Virgin Missing Adventures Reviews: Twilight of the Gods by Christopher Bulis (or, “Menoptera Behaving Badly”)

Whether you choose to appraise Virgin’s published output through a metric of quality or one of quantity, the Second Doctor has not been especially well-served by the Missing Adventures thus far. Of the six past Doctors which existed at the time of the range’s inception in July 1994, he was the last to receive a novel dedicated to him – and by a considerable margin at that.

When he eventually did make his debut appearance in Martin Day’s The Menagerie, a full ten months after Goth Opera, the proceedings felt rather underwhelmingly generic. There was very little about the novel’s bland and flavourless tale of a put-upon resistance rising up against an oppressive and tyrannical government which felt tailored to the particular sensibilities and stylings of the Troughton Era.

There was, of course, a rather simple reason for this, with Day’s novel having started its life cycle as a New Adventure that was hastily retooled as a Second Doctor story when it became clear that Gary Russell would need additional time to put the finishing touches on his own book featuring the so-called “cosmic hobo.” Surely with a three month grace period, however, said novel would have to turn out pretty good, right?

Wrong.

Invasion of the Cat-People ended up becoming one of my least favourite Missing Adventures of 1995. For a novel with such a pulpy and eccentric title, it somehow managed to commit the unpardonable sin of being unbelievably dull. There was a sense that Russell was unable to decide whether to treat the titular feline humanoids as a quirky punchline, or as a real threat grounded in fantastical and implausible technobabble, and this indecision ultimately sapped much of the zest and verve out of the narrative.

Throw in some oversimplifications of the belief systems of First Nations people – not to mention the casual, repeated and entirely unremarked upon use of a full-blown slur to refer to said people – and you were left with an absolute mess that only managed to avoid being crowned my least favourite MA of the year by virtue of The Ghosts of N-Space being marginally worse.

And then, radio silence. For thirteen long months after the publication of Invasion of the Cat-People, there was not a single new Second Doctor outing to be found among the Missing Adventures. Apart from the obligatory appearance in the yearly Decalog, his presence was largely confined to brief cameos in novels like Downtime or Who Killed Kennedy. With the coming of September 1996, however, the task of penning the first novel-length Second Doctor story in over a year would ultimately fall to MA stalwart Christopher Bulis.

Despite his prolific output across the combined lifespans of the Virgin and BBC novel ranges, Bulis is an author whose work is often greeted with a rather frosty reception from a lot Doctor Who fans – and I have, in the past, numbered among them. Certainly, he didn’t exactly make a great first impression, with his debut novel Shadowmind being riddled with spelling and grammatical errors and a penchant for offering up a cut-price, second-rate Star Trek pastiche with far too many faceless guest characters to keep track of.

Much like the debut of fellow erstwhile Second Doctor novelist Gary Russell in Legacy, I have often felt a trifle remorseful for the harshness of my initial review of Shadowmind. As with Legacy, it’s not that I have necessarily come to disagree with the contents of my criticisms, but I would definitely express them differently given the chance.

Indeed, with the added benefit of about four years’ experience in reviewing Bulis’ novels, I think I’ve come to reach something of an understanding as to the author’s placement in the wider tapestry of Doctor Who prose fiction. While it’s true that none of his output can really stand toe to toe with some of the more decorated writers in Virgin’s pool of talent like Kate Orman or Ben Aaronovitch, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing in and of itself. It’s simply not realistic to expect every single story to be on the level of The Also People or The Left-Handed Hummingbird, and the exquisite quality of such books would undoubtedly be a little diminished if every other book surrounding them was their equal.

More to the point, I understand why the Missing Adventures keep returning to Bulis. With the exception of Shadowmind, the writer has generally demonstrated a certain baseline ability to craft good, solid, reliable Doctor Who fare, even if the results may not be the most spectacular. On top of that, he can adapt himself pretty well to any particular era. With the release of Twilight of the Gods, the only incarnations he has yet to write for are the Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Doctors – the latter of whom nobody has really written a full-length original novel for yet anyway.

