12 February, 2012

Attack of the 50 Foot Ace





Mike Tucker and Robert Perry wrap up their story arc about the foretelling of Ace's death with Loving the Alien and they do so with reunions with friends and foes, Cyber gorillas, and giant ants. Even the state I call home, Wisconsin, gets mentioned. The Doctor is being held in a hospital and he asks the American soldier guarding him where he's from originally and the man replies, “Wisconsin, why?”

The year is 1959 and journalist Rita Hawks is covering a rocket launch in England. The Waverider, an experimental space plane, will be piloted by Thomas Kneale into orbit briefly and then returned to Earth. American president Eisenhower is supportive of the English effort to go into space, although perhaps a bit jealous that the Yanks didn't get there first. Backup pilot Davey O'Brien watches the progress of the flight from mission control at Winnerton Manor along with the top brass – both English and American - and reporters. Then something goes wrong. The reporters are hurried out of the room as technicians try to assess the situation and make corrections. An explosion rocks Waverider and sends it hurtling back to the Earth. However, contact is reestablished with the pilot: “Captain O’Brien here, sir. I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

Into this weird alternate reality come The Doctor and Ace. The Time Lord knows that this time and place in history is the key to stopping Ace's untimely death that was foretold in that perverted This Is Your Life show in Prime Time. Mel's death in Heritage only strengthened The Doctor's resolve to make sure Ace does not die a young woman. He performs an autopsy on Ace's body which reveals a tattoo saying “Ace and Jimmy, 1959”, that her last meal was a toffee apple, and that she'd had sex just prior to having a bullet put into her cranium. And, oddly, her exhumed body still bore a tag from St. Thomas' Hospital.

While Ace ventures off on her own, The Doctor investigates the hospital where he discovers Davey O'Brien's doppelgänger. He is expecting someone named Dumont-Smith who is a lawyer. It's off to Dumont-Smith's office where The Doctor runs into McBride, the private dick we encountered in Illegal Alien who is also inquisitive about D-S. They run into another friend from Illegal Alien, Inspector Mullen, who is on bomb disposal duty. The reunion takes a turn for the worse when giant ants burst forth setting off the explosives leaving Mullen sans legs.

Ace meets up with a strapping young lad ominously named Jimmy who works and, curiously enough, lives at the London Zoo. She is smitten and is happy bestow her favor upon him. The tension is ratcheted up slowly as first her hunger is satiated with a toffee apple and then later star-crossed lovers decide to get tattoos. When all proves not well between Ace and her beau, McBride comes to the rescue. McBride finds Ace locked in Jimmy's room at the zoo but his derring do gets the kibosh put on it and he finds himself in a darkened cage. In this, one of the more effective scenes in the book, he notices sparks casting a glow from the ceiling which reveal shadowy, ill-defined animal movements. Finally he discovers that he is locked in with a variety of apes that have been retrofitted with Cyber technology and that run on static electricity. They have these long poles attached to their bodies which touch the power source on the ceiling just like bumper cars. I found this scene to be very creepy.

Unfortunately for Ace, she too has her own reunion with a character from Illegal Alien – George Limb. This doesn't work out too well as it is he who kills Ace. It was rather odd reading the death of one of my favorite companions, especially in a way that wasn't heroic. She doesn't sacrifice herself in the line of duty to stop a phalanx of Daleks; she was the victim of a rather banal incarnation of evil.

Limb survived his trip in the Cybermen's time machine at the end of Illegal Alien and has been meddling with the web of time. Concomitant to his travels, the Cybermen trapped in hibernation at the end of the same novel are rediscovered by English authorities and the technology exploited. Although Limb's ability to navigate time is limited to about a decade from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, he gets enough glimpses of the fates of his future selves to worry. He decides to start selling Cyber technology to the Russians in an effort to cause a nuclear war and avoid his fate of becoming “augmented” with Cyber parts. Seeing Ace at the zoo, however, gave him another idea. He kills her in order to send a message to The Doctor. Limb's hope is that, once the Time Lord discovers Ace's demise, he would make his way that point in time where Limb could find him and enlist his help in changing his destiny.

It certainly worked but Limb's flirtations with time travel also cause rifts in the time-space continuum. Some of the alternate, parallel universes begin to intersect, hence the other Waverider with O'Brien as pilot, the giant ants, and other intrusions.

Tucker and Perry weave a wonderful story and create a lot of tension as the tale builds to a climax. Unfortunately the payoff just isn't there. At some point, Limb realizes that he can't escape, can't undo what he's done and kills himself. Mirabile dictu, all the damage done to the web of time which The Doctor spent so much time decrying is magically undone. If things were so dire, how did the death of Limb in one time line correct all the problems? There's still the other George Limbs in the alternate universes.

And what about Ace? Well, an Ace from one of the alternate time lines wherein everyone and everything is very large – hence those ants – makes her way into the primary/main time line where the story started. Very lucky. This 50 Foot Ace gradually and inexplicably shrinks down to “normal” size making her a suitable companion for The Doctor once again. So, not only was Ace, out of billions of people in that alternate universe, lucky enough to encounter a bridge between the universes, she automagically resizes to fit her new surroundings. Sounds like rather a lot of copping out instead of having to really deal with her death in a complex, nuanced way.

For all the worrying, all the mood swings, and all the depression The Doctor had on display over the past few books in this story arc, he sure takes Ace's death well. Almost in stride. He is all worried in Prime Time and feels compelled to dig up her grave. While on Heritage he is completely preoccupied by Ace's impending fate that he is totally listless and refuses to get involved, refuses to right wrongs. Here is determined to save Ace to the point where he is deliberately messing with the web of time. With all of the desperation and concern that he showed over the past few books, why does Ace's death seem to have so little impact on him? He is sorrowful and downs a few drinks but then it's back to business as usual. Yeah, he is angry with Limb but I never got the sense that, had the fate of our reality not been at stake, The Doctor's wrath would have been unleashed and he'd have opened a can of Gallifreyan whoop ass on George.

Loving the Alien is a classic DW romp. It has a great central mystery and there's a lot of fun and suspense to be had as characters from Illegal Alien are reintroduced and weird events flow from the intersection of universes that are meant to be parallel. Plus all of reality is at stake. But there were just too many dei ex machinae and I felt emotionally let down by the resolution of Ace's storyline. These books have done a lot to demonstrate that The Doctor may look human but is an alien. However, you can't spend books with The Doctor displaying a very human concern and being sad and then have him basically brush Ace's death off as yet another simple turn of the world. If The Doctor's view of life is that the incarnation of an individual from any old parallel universe is as good as the next, then why all the previous fuss?

Fun story but unsatisfying resolution to Ace's fate.

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