Head Games (New Doctor Who Adventures) [Paperback]

DOCTOR WHO: THE NEW ADVENTURES - HEAD GAMES

by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who Books/Virgin Books, ISBN 0-426-20454-9, US $5.99

This is one to boggle the mind, actually -- the Doctor, a bizarre duplicate, a false companion, two earlier companions, three current companions, UNIT and more plot complications than anyone sane should be trying to handle.

In this one, the Doctor, Bernice, Roz and Chris are up against an immense crystal formed of fictional energy, the result of an earlier conflict. Dealing with the problem isn't easy, though -- nothing in the Doctor's universe is straightforward -- especially as a dying planet is depending on the crystal for its existence. Meanwhile, an English teenager, Jason, has a way to tap into the fictional energy, using this to create a duplicate Doctor and take over the TARDIS for his idea of great adventures in time and space, an escapade that draws in former companions Mel and Ace, the former being dismayed at the real Doctor's machinations and the latter being determined to solve several mysteries. The real Doctor is up to his neck in his own problems in the meantime -- the consequences of his actions and all the things he's had to do have been weighing on him; his own sixth incarnation is haunting him, threatening to break loose and lead him down the dark path that will cause him to become the malevolent Valeyard.

Lyons keeps the balls in the air for the most part, despite moments of confusion and some clunky coincidences. This is a book that thumbs its nose at the fanatic image of the fanboy (or anoraks as they're called in England) whle making good use of the concept; the Doctor, meanwhile, is developed further in some painful and interesting ways -- series fans will be interested in the explanation as to why a knock on the head caused the sixth doctor to regenerate into the seventh...

--Reviewed by Steven McDonal

Despite the heavy moralizing and angsty emotional stuff, there's a lot of fun material here. The comparisons between Dr. Who and our own Doctor are amusing and only occasionally overbearing. One of the main themes that the book touches on is the shift in personality that the Seventh Doctor undertook when he: (a) first changed companions, and (b) switched mediums, going from television to book form. Much of this comparison takes place through the eyes of Mel, the squeaky-clean and utterly boring first companion of the Seventh Doctor. Her characterization is very much based on the stories that she appeared in and it's hysterical to see her reaction to the darker and ambiguous universe that the Seventh Doctor now finds himself dwelling in.

There's an unfortunately large part of the adventure that is so clichéd and stereotypical that I wondered if Lyon wasn't making some grand statement about formulaic stories. Actually, given the rest of the book's contents, this almost certainly is a statement of some sort, but that doesn't excuse it from being a mostly uninteresting waste of time. Rebels running up and down corridors. Fanatical religious rulers misleading a population. A mysterious artifact that gives life to a whole planet. A boring conflict between humanoids and reptile-aliens. Just thinking about it makes my eyes start to close. Lyons' prose is decent enough here to alleviate much of the pain, but it certainly isn't enough to breathe life into these sections.

Despite the cover featuring an ugly question-mark pullover and an ACME weapon waved at a Bonnie Langford publicity photo, there's also quite a lot of seriousness going on here. The Doctor faces both his past and his possible future in the forms of the Sixth Doctor and the Valeyard. There's a large decision affecting the lives of lots of (admittedly boring) people. HEAD GAMES is playing many games at once, and manages to win more than it loses, but only barely. The Doctor is at his darkest, yet this aspect of his personality seems very contrived here.

In fact, a lot of the angst is handled awkwardly. While Mel's reaction to the difference in tone is entirely believable (the universes in stories like TIME AND THE RANI and DELTA AND THE BANNERMEN have a completely different flavor from what we would see in later, darker adventures), her reaction to the change in the Doctor seems much more over the top. If Mel had stuck around for one extra story, would she have freaked out at the end of REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS? And if so, why should we care? We all noticed the Doctor upping his game as he settled into his seventh persona, but was there anyone out there who hadn't figured that out already and needed it pointed out in a novel? Granted, Mel's behavior here could been seen as being consistent with her TV character, but if something was annoying on-screen, why go through pains to recreate it? While it was fun to laugh at her exaggerated reactions, I'm just not sure that the comparisons were quite as clever as Lyons thought they were.

Although I'm spending a good deal of time talking about the negative points, there were many set pieces and individual scenes that I really enjoyed. The sequence of the Doctor stuck on a train while the adventure slowly falls out of his control is something that I remember vividly from my first reading, many years ago. The parts dealing with the Land of Fiction's creations are for the most part handled well, and there are one or two moments that put a shiver down my spine. The Doctor and company's battle of wits against Dr Who and Jason is a fun diversion.

I did enjoy HEAD GAMES overall, but there were major portions of it that I simply wasn't interested in. The bad sections weren't enough to actively turn me off, although I found some places to be a tough struggle to get through. In a book that's doing lots of things at once, there's always something different just around the next page, and, fortunately, there was just enough good stuff to pull me through. As controversial as the Valeyard/Sixth Doctor material turned out to be, I found myself quite interested in these sections (especially the hints that would be explored later in Kate Orman's THE ROOM WITH NO DOORS), but I'm just not sure what they had to do with anything else.