This chameleon-like versatility is obviously a crucial asset for any Missing Adventures writer worth their salt, but perhaps Bulis’ most important quality of all is just how efficiently he can cook up these novels. Twilight of the Gods is his fourth Missing Adventure in a little under two years, coming just five months after his last contribution, The Eye of the Giant. Just five months after this, he’ll pen a fifth book and get himself in right under the wire as the undisputed champion of the MAs, at least if you’re going by novel count alone.

Now, recognising that my critical appraisal of Bulis is running the risk of sounding rather damning with hints of faint praise, I do want to stress that I genuinely think that such an approach has its place within Doctor Who. In discussing the Wilderness Years – and particularly the New and Missing Adventures ranges – there’s often a tendency to reduce the artistic patterns at play into a simplistic dichotomy of “rad vs. trad,” but I’ve never been much of a fan of that framework. As a consequence, I tend to refrain from using it to inform my writings, although it’s never really been something that I’ve sat down and made a conscious choice about.

To my mind, it’s always smacked a little too much of trying to pit the individual tastes and authorial voices of the franchise’s writers against one another, and we get quite enough of that from the fans and writers themselves as is without needing to drag in a formalised framework for such conflicts. The very phrase itself seems to serve as something of a rallying cry, a call for fans to pledge their allegiance to a particular side in the front lines of… talking about some old books on the Internet.

If we absolutely insist on reducing everything down to “rad” and “trad,” however, then I think it’s fair to say that my allegiances – such as they are – generally fall on the “rad” side of the fence. Partially this is because it’s gone on to be much more influential in defining the contours of Doctor Who. Having grown up on a steady diet of a televised Doctor Who shaped by those “rad” writers who shot to prominence in the Wilderness Years, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I find myself feeling a certain affinity for the novels which served as a thematic precursor to the work that many of them would go on to do upon the programme’s revival in 2005.

The other component which informs this stance, though, is that I generally believe that franchises need to reinvent themselves in order to stay fresh, and this is arguably even more true in the case of a show like Doctor Who. After all, if you parallel the New Adventures with the contemporary output of the 1990s and 2000s Star Trek series, it was arguably a distinct lack of adventurousness which caused the fortunes of later shows like Voyager and Enterprise to wane, even as Doctor Who‘s star rose to meet a glorious rebirth.

At the end of the day though, I do like to think that I’m able to set aside my more “raddish” tendencies where appropriate. Although I might sometimes give off the impression that I need every novel to be a super groundbreaking take on the concept of Doctor Who, that’s really not the case. I think I just have some kind of condition where I’ll enter a severe state of serotonin withdrawal if I find a book that I’m not able to drone on about for 3000 or 4000 words or so, and so I generally tend to prefer works with a little depth to them.

(It’s either the serotonin theory, or I just like the sound of my own voice. Readers are invited to make up their own minds.)

All of this is to say that I don’t necessarily mind assigning this novel to Bulis, even if that very fact means it’s likely to be more traditionalist fare. If anything, Bulis has demonstrated a cannier ability than most to tell good stories with past Doctors that other writers haven’t quite managed to crack, which makes him an ideal choice to handle the Second Doctor.

Even though The Eye of the Giant may not have been dabbling in the same kinds of hefty political ideas as something like Dancing the Code, it was still the first time that the Missing Adventures had managed to tell a good Third Doctor story. It wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly preferable to The Ghosts of N-Space.

As for the Sixth Doctor, State of Change is often unfairly overlooked in discussions about the rehabilitation of the Colin Baker years, and probably remains Bulis’ best and most important work to date. Once again, it was far from an Earth-shattering breakthrough in the field of Doctor Who storytelling, but it managed to be precisely the right kind of book at precisely the right time. The work done in later novels like Time of Your Life or Millennial Rites – not to mention the plethora of audio dramas from Big Finish – couldn’t have been done without the solid foundations laid by State of Change.

