It’s time to dip into the Virgin New Adventures proper, though much like Zagreus I was hoping my planned dipping into older stories thing would’ve meant I’d at least covered the other three Timewyrm stories but alas, no. I have read and reviewed the other three but I didn’t find the space to randomly put them up as I had so many other new releases to catch up on. Anyway, the main point is unlike Zagreus there isn’t actually much continuity baggage beyond “the Timewyrm is a powerful mental parasite that the Doctor and Ace have encountered across several time periods”, just with a returning character or two thrown in. Revelation is a fun story, full of really weird and whacky imagery and scenarios that brings the arc to a good close. Let’s take a look!
The book opens with a series of intentionally confusing scenes including a child Ace being killed by her school bully Chad Boyle throwing a brick at her; a church in “Cheldon Bonniface” is inhabited by a sentient energy being called Saul who enjoys helping out his community alongside the reverend Ernest Trelaw; and mathematician Peter Hutchings and his wife Emily (who has psychic powers) are upset that they can’t have children until The Doctor runs in and places a baby in their hands and then runs off again. It’s quite the string of opening scenes, that’s for sure! On board the TARDIS Ace is worried about how often The Doctor is leaving the TARDIS by himself but tries to put it out of her mind as they arrive in Victorian era Cheldon Bonniface, where The Doctor soon figures out that the whole village is a forgery while Ace is attacked by still-child-age Chad Boyle in an astronaut suit, at the same time both time travellers realise they’re on the moon. The Doctor is attacked by old foe Lieutenant Hemmings (from Timewyrm: Exodus, basically a British Nazi from an alternate timeline where the Nazis won) but manages to escape in the TARDIS, with the Timewyrm exiting Hemmings body and transferring to Boyle, decapitating her previous host in the process.
Ace soon finds herself is a strange landscape and begins exploring but we’re shown that her actual unconscious body is being used by the Timewyrm, who creates a massive explosion in the real Cheldon Bonniface and brings the church, which has Rev. Trelaw, the Huchings, their new baby and of course Saul inside, to the moon, where her body is soon placed. The Doctor and the Timewyrm both appear in the church (on the moon) and the latter somehow summons the literal incarnation of Death to the moons surface to show the Doctor true fear but our titular Time Lord shows he has no fear of death by dancing with the grim reaper. The fact that the insane cover image for this story actually happens was a true delight in reading this story! The Doctor slips Emily an amulet and then allows the Timewyrm to send his mind to the same mental landscape that Ace finds herself in, and then the creature follows him in. As this is all happening Ace has found a wandering Librarian (the First Doctor) who has given her some information, namely that this is a mental landscape that the Timewyrm uses as a base of operations and as The Doctor joins them he admits to his sort-of other self and Ace that he and the Timewyrm are having something of a mental battle and if the latter wins then the alternate reality of Ace dying as a child will come true, among other timeline alterations. Just then The Doctor is confronted by three of his “personal demons” in Adric, Katarina and Sara Kingdom, three companions who died in his service (well, it’s hard to count Katarina as a companion really, but let’s not get into that…)
Amazing cover, ever more so that it depicts a scene that actually happens!
The Doctor and Ace escape only to find themselves in a prison where Hemmings (or a mental image of him) is torturing the Third Doctor. They free The Third Doctor, who admits he was fighting his own personal demons as well (though for him it was the events of the alternate Earth from “Inferno”) and then the two Doctors make mental contact to send a message to the people at the church to find Hemmings’ severed head and force his mental consciousness back into it, thus killing him properly and getting rid of the mental construct that had turned its attention to Ace, which they do (somehow). The two Doctors escape thanks to the Fourth Doctor appearing as a Ferryman to boat them across the mindscape, while Ace becomes trapped in an idyllic world, though she soon breaks free. Everyone reaches a pit and the two older Doctors head back, leaving the actual Doctor and Ace to head down where they confront the Timewyrm again, who reveals (unsurprisingly given the cameos) that this “main base” mind is actually The Doctor’s and that it had hid here way back in its first appearance. Slowly but surely it has been able to exert control over The Doctor for short spells (his strange excursions Ace noticed at the start) and has put everything in place that will allow it to fully take control of The Doctor’s body. Just as things look bleak Emily appears via an opening (created by the amulet The Doctor gave her before) and pulls the Time Lord free, but leaves Ace behind…
As you can tell it’s a pretty trippy story, but I was hooked the whole way, way more than the three books that went before it (which, as an advanced spoiler, I found “crap”, “pretty good”, and “okay”, respectively) Paul Cornell’s prose is that perfect blend of wordy but not obnoxious and full of great descriptions of the crazy scenarios unfolding.
The Continuity:
The clean cover, because why not break up the text a bit?
A few bits, mainly Katarina and Sara Kingdom’s deaths from the epic First Doctor story “The Daleks’ Master Plan” and yet another mention of Adric’s death from Fifth Doctor story “Earthshock” are the main only, well obviously with the exception of “Timewyrm: Gensys”, “Timewyrm: Exodus” and “Timewyrm: Apocalypse”, the three preceding novels. When on the subject like most of the VNAs characters and settings from this novel appear in “Happy Endings”, the sort-of anniversary celebration of the book series. The Timewyrm makes a return in the comic story “The Last Word”, similarly an anniversary story celebrating 10 years of the VNAs.
If you’re wondering why the Second and Sixth Doctors didn’t appear, that’s because the Second appeared in several flashbacks in the previous book, while the Sixth’s absence is apparently explained in the book “Head Games”, but I’ve not read it, so you’ll have to take the TARDIS wiki’s word for that one!
Overall Thoughts:
“Timewyrm: Revelation” gives a rather underwhelming quadril… I mean “Tetralogy”, a far better ending than it deserved. If you’re wondering about dipping your toes into the New Adventures like I’ve always been I have to echo the sentiments of people who I asked and say to skip the first few books and start later on, though if you can put up with a few references you won’t get then I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s the best kind of “weird and wonderful” with a good mix of human emotion and drama to boot. Top marks.
Ace is saved by the three dead companions, who then tell her to free The Doctor’s conscience deeper in the pit. She follows their advice and finds the Fifth Doctor tied to a tree, representing The Doctor’s conscience, and frees him, which enrages the Timewyrm. Meanwhile in the real world (that being inside a sentient church on the moon…) The Doctor now has the ability to crush the Timewyrm for good but he knows that will kill Ace as well so he SOMEHOW pilots the TARDIS into his own mental landscape and confronts the Timewyrm once more where he offers the creature peaceful co-existence rather than death but this just angers it further. It unleashes its full power but as it does so The Doctor is able to find Qataka, the regular mortal that transformed into the Timewyrm during the first book, and make the same offer of peace, only this time she agrees and gets absorbed into The Doctor’s mind, robbing the Timewyrm of its power and effectively killing it (though due to its time-based nature its always in the background of the universe, or something…)
Back at the church and in reality The Doctor transfers Qataka’s spirit into the baby, who the Hutchings have named Ishtar, giving Qataka a new chance at life. The church soon returns to Earth (as the explosion and transportation now never happened) and The Doctor and Ace tie up a few loose ends, including rescuing the baby from a test lab (in case you thought the Doctor kidnapped a baby!) and Ace seeing an adult Chad Boyle who grew up to be a perfectly normal man thanks to now never having killed Ace as a boy…
Hogan Reviews 