Return of the Scrapyard

Matrix is another Seventh Doctor PDA written by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker. The pair of them wrote four of the eleven 7th Doc PDAs while Tucker did one solo. I'm not sure how they managed to hoard so many of the 7th Doctor slots but, as I plow through them, I am getting to know their style.

The book begins with a mysterious figure huddled in a Gothic cathedral concocting a clay figure with its pale, bony hands. A dash of necromantic energy and POOF! – the figure disappears. We then join an introspective Doctor who stares out at an ocean. He's brooding over his inability to relate to his companions on an emotional level and laments that he is no better in this respect than his Time Lord peers which he abandoned. Suddenly a golem appears out of nowhere. After a brief chase into a lighthouse, Ace dispatches the thing with some of her Nitro-9.

The Doctor and Ace retreat to the friendly confines of the TARDIS only to discover that an evil, yet familiar, presence has infiltrated the old girl. It taunts The Doctor and tears at his mind. Finally he realizes that this presence has taken advantage of the TARDIS' telepathic circuit so he removes it. Thinking that Ace is in danger, The Doctor decides to leave Ace in the care of himself or, rather, his first incarnation, and so it's off to London in November 1963. But things there are wrong. For one thing, there are zombies running around. Another is that it appears that his previous self had never been there. He and Ace run into old companions Ian and Barbara who don't know a Doctor nor Susan. After Barbara explains how things got to be the way they are, The Doctor decides to travel back to the point in time and space when things went awry for Earth's history: Whitechapel, 1888.

Almost immediately after landing in a shipyard, The Doctor becomes a Time Lord possessed and attempts to kill Ace. But at the last moment he is able to fight the force which possesses him allowing Ace to flee. At this point, I knew that this was going to be one of those stories in which The Doctor and his companion were going to be separated for a time. I just didn't think it would be for as long as it was. Every once in a while as I read I took note of how long it had been since The Doctor made an appearance. "Ooh, it's been 50 pages." "Man, 80 pages and no sign of him." Separating The Doctor and Ace isn't a bad thing. Giving The Doctor amnesia so that he is basically absent from the story for most of it also isn't necessarily a bad thing when you've got a companion like Ace who is resourceful and interesting in her own right. The problem here is that the story is just a mess.

And it's a mess from the beginning. While I appreciated the sense of gloom and foreboding that Perry and Tucker create (and sustain throughout), the story just starts too abruptly for my taste. Why is The Doctor brooding? From information learned later in the story, I think an argument can be made that his mood at the beginning of the story is related to the machinations of the villain but I don't think that link is ever made explicitly. The opening scene with the golem just feels out of place and thrown in just because Perry and Tucker needed to start somewhere. It's too short and golems don't have a big role in the rest of the story.

The pall hanging over the heads of our heroes only deepens in Whitechapel, and that's a good thing, as is Malacroix, the sinister ringmaster of a circus that has set up shop in London. Ace's story of survival on the mean streets of Whitechapel makes for a good tale. She meets various minor characters that add to the atmosphere and, more importantly, the struggle brings out the Cheetah that remains inside her from the TV story Survival. Malacroix will stop at nothing to have her in his troupe of freaks.

Exposing the traces of the Cheetah planet that still reside within Ace complements The Doctor's dilemma well, namely, that the bad guy here is the Valeyard, that distillation of The Doctor's darker elements from his penultimate incarnation writ large and given corporeal form who was featured in Trail of a Time Lord in Sixth Doctor's final season. Given that the Valeyard is the mirror image of The Doctor, he is an extremely interesting character with lots of potential. Unfortunately Perry and Tucker can't capitalize on the opportunity.

At the end of the book, the Valeyard reveals his blasphemous machinations. In short, he survived defeat on the television show and absconded away with the Dark Matrix, a vast repository of all the "forbidden thoughts" of every Time Lord that died, inside a TARDIS. He then set about capturing all of The Doctor's previous incarnations and fostered their evil sides. The Valeyard landed his TARDIS underneath a church in Whitechapel and began his scheming.

I think this is a pretty bad-ass bit of conniving but Perry and Tucker don't utilize the Valeyard to the full extent. He hides in his TARDIS making golems and saying stock bad guy things like "Now you have are in my grasp, Doctor" and "She cannot interfere with my plans!" (These aren't direct quotes, mind you.) For such a wonderfully evil character, he just doesn't do a whole helluva lot beyond pulling the odd string until the very end of the story where The Doctor foils everything with due haste. That The Doctor is in a self-imposed state of amnesia and absent for most of the story compounds the problem because these two aspects of the same being confront one another for a paltry amount of time when their encounter should have been lengthier and more meaningful. We should have learned more about The Doctor and, perhaps, have any new revelations tie in with the weltschmerz that he felt at the beginning of the book. It feels like an opportunity to add depth to The Doctor's character and have a really big showdown was wasted.

There's another character that deserves mention and that is Joseph Liebermann. He is a kindly old Jewish man that takes in Johnny, a.k.a. The Doctor when he cannot recall his identity. Liebermann seems resigned to his fate – the Jews are always blamed. The curious part is that he is very old – more than twice as old as The Doctor – yet we learn very little about him and what accounts for his longevity. He is perhaps the Wandering Jew of Christian folklore. The book has six parts and each part is prefaced by a short scene that is outside of the main story. Part Six opens with Liebermann identifying himself as Isaac and he is in a bar in Salt Lake City when the Eighth Doctor pops in and strikes up a conversation with him. Liebermann reveals that he was given the name Joseph by a man call Ananius. Perhaps this Ananius is Ananias of Damascus, a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Other scenes include Pontius Pilate being told that one Cartaphilius has gone on a journey, Joseph encountering some treasure hunters in the desert of Qumran, an old man looking in Antwerp discovering that he is young again, and an old man giving some solace to a young girl.

Perry and Tucker could have been laying the groundwork for Liebermann to return in a future book but I cannot find any evidence to support this notion. Thusly I can only conclude that they said all they wanted to say about him here. Just as Ace's inner Cheetah reflects the Doctor vs. Valeyard duality, Liebermann seems to be yet another analogue of The Doctor. The pair fix clocks together, many of which line the walls of Liebermann's home. As Johnny, The Doctor performed a supernatural card trick in a bar which Liebermann correctly surmised as being his attempt at constructing a matrix.

But the important part is that Liebermann, like The Doctor, wanders. Also like The Doctor, he tries to help others. However, he is weary. Is The Doctor getting fatigued as well? It's possible that his little bout with ennui at the beginning of the book is a symptom of this (or perhaps it was the result of his previous incarnations being pulled from their timelines.) Regardless, the book doesn't dwell on this although later books in the series may return to this notion.

While there is a plethora of interesting ideas here, Matrix ultimately fails because it's too big of a mess. Furthermore it woefully neglects the villain with the Valeyard doing precious little and being disposed of all too quickly.