If, as I’ve hopefully established by now, Bulis is one of the go-to guys for solid, reliable Doctor Who fare, then getting him to contribute a Second Doctor novel can only be an improvement. Say what you will about The Menagerie or Invasion of the Cat-People, but it’s very hard to argue that either of those novels are particularly solid or reliable. So, was Bulis able to work his magic and save the Second Doctor? Well, not exactly…

Twilight of the Gods is just as much of a dull, unrelenting slog as fan wisdom would have you believe, and it’s probably Bulis’ worst book since Shadowmind. The guest cast are paper thin, existing more as a bunch of broadly-drawn archetypes acting out an equally broad central conflict that simply falls back on all the tired clichés associated with the “war between two alien factions” school of Doctor Who storytelling. If you’ve seen enough of the classic series, none of it will be surprising in the least, except perhaps for those points at which it seems to offer even more proof that the author seems to desperately wish he was writing Star Trek rather than Doctor Who.

The cruellest irony of all, though, is that Twilight of the Gods still manages to be the strongest Second Doctor novel to date.

As ever, it’s probably best if we start with the basics before we get into any kind of deeper analysis. Twilight of the Gods is a sequel to The Web Planet, and that alone bears commenting on. Up until the publication of The Sands of Time in May 1996, the Missing Adventures had generally avoided doing direct sequels to classic television serials, but it seems as if Justin Richards’ novel had opened the floodgates.

The Scales of Injustice sought to plug a continuity gap in Warriors of the Deep by revealing that the Third Doctor and Liz encountered the Silurians a second time after the events of, well, The Silurians. The Shadow of Weng-Chiang awkwardly tried to overcome the Yellow Peril themes of Talons by relocating the action to 1930s Shanghai. Even Killing Ground, the lone novel in this period to not serve as a follow-up to a televised adventure, still featured a classic Doctor Who adversary as its main villain, and it’s not too unreasonable to describe the book as a sequel to Lyons’ own Time of Your Life.

What can explain this sudden wave of sequelitis? Well, I don’t rightly know. The most plausible theory I can construct is that it’s some kind of response to the realisation, steadily dawning at this time, that Virgin were probably going to lose their mandate as the home of original Doctor Who novels in short order in the wake of the TV movie. Perhaps that terrible knowledge led to a wave of introspection, with the books taking stock of the franchise’s past successes in an effort to recapture the days of yore.

This is a pretty flimsy hypothesis, though, considering the fact that many of these books would surely have been commissioned well in advance of the airing of the TV movie, and therefore at a time when nobody could have rightly known how well the nascent reboot-that-never-was would perform. Hell, being released on May 16, 1996, the release of The Sands of Time would have actually predated the British airing of the TV movie by about eleven days. As such, I really don’t think any of this was particularly conscious, and it was likely just a huge coincidence that so many sequels should land one after the other in rapid succession.

Whatever the case may be, the fact that we’ve reached a point where we’re offering up sequels to The Web Planet should only serve to outline how deeply the sequel craze has taken hold within the Missing Adventures. I actually don’t mind The Web Planet as a weird, trippy slice of psychedelic eccentricity, and I do think it speaks to the wonder and unique potential inherent in Doctor Who that a story like that can be wedged in between two period pieces about the Great Fire of Rome and the time of the Third Crusade. Only a show as brazenly quirky and ambitious as Doctor Who would even try to create a whole alien planet on the kind of small budget afforded a weekly BBC science-fiction series in the 1960s, after all.

If that’s not enough, I’m even quite fond of Bill Strutton’s 1965 novelisation of the story. Of the original three Frederick Mueller novelisations that served as the spark for Target Books’ later dominance of the field, The Web Planet certainly benefits from the prose treatment in a way that The Daleks and The Crusade simply don’t. That’s not to dismiss David Whitaker or anything, merely to point out that Vortis is a hell of a lot more convincing when you don’t have to think about such piddling trifles as “staying within the budget” or “recording footage on time.”

