Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell (Virgin New Adventures #4)
The year is 1991, and the newly-canceled Doctor Who — what we now call “Classic” Who, to distinguish it from the post-2005 version — has been limping on in the form of these licensed novels continuing the story of the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace. The first four installments of the series constitute a loose plot arc, although in practice they’ve been as discrete as the program’s own attempts at such larger narratives like The Key to Time in season 16 or The Trial of a Time Lord in season 23. They’ve also been of variable quality, but at their best moments have lived up to the presumed mission statement here to produce recognizable Whovian adventures almost like missing scripts that just happened to never get filmed.
All of that changes with Timewyrm: Revelation, which not only resolves that titular universal threat but pushes the franchise forward into strange and unsettling new territory. This is a deeply interior novel, taking place partly on the moon but primarily in the weird landscape of the Doctor’s own mind, riddled with manifestations of his prior selves and his guilt over fallen friends. The previous books have all had their cheeky fanservice easter eggs, but this one asks us to really reckon with what it means for the Time Lord to have gone on after losing someone like Adric or Sara Kingdom. It’s also a kind of afterlife: the characters have to pretty much die for their consciousnesses to reach it, and while the villain is in control, the setting is bluntly described as a hell where Ace is threatened with torture and tormented by an old childhood bully after being regressed to a young girl herself. In fact, it’s even more sinister than that, as he’s been brought over from an alternate timeline where he murdered her on the playground with a brick to her head.
Not all of this works, to be clear. Although the imagery is striking, in execution the action can sometimes feel bafflingly unexplained, and author Paul Cornell throws out bizarre concepts like a sentient church back on Earth without much justification or build-up. But it all comes together in the end, and would prove influential with both the following releases in this line and ultimately the modern TV revival too. The protagonists are challenged as never before, and the trust between them stretches nearly to a fraying point, with the Doctor stepping more firmly into the manipulative chessmaster characterization that had been established in the final years of the show. It brings an energy that the New Adventures had been sorely lacking, and leaves me genuinely excited to read on and see where the concept goes next.
[Content warning for gun violence, Nazis, racism, and gore.]
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