It is fortunate that I decided to re-read Revolution Man because it is referred to here, albeit briefly. Fitz feels guilty for, well, all of his failings in the previous novel such as forcing the Doctor to get all medieval on Ed Hill, carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, etc. He wanders over to Sam's room with his tail between is legs when suddenly it is beset by this swirling vortex hole to another world and Sam is sucked in as of by some vorticial vacuum.
Meanwhile it's 1999 here on Earth and near the Swedish town of Strängnäs, the young, lithe Kerstin is spending some time at a cabin with her boyfriend Johan. (Curiously enough, Strängnäs is a genuine location in Sweden.) One night a big chunk of the cabin and a large swathe of the surrounding earth is suddenly gone. Just poof! Vanished. It turns out others in the area have also disappeared under similarly mysterious circumstances.
We meet a local farmer named Björn who finds a hideous reptilian creature attacking his pigs and chases the squamous beast away with his shotgun. Kerstin, in shock and with only half a cabin, goes to Björn's farm seeking shelter. He is reluctant at first but, being a widower, he can relate to her situation and so he relents and takes her in.
Sam is absent for something like the first half of the story which leaves The Doctor and Fitz to do the heavy lifting. They stumble upon a dead creature out in the woods that appears no less hideous than the one Björn encountered in his barn before being shooed away by hazmat suit clad folks claiming the authority of the State Biohazard Protection Unit, which, of course, doesn't exist. Instead they are UNIT and have a real nice underground bunker nearby where one Professor Jennifer Nagle has taken some alien technology and come up with a telecongruency warp generator. But instead of being able to teleport people and things between two points (I thought of Miss Kelly from "The Seeds of Death" here), she has created a wormhole between our world and another one.
It is unstable and threatens Earth's very existence! And just as chunks of the Swedish countryside and its inhabitants are being sent through the wormhole, inhabitants of that other world, the T’hiili, Bane, and the Ruin are brought here.
Sam is at that other world and has to figure out who is who and how to survive the menacing black Blight which threatens to overtake that world. The Doctor is in even more precarious position as he is tasked with dealing with Major Gareth Wolstencroft of UNIT who has a military mind even worse than the Brigadier's! He heedlessly attempts to deal with the threat to Earth as his training dictates, ignoring the Doctor's admonitions all the while.
Eventually the fecal matter hits the fan on both sides of the wormhole with the Blight joined by the threat of the Ruin on the other side while here on Earth, Ruin make their way into Nagle's lab. Things get dicey but the Doctor saves the day.
The first 40% or so of Dominion was excellent. Sam was on the far side of the wormhole so we get to witness the relationship between the Doctor and Fitz develop a bit. Plus Nick Walters does a very nice job of building up mystery in Strängnäs. Weird things are happening and nothing is as it seems. Plus we have no idea where Sam is or what she is up to. There's even a point where Johan mysteriously turns up again only to suffer the same fate as Kane and has a baby Bane burst forth from his chest in a scene full of disgusting glory.
I credit Walters for not simply having Kerstin brush this off to get on with the business of helping the Doctor save the world. But it's too bad Björn was killed so prematurely instead of being someone with whom Kerstin could commiserate. Walters didn't have to go full-blown Forbrydelsen here but I think he missed some opportunities to show that not everyone can just leave their traumas behind in an instant. On the other hand, Fitz thinks twice about hitting on her.
While I really enjoyed the scenes in Sweden - even if they tread some well-worn Third Doctor ground - the scenes with Sam on the other side of the wormhole, Dominion, were less interesting for me. Sam basically wakes up in a cave and is a stranger in a strange land. She's trying to grok where she is and what's going on with the help of a local named Itharquell. Itharquell is a bit pathetic at times, just resigned to die at the hands of the Blight without so much as putting up a fight.
I liked the idea of the Dominion - a pocket universe with the Blight threatening its very existence being our universe creeping in and taking over - to be rather neat. But it all seemed a bit undercooked in the end. The Dominion's inhabitants seemed rather one dimensional in order to make Sam look heroic. But I will admit that the situation in Dominion is given a genuine sense of threat, of urgency.
Nagle's telecongruency hoolie punched a hole in the TARDIS that sucked Sam out and this damaged the our beloved ship severely. We are told it reverted to its original form, a grey slab, in order to use power that would normally be used to project an outer shell (or whatever) to fix itself. A nice dash of basic Doctor Who lore. I liked the appeals here to the UNIT-laden earthbound Third Doctor era. Here the Doctor has a mechanical blood drawing mosquito gadget. I also liked the evil UNIT. Instead of venerating the Doctor and seeking his help, they ignore and try to suppress him as they use a blunt instrument to fix the problem instead of something with a bit more finesse.
Despite the Dominion scenes being weaker, this was still a very fun tale. It ends with the Doctor announcing that there is some kind of dimensional anomaly in San Francisco that must be investigated...
No comments:
Post a Comment