Nevertheless, the fact remains that The Web Planet is most definitely the odd one out among those stories that have received the sequel treatment from the Missing Adventures to date. If we refer to the same 2014 Doctor Who Magazine poll I cited in my review of The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, the disparity in fans’ estimation of these serials becomes strikingly clear.

While Pyramids of Mars and The Talons of Weng-Chiang each sit snugly within the Top 10, and even The Silurians manages to achieve fiftieth place – no small feat for a list with nearly 250 entries – The Web Planet places at an astonishingly low 219th. This makes it the third lowest-rated First Doctor serial in the list, surpassed only by The Sensorites and The Space Museum. If you’re looking for an opinion more contemporary to 1996, consider The Discontinuity Guide‘s judgment that the story was “…imaginative, ambitious, and, by modern standards, slow and silly looking.”

Again, I don’t bring all of this up to suggest that I think either of these opinions should be considered pieces of ironclad, gospel truth. Lord knows I am far from being one who pledges undying allegiance to fan consensus. My point is that The Web Planet stands as a strange choice to receive a sequel.

Were fans really chomping at the bit to know exactly what happened to Vortis after the Doctor, Barbara, Vicki and Ian left it? More importantly, was anyone actually under the impression that a sequel would really have much of any weight or consequence to add to the original?

Both of these are, I suppose, eventualities that I cannot entirely rule out. Every story will inevitably accrue a small yet passionate sect of fans, no matter how critically reviled it may be on the whole. I’m sure there are people who absolutely adore Underworld or The Space Pirates and consider them to be the pinnacle of Doctor Who, unthinkable as it might be to some.

Putting all of that aside, however, a declaration I do feel reasonably confident in making is that Twilight of the Gods does not manage to accomplish the task of presenting the audience with anything particularly weighty, consequential or new, and I can’t imagine even the most diehard of Web Planet enjoyers being especially stoked with this as a continuation of the original tale.

But make no mistake, there are some new additions here, and we’re going to talk about them presently. The most substantial is the presence of the Rhumon, a race who are split into two factions locked in an endless and bitter military conflict.

On the one hand, you have the Imperium, a state ruled by a monarchy which claims divine legitimacy through a priesthood who convey the wishes of their benevolent deity, Omnimon. On the other, you have the Republicans, who are basically a thinly-veiled Communist analogue. They live extremely regimented lives, feel intense antipathy towards what they perceive as the tyranny and decadence of the Imperium, and consider their enemies’ claims to divine providence to be a load of old tosh.

You might think that these factions are both pretty unoriginal and predictable as far as Doctor Who goes. You might not be especially convinced as to Bulis’ ability to construct compelling and nuanced drama of a political and/or military stripe, given how tedious much of Shadowmind was. Both concerns would be well-founded.

Neither the Republicans nor the Imperials ever really manage to rise above the simplistic descriptions I just gave you. Oh, sure, there are plenty of individuals within both factions with their own loves and hopes and desires and relationships, but they all feel rather rote and mechanical. A military officer feeling the pressure of duty on his marriage here, a reminiscence about a bakery and an old flame there. And let’s not forget the classic double act of a reasonable yet weary military commander who occasionally has to rein in their zealous, fanatical adviser – a double act so timeless, Bulis does it twice, once for each of the warring sides.

To be fair, the warring states serve a pretty clear purpose within the book. Bulis is very obviously trying to tie them into a grand moral statement on the futility and tragedy of war, and how we’re all alike underneath it all. We’re all part of the same race, man, the human… er, Rhumon race! It’s a nice enough sentiment, I suppose, but it all feels rather surface-level and prosaic. What’s more, given the facelessness of all the innumerable and indistinguishable functionaries and soldiers that populate the novel – even among the non-Rhumon characters like the Menoptera – I think it’s fair to say that the whole “We are all the same” philosophy may have been carried a little too far in this case.

