Deceit / Lucifer Rising

Ace is back, and she's not happy. After serving a few years with Spacefleet and being part of the Dalek war that was brewing in the pages of Love and War, she's a battle-hardened war vet, and her unit is being shipped off to the planet Arcadia to sniff out more Daleks. The Doctor and Bernice are also headed to Arcadia for reasons of their own, and to everyone's surprise there are no Daleks to be found there, but there is one Abslom Daak, a mercenary also simply known as "Dalek Killer"...

That's a brief gloss-over of the high points. I don't remember a lot of details, as usual. I'm really just including the review of Deceit as a continuity point, with Ace finally making her anticipated comeback. In relative terms she was away from the Doctor and Benny for almost 5 years, so the story would tell us, but her absence from the printed page was something less than one year given Virgin's publishing schedule at the time. But the Ace that returns to the TARDIS this time is not the same one everyone voted as fan favourite; she's meaner, she's got little respect for the Doctor after what went down on Heaven that made her leave in the first place, and she isn't too keen on Benny either. Her choice to rejoin the TARDIS is questionable at best.

The other character worth mentioning is Abslom Daak, a creation of the comic strips from Doctor Who Monthly back in the 70's. He's a total wild card, uncontrollable, all he wants to do is kill Daleks. His exact motivation is probably out of revenge or something; exactly what his motives are remain unclear at best because author Peter Davrill-Evans simply can't write for him. or for Ace. Or for Doctor Who, effectively.

Now I can see why something as mediocre as The Pit made it to print. Actually I have two theories: the first is Darvill-Evans was too wrapped up in his own book to care about the quality of the one coming just before it. The second theory is he was very aware that his book was substandard and he deliberately put one in front that was worse so blunt the impact. Either way... Deceit is far from a glowing example of what can be done.


Lucifer Rising, however, is much better. Or at least I remember it to be so. The bonds between the TARDIS crew start to come together again, slowly, as they join a group of workers from IMC (think back to 1971's Colony in Space) on the planet Lucifer to first solve the mystery of who or what killed Paula Engado, and then confront the bigger issues beind IMC's interest in the planet.

Again, memory shorts out at fine details, but much better characters, much tighter pacing, much more credible motivation. The first joint effort of Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore is indeed a good one, and puts some quality back into the line that (to be fair) wasn't entirely missing from the last two novels, but was certainly decreased.

So rather than waste time with half-assed reviews starting with "I don't remember," (which is sounding more and more like Tom Baker commenting on the VHS compilation of The Tom Baker Years) I'm going to leap ahead a bit here and just pick up the high points where the series breaks new ground or goes back to revisit some old events... or just stories I remember better...

NEXT EPISODE : ICEBERG