The Indestructible Man

Okay at LAST a book I enjoyed. Leave it to author Simon Messingham to create a frightening vision of Earth's future where an unknown and virtually unseen alien menace terrorized Earth in a nasty war by posessing normal people and driving them mad. And the only way to stop them was to employ the services of the Indestructible Man; a normal human who was duplicated by the alien Myloki but remained human enough to stop them. But 30 years later, an intruder is fatally shot on a secret base, his companions escape, and six months later he makes a complete recovery. The man also appears indestructible, and he muses that he should have changed. The Doctor realizes that there is more going on than a simple invasion and once Jamie and Zoe have been recovered from where they have hidden on Earth he attempts to find the original Indestructible Man and save the world. Again.

I have long been an opponant of revisionist writers taking previous Doctors and companions into dramatic areas they never really touched on screen, and here we have just that, and aside from a few minor points it is actually done quite well. The second Doctor has often had this frown and darker mood that hinted at his murky past (which is in itself a revisionist concept that came from the final days of the seventh Doctor in 1989), and Messingham has capitalized on this. The Doctor broods a lot. He is direct and to the point when he has to be. And other times he exhibits childlike delight and wonder at what he finds. It's all there, and it all works. The failing in this scheme is usually in the companions, and I find the circumstances that Zoe and, particularly, Jamie, end up in after witnessing the "death" of the Doctor to be a bit of a stretch. Zoe's technical skills are realized and she becomes part of a slave class, working in an office and falling in love with her boss. Every now and again she gets flashes of her previous life on the Wheel and realizes that she is slipping back into her more "robotic" existence, and that her time with the Doctor has changed her. As for Jamie, he becomes a twisted nasty sort working for a local military elite, chanelling his rage at the Doctor's death against those he holds responsible. I suppose people do what they must to survive, but it's hard to picture them in these situations. Even when the eventual re-uniting happens it takes a while for them to come back together and become the TARDIS crew once more.

Earth in Messingham's future is a grim place. The entire social order is in ruins from the effects of the first war, and secret organizations hold the answers and the only hope for the future of the planet. One in particular, SILOET, has direct links back to the old UNIT that was created under Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart back in The Invasion. As UNIT figures very prominently in the future of Doctor Who there is a lot of material referenced here (the Earth year in the book is 2096) which would be confusing for a new viewer/reader who has started at the very start with no knowledge of the future direction of Doctor Who. The people running SILOET, though, are nowhere near the kind of solider the Brigadier was; they are desperate, afraid, and feel helpless in the face of what has happened. Especially good is the commander, Bishop, who doesn't go over the edge as a megalomaniac like some would in his position. Of course the central location to start the story off is London, but the Doctor takes a side-trip to Barbados and regions of South America in search of the Indestructible Man, while Zoe spends time on SKYHOME, a massive skybase within the stratosphere, and Jamie goes to an underwater prison. It's always good when a writer can make all these locations work on page, taking us away from the usual corridors and control rooms. In fact, Messingham doesn't even use the TARDIS as a location the whole novel.

Now, of course, comes the real jarring part: this is the last novel of the second Doctor that I am going to review, so I'm back to 1969, back to the televised episodes. And there are only two adventures left for the Doctor...

NEXT EPISODE : THE SPACE PIRATES