Underneath all of this, there is perhaps the faintest glimmer of interesting political commentary to be found. Vortis is very clearly positioned as an analogue for those nations that found themselves caught in the middle of the Cold War power struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It’s an allegory which is admittedly rather outdated for the world as it stands in 1996. The Russian Federation was far from being the “evil empire” spoken of so alarmingly by Ronald Reagan, and the United States’ role in world affairs was more that of the lone global superpower intervening in a peacekeeping capacity in isolated conflicts like those in Somalia or the former Yugoslavia.

Still, if you’re trying to evoke the world of 1965 in which The Web Planet originally aired, I suppose there are worse decisions you can make. Considering the way in which the Psi Powers arc has been playing with notions of historical recurrence at around this same time, it might even serve as something of a prescient and timely critique of teleological viewpoints like Francis Fukuyama’s infamous “End of History,” or the idea that the consequences and attitudes that sprung from the Cold War could be so readily brushed aside. And really, I’d probably eat all of that stuff up. That is, after all, kind of my whole thing. It’s real bread and butter Dale’s Ramblings material.

A shame that it’s not really present here, then. Any potential for deep or hard-hitting political commentary is lost in the crushing mundanity of – you guessed it – capture, escape, recapture. As I said, it’s not that I necessarily need deep or hard-hitting political commentary in every book, but this is the third novel in a row where the author has pushed any potentially insightful themes or analysis aside in order to serve up a dull runaround. It’s all getting to be a bit much, honestly, and I simply cannot bring myself to care enough about the Rhumon to seriously treat their political system as an object that merits proper, in-depth critique.

It’s there, it’s dull, deal with it.

(To sum up how basic and barebones this all is, the novel throws in a whole subplot regarding some magical space technology which the Rhumon claim can measure physical differences based on belief… only it turns out that it actually just measures the different mineral contents of the Republican and Imperial food supplements. Sorry, but when you’re trying to earnestly sell me on the resolution to a technobabble mystery that essentially involves a war being based on a bottle of Swisse multivitamins, I’m going to laugh. We’re at “telepathic squirrel duplicate” levels of ludicrous here, folks, so I really can’t be bothered to do my usual spiel about this novel as an exploration of faith in the 1990s or whatever. If it is there, it’s so painfully hamfisted that it renders any meaningful commentary almost completely incoherent.)

The moments at which Twilight of the Gods comes closest to redeeming itself are probably those scenes concerned with the characterisation of the regular cast. As the first writer to handle Victoria in the Missing Adventures – not withstanding the older version from Downtime – Bulis actually puts in a pretty decent showing.

Existing in the gap between The Web of Fear and Fury from the Deep as this story does, we get the usual “companion is considering leaving” treatment. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be much to write home about, but Victoria’s exit has always stood out among the classic series’ companion departures.

She doesn’t die, she doesn’t fall in love, she doesn’t find some nobler and higher calling to give her life meaning. She just decides that she’s scared and fed up with the life lived by the Doctor and Jamie. That’s a far more human and understandable departure than a lot of companions got, and it’s therefore pretty fertile grounds for what might otherwise be pretty standard or predictable Missing Adventure fare.

And, to Bulis’ credit, he does a pretty good job. You really get the sense that Victoria is a fully-formed individual with her own distinct personal history, which is more than can be said for a lot of her appearances on television. She’s frightened by the ordeals she’s put through, yes, but she tries her best to overcome that fear, and you can’t help but want her to succeed. Sure, the sequences where she reflects on the way in which the Rhumon’s fanaticism parallels the Christian missionaries of her own era might be about as subtle as a bag of hammers dropped from a considerable height, but it’s the most natural and believable character arc to be found in this book, so I’ll take what I can get.

Jamie also gets some pretty solid characterisation, and contrasting his sympathy towards the plight of the Menoptera with Victoria’s steady realisation of her own past privilege as the daughter of a wealthy English family is another nice, if perhaps unsubtle, piece of character work. It’s a shame this thread wasn’t developed a bit more but again, we have to take what we can get.

