Book #1 of 2021:
Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious: All Flesh is Grass by Una McCormack
The second and final Time Lord Victorious novel offers a generally satisfying resolution to this sprawling Doctor Who multimedia experiment, although there are still a few open areas that will likely be shaded in by future releases of some sort or another. The project ultimately boils down to the Tenth Doctor journeying back to the dawn of time after the events of The Waters of Mars and trying to stop the beings who introduced life expectancy into the universe, and here’s where he’s finally thwarted by two of his previous incarnations and an assortment of unlikely allies.
Truth be told, I feel as though this book could have delivered even more crossover, pulling from all of the different comics and audio dramas and everything for a suitably epic finale, but instead we mostly just get vampires and Daleks — and the erstwhile Ood assassin Brian — going into a battle that plays out largely as a steady sequence of spaceships exploding. All three of the Doctors seem too callous toward the high body count, and author Una McCormack’s choice to officially describe them in text by number (Eighth Doctor, etc.) is odd for the franchise albeit understandable to prevent reader confusion.
Like usual for this type of story, the scenes when various regenerations of the same Time Lord draw together to banter or exchange grim knowing glances are definitely worthwhile, and the concluding chapters in particular do a good job of illustrating each one’s respective moment along their shared character history. As an overall narrative venture, the Time Lord Victorious arc has consistently struggled to come across as more than a cash-grab curiosity, and I can’t imagine any critics having their minds changed by the present volume. Nevertheless, it represents a reasonably solid ending that I do think I’d recommend for anyone who’s been following the twisting adventure throughout.
★★★☆☆
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