Zealot Script

Another entry, number 7, in the 73 book long 8th Doctor series by BBC books following the continuing adventures of The Doctor and his latest assistant Sam Jones.

Before diving into the plot I feel I can’t continue without a small confession. I attempted to start this book four or five times over the past few months and never really got going with it, dropping it for something else and putting it to one side. It’s a fact perhaps indicative of the slow start in Kursaal. It’s not narratively short of action at the start, an unearthly archaeological find, brutal murders in the first few pages and The Doctor, in typical fashion, stumbling onto the scene purely accidentally. But something about it didn’t quite grab me at the first few goes.

The book does find its feet as it runs through and is a passable entry in the series, but I find myself coming to writing this review with more criticisms than complements. I don’t want this to put anyone else off from reading the book, there are a couple of very good twists towards the end that move it away from a standard werewolf story and make it worth sticking with but this being an, at least mostly, spoiler-free review I don’t feel I can give too much detail on these elements. And let’s be honest with each other, you’re very unlikely to be picking this up as a standalone read and are more likely to be embarking on a full read-through as I am, in which case you’ll be reading all the novels in the series regardless of quality!

That being said, on with the critical elements.

Sam. As a character, she really didn’t shine in Kursaal. Her initial revulsion to the crime scene the pair stumbled upon was an excellent choice, contrasting her very human reaction to the detached fascination of The Doctor, but following that her character never really recovered. She spent a lot of the time randomly spouting off facts about her parents and her childhood in London in the 1990s, to people that would clearly have no idea about where and when this London is. Despite these blatant indiscretions from a Time Travel attempting to remain undercover, not a single person became suspicious of her origins. There are certain allowances made in any Doctor Who novel, mostly explained by the magic of the Tardis’ language translation circuit, but sometimes in stretches even this reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Another issue with Sam in this outing was that the entire concept of The Doctor having a companion at all is giving the reader (or viewer) an insert that allows The Doctor to explain everything to, avoiding any fourth wall breaks and yet even this function was missed as they spent a significant part of the story apart.

A second issue I had with Kursaal was the moral. Kursaal is a pleasure-world. The Doctor and Sam were intending to arrive for a break from their adventures, but as always manage to arrive during construction works. The planet is being terraformed and all traces of the original planet being erased. This leads to the initial conflict of trying to preserve the archaeological discovery before the excavators move in. A classic statement of environmentalism versus the destructive power of unchecked capitalism, a moral I have no problem supporting, but also one that was a little confused. Only Sam seemed concerned about the natural environment of the planet (very loudly and to anyone that walked near her it has to be said), everyone else only concerned with preservation of the previous civilization, with no actual thought for the ecological impact. Also, The Doctor clearly knew this before offering to take Sam to a fully terraformed planet in the first place, so why then become outraged? The Doctor’s moral ambivalence has been explored before, but here it was simply glossed over. He displayed a similar hypocrisy towards the conclusion, but to avoid the spoilers I won’t broach that here. The absolute biggest problem I had with the “moral” was that there was absolutely no subtlety in its delivery, certainly emphasised by Sam’s behaviour. It is important, particularly within a Doctor Who story, to have a message about decency, about good triumphing over evil, about intelligence over violence, about preservation over unchecked exploitation, but anyone reading this far into a niche accompanying series of published books to an already genre restricted science fiction TV series already knows this. As an author you have the joy of addressing an already invested and sympathetic audience, so use a scalpel not a sledgehammer.

Overall I consider that the final act of the story rescued what could have been a rather dull entry in the series, but it does remain flawed. Both sets of baddies, the capitalists and the actual monsters, get a more complicated and nuanced motivation than initially expected and the concluding action set pieces hold attention and drama in a satisfying final portion. On to the next book, but hopefully one with Sam becoming a bit more bearable again. After all, she’s in another 19 books after this one.