As for the Doctor, I have to agree with the assessment of past reviewers that he is given a few more dramatic speeches than Troughton was historically, but if you can overlook that minor detail I think this is one of the better attempts at writing for the Second Doctor so far. Not much more to say than that.

So it’s fair to say that I really didn’t care for Twilight of the Gods at all. It’s monotonous, much too long, and packed to the brim with glaring examples of some of Bulis’ worst tendencies as a writer in a way that his novels have generally avoided since Shadowmind. Despite that, it manages to offer up some vaguely interesting and accurate characterisation for the regular cast, and I counted precisely zero racial slurs.

Don’t misunderstand my point here, I am fully aware that these are some astronomically low benchmarks by which to measure a book’s quality. Unfortunately, the fact that Twilight of the Gods manages to clear those hurdles still puts it ahead of both The Menagerie and Invasion of the Cat-People almost by default. It’s a sad indictment of just how poor the Second Doctor’s run in print has been so far if a book as eminently flawed as this can make a serious claim to being the best novel to feature the character.

Miscellaneous Observations

I didn’t even bother commenting on the Animus and its plan, because it really is just a load of old guff that serves to offer up a thin excuse to bring back the original big bad from The Web Planet, in one of the most unsurprising twists in the history of unsurprising twists. All of a sudden the culture of Vortis and the Menoptera’s ability to fly are actually the result of some magical super mineral called isocryte, which we have never heard of before or since, and the Animus wants to use said mineral to pilot Vortis around like it’s The Dalek Invasion of Earth all over again and all I can think about is how nice the back of my eyelids look at this time of year.

This also ties into some nonsense about the Gods of Light experimenting with Vortis and recurring interludes featuring Bris, Twel, Ilex and Oryl. I’d say that the incomprehensibility of these scenes leads the reader to have a hard time caring about how these characters fit into the overall story, but I had a hard time caring about anybody in this book so I don’t really think that these sequences are a special case. There’s a certain grim irony in the idea that the entirety of this planet’s existence amounts to nothing more than, as the Doctor puts it, “an unauthorised student research project,” but it’s never developed far enough to be as impactful as it might.

No, it’s much more important that we get interminable action scenes where Jamie, the Menoptera and the Rhumon get turned into giants and engage in grisly, gory mano y mano combat with the Animus. Perhaps these scenes would have been thrilling if they were adapted to celluloid, and with the right budget, but on the printed page they are ultimately just as tiresome as everything else in the book.

And, once more, I really cannot stress enough how pitifully dull a novel has become when it’s offering up serious technobabble explanations as to why the trippy weird butterfly men from a single First Doctor story thirty years ago are actually able to fly. I’m sure that there do exist more uninteresting things than Menoptera biology lessons, but at this very moment I am hard-pressed to think of what they might be.

One thing I will give Bulis credit for is that his descriptions of the landscape of Vortis are frequently very evocative and really help place you in this alien world. It’s a worthy attempt at succeeding Strutton, and the addition of the rejuvenated flower forests adds some nice environmental variety. A book can’t survive on pretty descriptions alone, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Final Thoughts

Sorry if this review was a bit harsher and more brusque than my usual ones. I still tried to be as balanced as possible and never get as overly mean or personal as I feel I may have been in my Shadowmind review, especially since Bulis has proven that he’s able to pen much better novels than his debut. Equally, however, that’s also why it’s so disappointing to get a novel that is this poor.

Not only that, but it stings all the more when you consider the fact that it’s coming off the back of The Shadow of Weng-Chiang and The Death of Art, and I wasn’t especially keen on those either. What we really need is someone who can come in and clean up this rut that the books have found themselves in.

Anyway, on a totally unrelated note, join me next time as we read the debut of some fellow called checks notes Russell T. Davies. Huh, never heard of him. We’re going back to Thatcher’s Britain for a tale of drugs and ancient psychic forces from the dawn of history, it’s Damaged Goods. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper