Saturday, April 26, 2014

Book Report #5 - Doctor Who / The Doctor Trap

I realized why I stopped collecting more or less blindly all Doctor Who books (not that I gathered up that many to begin with): not every author can write well for the Doctor. Or perhaps it's just that not every of those many authors that work for BBC Books writes to my liking.

"The Doctor Trap" is about Ten and Donna. It shows their faces on the cover, but I found myself often thinking of Eleven instead. Not that this was a typical Matt Smith adventure right from the beginning - it's just that I couldn't find much that way typical David Tennant in it. If the author hadn't described the Doctor's appearance now and then and if I hadn't reminded myself that only Ten spend time with Donna, it really could have been any Doctor (or a whole range of other people).
Donna herself was better portrayed, probably because she's rather unique. However, her's was only a small part in the whole story.
The main character seemed to have been the antagonist Sebastiene, who started out as the all-powerful ruler of a planet that fulfilled his every wish, but ended as a slightly annoying maniac.
And then there was the Doctor's doppelgänger, Baris - who probably was a main character, too. Although since he doesn't know if he's himself or the Doctor for most of the time, he has to share this with the real Doctor.

Confused yet? Well, I was now and then - but not as much as I would have preferred.
Ever more confused now? :)
Well, I think this story was about how someone wanted to hunt the Doctor and thus created a doppelgänger to lure him in. However, the Doctor saw through that scheme and turned it on its head - acting as the doppelgänger and making the Not-Doctor believe he was the Doctor so the real deal could find out what really was going on.
Not the worst idea I've ever read, but somehow it got revealed too soon or perhaps just in an unfortunate way. I soon found myself a bit bored of "I'm really him" and "you can't be him" and "perhaps you are lying" etc. and I didn't really care much how it all got resolved in the end.

I still have a few more unread Doctor Who books and I might even buy more in the future, but most likely not another one by this author (Simon Messingham).

And if I ever want to write a story about a person pretending to be someone else, I now know I should be careful how I go about it.


This got cross-posted in my LiveJournal.

1 comment:

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