I read Simon Messingham's Strange England several years back when I plowed through the whole of the Virgin New Adventures. Honestly, I don't recall a whole lot about that Seventh Doctor tale but I do remember it as being very weird and unsettling. It wasn't until I was a little way into The Indestructible Man that I found more info on Messingham and saw that he had written Strange England. Apparently putting the Doctor and his friends into very odd situations and having them run around worlds that are at once like ours and yet very different from it is his M.O. because this story sees him again transporting our heroes into another bizarro world.
And, now that I look again, Messingham wrote The Face-Eater. While I really enjoyed that book, it wasn't as, well, strange as Strange England.
Although it's a tale that is largely earthbound, I suspect continuity-loving folks would offer that The Indestructible Man takes place in an alternate universe. In the late 2060s, mankind fought a war with the enigmatic, unseen Myloki. They have an "outpost" on the moon which, in a very 2001-like scene, is discovered to be sending signals. But instead of them going to Jupiter, they go to the Earth and apparently control people. Many folks became these almost mindless zombies that are known as Shiners.
A secret military group called PRISM is created to combat the Myloki. Two of its members fall into the clutches of the aliens but not as Shiners. Captain Karl Taylor discovers the Myloki outpost on the moon which is indescribable and incomprehensible to mere mortals in the best Lovecraftian fashion. He ends up becoming a zombie too but his reanimated corpse cannot be put down. Oh, and he's anything but mindless. He's a highly effective undead killing machine. Captain Grant Matthews is killed but the Myloki create a copy of him that cannot die and it is he that gives the book its title. He brought Doctor Manhattan from The Watchmen to mind.
Once the signals from the moon are detected, the Matthews simulacrum is sent there with a rather large bomb attached to his person and he proceeds to take out the Myloki presence there. This, in turn, cuts the link to the Shiners and victory is declared.
Civilized society, however, was drained and devastated by the war with the Myloki and into this dystopian future, about 30 years after the alien menace is defeated, come our heroes.
Rather than describing some kind of wheezing elephant sound, having the TARDIS materialize, and our time travelers alight to investigate where they've landed, we hear about them from afar and through the descriptions given by other characters. As it happened, they landed aboard PRISM's disused floating military base, SKYHOME, which gave me Thunderbirds vibes. PRISM's successor, SILOET, discovers the intrusion and The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are captured. They effect an escape but, while Zoe and Jamie manage to evade their captors, the Doctor is shot in the head.
From here, the story trifurcates and is told through the lenses of our heroes separately. The Doctor's companions think him dead and they try to assimilate into the world. Jamie joins a paramilitary group called the City Militia which policies the rather anarchic London. It is led by a demagogue named Mackenzie who has some weird eschatological views. Thinking the Doctor is dead and thusly that he's stranded in his own future, Jamie falls under Mackenzie's spell before being captured by SILOET.
Zoe, also under the impression that the Doctor is dead, is kidnapped and ends up in what are basically the remains of Canary Wharf where the Haves have walled themselves up and retain Have-Nots as slaves. She resigns herself to life there and eventually falls in love with the Haves' CEO, Mark Khan. Their romantic idyll ends when SILOET tracks her down. But her capture leads to Mark being shot dead. Zoe is brought back to SILOET and she ingratiates herself into their ranks using her mad computer skillz.
Although shot in the head, the Doctor remained alive. He gets injected with some kind of Shiner-dervied serum and this inhibits his regeneration. But it also puts the Doctor in contact with the Myloki, though only briefly. Upon his recovery, he is thought to be controlled by the revenant foes but another SILOET officer recalls some old U.N.I.T. reports and their descriptions of a certain scientific advisor.
The upshot here is that Zoe is working for SILOET, Jamie has been captured but also has had a psychotic break and disbelieves that the Doctor is still alive, and the Doctor comes to the conclusion that the Myloki are back and that the Matthews simulacrum is key to defeating them. He and a crack team of SILOET men begin their search for Matthews by seeking out a guy named Neville Verdana, a disgruntled former PRISM man who wrote a tell-all book that is excerpted at various points.
