It's too bad David McIntee didn't have this story take place a week or so later than it did so we could have General George S. Patton as a character. Can you imagine the barbs he and Sam would trade? Woo boy! Old Blood and Guts would demean the Doctor as an effeminate dandy but they would come together after finding common ground in the maxim about making plans that fit the circumstances.
But McIntee didn't.
Instead it's 15 December 1944 and Patton's Third Army are still in Germany. Here in the Ardennes, beleagured American forces are doing their best to hold out against a desperate last push by the Germans into Belgium and France. Into the waning days of the war and on a bridge in the the Ardennes forest lands the TARDIS. Our heroes go wandering when suddenly the bridge is destroyed. The TARDIS falls to the bottom of the river and Sam ends up on the far side separated from her friends. Eventually the Doctor and Fitz get split apart as well when the latter ends up in the river just like the ship and is swept downstream.
Oh, and weird things are happening in the forest, namely, bodies are disappearing...
Sam runs into an American soldier named Kovacs who gets her a lift farther back from the front lines. That convoy is attacked by the Germans and everyone is captured. In retaliation for the Allied bombing of cities - I think the fire bombing of Dresden was still a couple months off but Hamburg had been turned into an inferno the previous year - the German soldiers decide to take no prisoners and shoot them instead. I was shocked when our beloved Sam was shot point blank in the heart.
Fitz eventually extracts himself from the water and finds some shelter in a small town. Unfortunately, the Germans move in and Fitz is forced to grab the uniform of a dead paratrooper. Although unterwasser, the TARDIS translation circuit works just fine and Fitz is able to integrate himself into the Wehrmacht unit that has occupied the town. His Spidey sense is activated when a trio of armored vehicles appear with strange-looking antennae that seem out of place in this time period. Ooh! The Ahnenerbe!
After having lost Fitz, the Doctor meets up with a Polish-American G.I. named Wiesniewski who is out of sorts and is mumbling something about a "Leshy in mist..." with a Leshy being a Polish spirit of the forest. The Doctor gets him to the town of Bastogne for medical care where a doctor of the medical kind named Garcia treats him. The Americans there are under a Colonel Lewis who is a bit of an odd duck. He appears to make a reference to the Philadelphia Experiment and seemingly has an invisible companion that he talks to.
Just as there was a scarred rip in the fabric of space-time in Unnatural History, there is a rift here in the Ardennes. This rift has exposed our world to that of the Sidhe, creatures that we ostensibly share the Earth with but who also exist in the rest of the 11 dimensions and out of phase from us and our limited perceptions. Thusly it's like we can kinda see them out of the corner of our eyes, but when we turn to get a better look, they're gone. If we were able to see them, they'd appear somewhat elven to our eyes. Lewis and the local Ahnenerbe rep on the ground with those armored vehicles donning strange antennae, Sturmbannfuhrer Leitz, have a pact. They will penetrate the rift with some tanks and troops and duke it out as an experiment.
I didn't think Sam's time had come and indeed it hadn't. Not unlike Richard Francis Burton in Riverworld, Sam wakes up in the land of the Sidhe. Alive. I was going to write that she'd dodged a bullet but she did no such thing. Sam meets Titania, queen of the Sidhe. The king is named Oberon and is her equal and opposite. Whereas Titania represents order, Oberon revels in chaos - vague shades of the Faction Paradox here. We learn that Lewis' invisible friend is Oberon who is meddling in human affairs.
OK, done with the synopsis.
McIntee does a really nice job here. The first chapters give you a good picture of the scene and build up mystery well. I was not expecting Sam to get shot and killed. That scene was done very well with people dying horribly and Sam trying to feign that she's dead so that the Germans wandering the bodies looking for any survivors to dispatch don't come to her. A very tense scene that left me incredulous.
The Wehrmacht soldiers are definitely the bad guys but they aren't cartoonishly evil devils while the G.I.'s come across as your average Joe put in a predicament they don't want to be in but must. OK, there's a dash of John Wayne heroics at the end when just a handful of them take on German infantry and heavy armor but that's fine, really. Even Lewis und Leitz aren't over the top.
McIntee treads well-worn ground here with his "war is hell" theme, but he does a good job and never gets preachy. The battle scenes were well drawn with tension filling the air as grenades are lobbed and bullets fly overhead. McIntee appears to have done his homework as his descriptions of military equipment seemed legit and I don't think the differences between Panzers and Tigers have ever elucidated upon before or since in Doctor Who.
Some things I noticed: Fitz worries about whether this Sam is the same one he slept with in Unnatural History. And, as in that novel, the Doctor here does not cast a shadow. I smiled when Fitz did his imitation of Sean Connery in Dr. No. It was a nice bit of fun when, needing a couple thousand tones of ferrous metal to close the rift, the Doctor heads to Philadelphia intending to snag the U.S.S. Eldridge. When told he cannot just steal a ship, he retorts, "Famous for disappearing, isn’t it?" And thusly he makes the Philadelphia Experiment come true.
At one point, Oberon takes on Sam's appearance (or, rather, alters everyone's perceptions so that they think they're seeing Sam) and heads off in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Fitz. The real Sam seems rather unperturbed when she is told that she was seen entering the TARDIS which promptly took off. You'd think she'd be a bit more worried about the Doctor and her lover boy stuck with a fake poseur Sam.
At the end, Sam declares that she is through traveling with the Doctor and wishes to resign her commission as a member of the TARDIS crew. "I don’t need to do this anymore...I don’t need to follow someone else to know who I am, now. I feel like I’ve been pulled apart and put back together again – literally – more times than anyone should have to put up with..." I guess Sam will leave at some point in one of the Interference books. We shall see.
Autumn Mist was a hoot. The action scenes were tense, the story didn't bog down when Sam ends up going to another dimension as in Dominion, the characters were well-drawn, and, overall, it was just fun. No big continuity issues to keep in mind; just bad guys to deal with.
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