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danny_phantom57's review against another edition
4.0
Good stuff! A deep dive into Gallifrey's history and culture through an interesting and different Doctor Who story. Good plot with surprising twists.
gingerreader99's review against another edition
5.0
It earns 5 stars because of how exciting and fabulous it is. It is also my first 8th doctor story outside of the movie, I have not read a novel about him and I think this likely trumps anything else I could acquire. Unfortunately it doesn't hit as close to home with me simply because my Doctor Who is from the new series and not classic who so some of the epicness is lost on me.
liria10's review against another edition
5.0
I have no idea how to sum up this book. It's wonderful, Parkin outdid himself yet again and wrote interesting characters (I absolutely love Larna), a griping story that uses the mythos of gallifrey really well, and manages to make the planet quite alien. There's just many things to unpack here, and I love how it's ambiguous which doctor we are following (for me, definitely eight at some point).
This books is just soooo good!
This books is just soooo good!
chicafrom3's review
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
The Doctor, in a timeline where he returned to Gallifrey and stayed there, deals with the threat of Omega.
nwhyte's review
http://nhw.livejournal.com/1087211.html[return][return]This wasn't quite the book I expected. (I thought I had read somewhere that this was the one where various different versions of canonicity collide; obviously not.) This is an alternate timeline where the Doctor never left Gallifrey, and neither did the Master (here renamed the Magistrate); both ascended to high office among the Time Lords. The Doctor is brokering a peace deal between the Sontarans and the Rutans, but meanwhile Omega is trying to break out of his anti-matter universe using the Doctor's body; so it's a combination and re-orientation of The Three Doctors, The Invasion of Time and Arc of Infinity (Hedin is the only other TV canon character in the story) with some very small bits of The Deadly Assassin and The Five Doctors. There are also a number of nods to Stephen Baxter, which is mildly amusing.[return][return]While I liked the overall idea, and numerous details of the scenery, I wasn't so sure about some of the plot. I felt that the Gallifrey audios managed to balance the idea of competing factions in Gallifrey, powerful external forces and rogue Time Lords rather better, and without having to invent a whole new continuity. One crucial point is that the Gallifreyan security system really is unrealistically poor, even for the sclerotic Time Lord society: there is little sense of urgency from the President and High Council as the body count rises in the corridors of the citadel, or when important visitors start going astray, and the Watch's investigations are astonishingly incompetent.[return][return]However, the interactions between Time Lords and the rest of Gallifreyan society are well done, and so is the depiction of Omega's universe and its limitations. There are also some intriguing hints about the Doctor's own lost past, and his capacity for loving women of his own race. (And of course it's impossible to know which Doctor we are dealing with here - Paul McGann without the wig, perhaps?)[return][return]Fails the Bechdel test, I'm afraid. There are few women characters - Omega's unnamed wife, Larna who is the Doctor's quasi-companion, and Larna's maidservant; the first of these never meets the other two, and the only direct speech interchange between Larna and her maid is about a male visitor.[return][return]Otherwise, not bad, but not a classic either.
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