City At World's End

The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara to Arkhaven, a city on the planet Sarath. Within minutes of their arrival there the travellers realize that there is something amiss: there are no people around, the inside of the office tower they have landed atop is hollow and drone cars with dummies at the wheel are making their way along the streets. Before this mystery can be investigated the city is bombarded by a meteor storm, the building is destroyed, Susan is in hospital, Barbara and the TARDIS are lost and Ian and the Doctor are sent off to a refugee camp for outsiders. Sarath is facing its final days as its moon is falling. The population are patiently waiting for Zero Day, the day when their great Ship, under construction for years, will lift off and carry them away. But it's not going to end well for everyone as the ship can only hold so many of the inhabitants, and if you're not a devout follower of the Church or one of Arkhaven's elite members your odds of securing a ride to salvation are mighty slim. They're even slimmer given that there are hostile survivors from other parts of the planet converging on the Ship, and there's something outside Arkhaven's walls called a "Creeper" which makes short work of whatever crosses its path.

It's Christopher Bulis at the helm again, this time under the banner of the BBC Books novels' "Past Doctor Adventures" or in simple terms, PDAs. Whereas his Virgin novel, Sorcerer's Apprentice, focussed on the fanciful and fictional (for the most part), City goes to a far flung futuristic society with technology aplenty starting with the massive Ship being built in the centre of the city and going through the gamut of robot cars, robot construction machines, and even the polite HAL-like AI called Monitor. Arkhaven doesn't really stand out as the most futuristic city ever to be in Doctor Who of any genre, though - it feels very modern day Earth circa a few years ago with shops, social clubs and an accurate predication from when it was written in 1999 about how future societies will see everyone with a personal pocket phone. Arkhaven does, however, have a pretty fierce defense battery system which blasts almost all the falling moon rock out of the sky before it can hit the city.

How's our regular cast doing this time around in print? Same as always it seems - Bulis doesn't do too bad a job of bringing the Doctor to life on page; one can almost hear William Hartnell's voice sometimes when reading the Doctor's lines. He goes back and forth from deep concern when it comes to Susan's well-being to classic impatience and fury when dealing with the self centred small mindedness of the Elite ruling class and the pompous religious zealots. As has happened before, the Doctor gets in good with the leaders of the city and while he is attempting to help them improve their plans to escape their doomed world Ian goes looking for Barbara at the accident site, his feelings for her becoming more and more pronounced as they spend more time together in the TARDIS. It's hard to get a proper grasp on Susan in this one, but that's probably due to the fact that she seems to be at two places at the same time. She does have a good retcon moment, though; when she realizes she is injured and needs to heal she does contemplate a "drastic measure" but knows it might be risky at such a young age. In series lore it will be some time before this measure actually happens so it is carefully not pursued. Bulis allows Susan to pay a bit of homage to Apprentice as well, when she references her experiences in that tale. Barbara really gets the least to do this time; clambering through sewers, supposedly made into an agent of another Sarathian nation, and then... well being found again.

The other species on Sarath, the Taldarians, don't really impact the story much. Between the rivalries and deceptions of the Elites, the Church and the city's Mayor they don't seem to be a real threat, and their backstory is only briefly sketched out. City could have very easily been told without them, or their plight could have been a story all its own, but with the menace of the moon overhead falling to bits their presence when they do finally make it felt is a bit of an anticlimx. Not so much of an anticlimax as the REAL one which comes along later, but an anticlimax nonetheless. I don't know if Bulis found himself running short of his page count and had to create a last minute crisis to fill the book's 281 pages or if this is just what happens when the editor of the series takes a nap but City falters a bit at the end. The layers of deception start to peel back at the climax but the final resolution struck me not as the plot elements merging but a few cop outs glued together before a type of happily ever after epilogue.

From the fate of an entire planet to the fate of one person we move to a new setting in Earth's past...

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