2.1 Legion of the Lost by John Dorney
In a time of war, every means of victory must be explored. In the Time War, the unthinkable must be thought, and neither side can afford to be squeamish about their methods.
When the destruction of an obscene weapon leads to the Time Lord once known as the Doctor uncovering a secret Gallifreyan initiative, he cannot believe what is being considered.
Should victory be sought at any cost? Or are there worse possibilities than losing to the Daleks..?
2.2 A Thing of Guile by Phil Mulryne
The Daleks are developing a secret weapon on Asteroid Theta 12. It is imperative that their plans are uncovered.
Cardinal Ollistra has her hands full studying the range of ancient and mysterious armaments the universe has to offer, but she makes it a personal mission to investigate the Dalek project.
On this dangerous assignment, there is one particular Time Lord she wants at her side – and he will be accompanying her whether he wants to or not.
2.3 The Neverwhen by Matt Fitton
On an isolated world ravaged by battle, time itself has become a weapon, laying waste to all who live and die there. Arms and technology are in a state of flux – and it seems that everlasting war is their only option.
The arrival of one battered Type Forty TARDIS inside this nightmare offers hope to the combatants trapped within.
But when he discovers the truth, the horrors of the Neverwhen will shock even the War Doctor…
THE WAR DOCTOR: INFERNAL DEVICES
LEGION OF THE LOST
My biggest complaint about the first War Doctor set was its lack of imagination: stories set in the Time War should be mind-bending experiences featuring a new, unpredictable Doctor pushed to his limits, and “Only the Monstrous” was none of those things. The new set, “Infernal Devices,” is much better in this regard, though it still has a ways to go to reach masterpiece level.
The first story, “Legion of the Lost” from John Dorney, puts its imagination on display right off the bat. The Time Lords travel back in time to the early days of the universe to employ the services of the Technomancers, a race whose technology is supplemented by what can only be described as magic. And the Technomancers use this technology – supported by the power of an Old Time race known as the Horned Ones – to do everything from powering communicators to resurrecting the dead. So what better way to bring back Time Lord battalions that have been killed in battle with the Daleks? It’s into this situation that the Doctor arrives, and of course he needs to learn more about the resurrection process.
That the Technomancers are sacrificing lives in order to resurrect Time Lords is obvious: it’s the standard revelation in stories like this. I like the moral twist that Dorney puts on it: if the lives being sacrificed are those of people who were erased from history, is anything actually being lost? It’s a good question, so good that the Doctor can’t offer a counter-argument other than “it’s wrong because I say so.” But Dorney simplifies matters by revealing that the process also implants a small part of the Horned Ones in the resurrected, and that they are using this process to re-enter the corporeal universe. This makes the process dangerous, and justifies the Doctor shutting it down – but it also removes the better moral dilemma from the equation. Why not make the Doctor make that choice? Make him decide between weakening his people’s fighting ability or allowing the sacrifice of innocents to continue – by making only one choice correct, the drama is lessened.
The fact that I can debate the ending already renders “Legion of the Lost” better than anything in “Only the Monstrous.” And the production is great besides, with David Warner brought in as guest star to play against John Hurt. Who wouldn’t want to listen to a confrontation between those two? Overall, this is a solid start to the box set, and it bodes well for the future.
7/10
A THING OF GUILE
This, on the other hand, does not. The second story in the set is “A Thing of Guile” from Phil Mulryne, a tale that sets up a number of promising ideas and promptly does nothing interesting with any of them. Coming off the cliffhanger that the Doctor is being charged as a war criminal – and he’s never been tried by the Time Lords before, so who knows where this’ll go, right??? – we see virtually no impact to this sentence apart from the Doctor wearing an “artron leash” that keeps him attached to Ollistra. Sure, a few characters refer to him as a war criminal, but by story’s end he’s won them all over as usual. It doesn’t even tell us much more about Ollistra than we already know: yep, she’s devious, brutally pragmatic, and largely unsympathetic.
But then there’s not much of a plot here. The Daleks are doing something secret on an asteroid and the Time Lords want to find out what it is. So they send the Doctor with some other Time Lords to investigate under a Trojan horse strategy. Upon landing on the planet, we spend half the running time of the story watching the characters run in circles trying to not be eaten by a giant worm. And finally we learn that a group of renegade Daleks is trying to reverse engineer Daleks back into Kaleds for… some reason. I’m not sure if this is intended to prefigure “Evolution of the Daleks” or if it’s just inspired by it, but there’s very little being done here that’s new. Perhaps this’ll be picked up in later box sets, because almost nothing is done with the idea here. Dalek High Command finds out, destroys the installation, and kills everything. Oh, and the Doctor escapes. The end.
The problem here is that we really don’t learn much of anything. The characters aren’t developed in any significant fashion, there are no revelations about the Time War, and we don’t even get a look at some apocalyptic technology. Yes, it’s more action-oriented than your average Doctor Who story, and yes, the Doctor is more pragmatic than many of his other selves, but we really need more ambition behind these stories. There are only so many times the Doctor can uncover a scheme by either the Daleks or the Time Lords, indignantly declare it even worse than the Time War itself, and defeat it. And if the stories insist upon going down that road time and again, the least they can do is offer something else along with the routine. “A Thing of Guile” does not. It’s boring. The fifth episode of a limited-run series starring John Hurt should not be boring.
5/10
THE NEVERWHEN
It took six stories, but finally, with Matt Fitton’s “The Neverwhen,” the War Doctor series starts to embrace its potential. My usual complaints – the war is conventional and unimaginative, the Doctor’s portrayal is routine, etc. – are answered here to great effect in a story that takes its high concept and runs with it all the way to a logical conclusion.
This is the sort of thing we should be seeing in a series about a Time War: a battlefield where time itself is in flux, and where a soldier can be carrying a plasma rifle in one moment and a spear in the next. But Fitton goes beyond even technology in having the shifting timelines affect the biology of the soldiers themselves. Unless I missed it, though, one obvious effect of this isn’t used: we don’t see the Gallifreyan characters regressing through previous regenerations. That’s a minor complaint in light of what happens to the Daleks, though, something that sets up the story’s major twist. While the twist was screamingly obvious by the time it was revealed, it was still elegantly constructed and executed and didn’t rely entirely upon its own existence for self-justification. My only complaint about it is that the Doctor’s supposed allies don’t show significant nuance, which is what makes the twist so obvious in the first place.
We also finally get a glimpse into the mentality driving the War Doctor. Rather than relying upon the “Don’t call me that!” repetition that has substituted for character development thus far, Fitton actually digs into his thought processes. He’s still the Doctor, he’s still trying to find Doctor-ish solutions to problems, but he’s stuck in a war that doesn’t always allow it. The new series portrayal of the Doctor as “the man who never would” often presents him with impossible binary choices but allows him to avoid them by finding a third way. Here, the Doctor seems to come up with a brilliant solution to the Neverwhen problem – and it fails because it can’t actually work. Faced with this failure, he actually then picks one of the bad solutions, and the resolution is disturbing as a result.
This is the best War Doctor story thus far and it’s not particularly close. There’s actually something going on beneath the surface, and even the surface is skillfully constructed. “The Neverwhen” is the sort of story I was hoping for, ever since these War Doctor sets were announced. Let’s hope we get more of this in the future.
Highly recommended.
9/10
Box set average: 7/10