Ach!
I plot summarized much more than I intended. In my defense, The Indestructible Man is a knotty tale and, while it may be the normal 283 pages of a PDA, the type is small so this, by rights, is a 300+ page story.
The usual bonhomie that the Doctor and his companions bring to a story has been cut out here with no anesthesia. Zoe and Jamie witness their friend and mentor get shot in the head before their eyes (and Zoe saw Mark suffer a similar fate) so it's no wonder they become hardened and lose their genial demeanors. Without his young companions, the Doctor is stern and all business. There's no Jamie to poke fun at; instead, the Doctor can only mourn that he has broken with reality. Zoe ably demonstrates her computer skills but cannot indulge in playful banter with her friends so she comes across as the cold, calculating machine she was accused of being on the Wheel.
Jamie is certainly a man of action here even if it mindless, at times. He is confined to an underwater prison called OCEAN FLOOR and he effects an escape which causes enough damage in the process that another prisoner is able to escape - the indestructible killing machine that was Taylor. When the Myloki presence on the moon was destroyed, he went into a torpor that allowed him to be captured and placed into a titanium sphere which was then filled with cement. The sphere was then deposited deep in the ocean. Against all odds, Taylor is revived somehow and escapes on a submarine.
This leads to a really thrilling scene where the Doctor and a SILOET officer land on the island where Matthews resides in seclusion. Instead they run into Taylor who had piloted that stolen submarine there. He is a relentless killing machine in a Terminator kind of way. He doesn't run but he pursues his prey with a silent, unrelenting menace. This scene was really on the edge of your seat thrilling stuff.
I don't know if Messingham was a fan of H.P. Lovecraft's work or even knew of it but the Myloki are some of the most Lovecraftian elements of any Doctor Who story. Their foreignness, mankind's inability to understand them, and the way their presence on the moon was indescribable reminded me heavily of "The Colour Out of Space".
In another great scene filled with palpable tension and excitement, Zoe figures out where the Myloki have been since their presence on the moon was destroyed. She surmises that they must be close and convinces the SILOET brass to initiate a scan which reveals them to be cleverly hidden and extremely close to the Earth. The Myloki start bombarding our home planet with beams of energy that don't destroy but instead mutate living things into hideous malformations that make a mockery of nature. The Doctor and a SILOET cohort visit one of the energy blast sites and I was creepily reminded of Jeff VanderMeer's Anniliation, a novel that shows a lot of Lovecraftian influence.
Rather than tentacles, Messingham used unknowability and mankind's seeming helplessness before the Myloki to create his own brand of cosmic horror. Even the Doctor is left to speculate about the aliens he faces rather than coming to hard conclusions backed up with a boat load of evidence.
While The Indestructible Man lacks the warmth and playfulness of the Second Doctor era on TV, it is still a fantastic story with a Lovecraftian menace wreaking havoc on a dystopian Earth. I haven't mentioned it much but he does a great job of characterization. Not in that Zoe, Jamie, and the Doctor are portrayed just like they were on TV, but rather we get into everyone's head and people get fleshed out. For instance, the Doctor comes to really appreciate just what wonderful friends Zoe and Jamie are and not just mere traveling companions. And Zoe falls in love which means moving beyond the emotionless calculating machine she was brought up to be. Plus, there's some good dialogue with Matthews and how he/it comes to terms with being a Myloki/human hybrid and one that is essentially immortal.
BBC's Past Doctor Adventures get a lot of criticism and unfavorable comparisons to the Virgin books. It may be true that the PDAs are conservative, generally speaking, and adhere to established conventions. But The Indestructible Man strays from the middle of the road off into the ditch and is a great side step from the Second Doctor stories we've generally had thus far. Just great Doctor Who.
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