We're All Stories In The End 20 - Deceit

 Can a comic strip character cross successfully into prose?....

Deceit by Peter Darville-Evans

Seventh Doctor Adventures number: 13

Originally published: April 1993

Companions: Ace, Benny and... ?

"Take Arcadia apart if you have to."

The middle of the twenty-fifth century. The Second Dalek War is drawing to an untidy close. Earth's Office of External Operation is trying to extend its influence over the corporations that have controlled human-occupied space since man first ventured to the stars.

Agent Isabelle Defries is leading one expedition. Among her barely-controllable squad is an explosives expert who calls herself Ace. Their destination: Arcadia.

A non-technological paradise? A living laboratory for a centuries-long experiment? Fuel for a super-being? Even when Ace and Benny discover the truth, the Doctor refuses to listen to them.

Nothing is what it seems to be.  

This one features the return of Ace after three years away from the Doctor (in her timeline, anyway) and a guest appearance from infamous 1980s comics character Abslom Daak - Dalek Killer.

And it's definitely a novel in three parts.

The first is thoughtful and measured and with lots of different threads in play. It's also full of mysteries:  

• Why does Agent De-frees have Abslom Daak on ice? 
• What secrets has Scribe Francis uncovered? 
• Who are the hooded Counsellors? 
• Why does everyone die at age 30? 
• What does Lacuna want with Britta? 
• And what is the big experiment involving Arcadia?

To start answering these questions, the book jumps around between multiple points of view, sometimes giving us just brief glimpses before pivoting away to another location. Reading it, I wasn't exactly sure where it was all going  - and not much of it seemed to  involve the Doctor. But unlike other novels in this series where I might have been annoyed at that, this time I was gripped. This was excellent stuff -  full of great character development and backstory. A cracking start.

Ace generally felt like the same character, just more experienced - a bit more jaded and, dare I say it, grown up -  and with lots of exciting new gadgets to blow stuff up. Benny is perhaps less well served in this section, basically being trapped in a rapidly constricting TARDIS until she's expelled onto the surface of the pastoral-looking Arcadia. Thankfully she's still as sarcastic as ever. As for whatever was going on with Britta and Lacuna? Well, that was an unpleasantly abusive relationship if nothing else.

I'd say the second part starts as Daak is defrosted. He's as homicidal as I remember from the "Doctor Who Weekly" comics, although I don't recall him being quite such a boorish, sex mad, Conan the Barbarian archetype. There was always a bit of a sad, tragic element to his character, with him pining for a lost love that he hardly knew, and channelling his anger into killing as many Daleks as possible. That seems to have been lost in this written-word version - or maybe my memory is being kinder. I did like the tie-in to the "Nemesis of the Daleks" strip and Ace assuming that was in Daak's future, so she had to keep him alive, despite wanting to push him out of an airlock.

The book becomes like an action movie: huge set pieces with a starship destroyed, a cliff top crash landing and a massive battle with Ace and Daak and troopers fighting against endless Counsellor robots. There are also some nice ideas, such as the giant tortured faces made of rock; the fact that the monsters attacking were projections backed up by force shields to give them a physical presence; And the idea that Arcadia's natural flora and fauna were slowly retaking their planet back after the terraforming.

It's certainly fast-moving and there's plenty of peril and death, with the loss of the crew of the ship almost in an instant - and then Johannsen gets taken down by the androids on the planet. And it's certainly enjoyable, as the stakes get higher. But if I'm honest, I kind of preferred the writing in the first section. I also lost count of the number of times Ace had to rein Daak back in from doing something stupid, contemplate how annoying he was - but still a bit sexy - and then recall that she had to keep him alive. It got a little repetitive.

Finally, after some convenient transmat beams and shuttles, all our main characters end up on the Spinward station - and it's here where I feel the wheels start to come off… if only a little. I really liked that the Doctor realises that his past actions may have led to the atrocities committed on the people of Arcadia. The fact that Pool was composed of harvested brain matter is a nicely gruesome image - even if its plan to become a god in its own universe was a trifle cliched. And it was clever for the Doctor to plant the idea of the TARDIS connection socket in Benny's head so that Pool could read it from her.

But…with Pool being just a formless presence, its downfall doesn't carry a huge amount of weight and seemed to be over in a flash. Lacuna and Britta just…wander off together ? And Francis just accepts everything and goes home. It felt like much of the promising build-up for these supporting characters from the start of the novel didn't follow through  - and they didn't get the resolutions I hoped for. Maybe that was the point, but I did feel that, although I enjoyed reading the book, the end was a bit of a let down.

And before I forget, lets talk about Abslom Daak accidently getting decapitated by Ace ! But it's okay because he was only a clone. What was the point of him being there then? Why bring back such an iconic  character from another medium if you're not going to have him be responsible for anything meaningful in the plot?  Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to see him pop up, but it did feel like a bit of a wasted opportunity. He didn't even get to kill any Daleks for goodness sake. What a waste of a legend.