent, problem with one of Exodus's story elements as well, but it veers into spoiler territory if I get too in-depth with it, so I'll say one of the major players on the bad guy side absolutely should not exist due to circumstances surrounding his own father portrayed in the TV show. I saw nowhere in the book where Dicks was able to side-step this paradox, and to be fair it'll slide right past you if you've not seen the episode this story is using for that particular continuity grab, but I caught it right away. Ultimately the rest of the story is so satisfying that I'm willing to hand-wave this one away. Your mileage, of course, may vary.