Virgin New Adventures Reviews: Eternity Weeps by Jim Mortimore (or, “The Bleakverse, Part IV: Kill the Moon”)

As we enter into 1997, it’s quite clear that there’s change in the air for Doctor Who.

Well, OK, maybe that’s overselling things a little. In the most important sense, not much has actually changed since we talked about Bad Therapy and Cold Fusion. Pretty much everything that I said about the state of the franchise in the former of those two reviews still stands, but to recap for those who are just joining us, the eagerly anticipated and hoped-for revival of Doctor Who as an American co-production in the wake of a high-profile television movie had pretty much fizzled out by this stage.

In the gap between December and January, the biggest news which fans could hold on to in a last ditch effort to find some hope that a new McGann-headlined series might yet materialise was the BBC’s decision to extend their agreement with Universal Television at the last possible minute. Whereas the studio’s option to take the TV movie to series had previously been set to expire at the end of 1996, the ultimate decision on the fate of the prospective pilot would now be afforded an extra four months’ worth of breathing room.

I made a passing reference to this stay of execution in my review of Bad Therapy, but I do think it’s worth reflecting on exactly why this decision was taken, as it’ll help us to provide some possible answers to some pretty important questions. These questions include:

• Why did the franchise never quite make the great trans-Atlantic migration that was Philip Segal’s dream?
• Why are the New Adventures about to be quietly supplanted by BBC Books’ Eighth Doctor Adventures novels?
• And why did Eternity Weeps land with about as much fanfare and jubilation as a fiery cannonball shot straight into fandom’s collective places of residence?

On the face of it, the extension of Universal’s arrangement might initially seem a little odd, and it is. The material realities facing any attempt to produce a new version of Doctor Who in collaboration with the American studio system had not changed, after all.

Fox had been distinctly underwhelmed with the TV movie’s performance in its Tuesday night movie slot, and had consequently pulled out of the project post-haste. The distinct lack of any network on which to air a full series was always going to be a major roadblock for Universal to contend with, even if anyone at the studio had actually demonstrated any interest in pursuing such a show.

It’s worth noting that the studio’s own reluctance to aid in the financing of the film had almost sunk the project to begin with, and a firm commitment on their end had only been secured after a number of messages – claiming to be penned by Segal himself – appeared on fan sites explaining the situation and leaking the phone number of Universal Television president Tom Thayer. The phone line was subsequently clogged with messages from irate fans, all demanding that Thayer deliver on the promised monies.

With the ratings performance of the telemovie being distinctly underwhelming at best – it tied with a repeat showing of fellow Fox programme COPS as the seventy-fifth most-watched show of that week – one almost suspects that Universal’s judgment of the whole affair was probably something akin to “We told you so.”

For a justification of the licensing deal’s extension, then, we must direct our gaze closer to home. In marked contrast to its performance across the pond two weeks earlier, the May Bank Holiday broadcast of the TV movie in the United Kingdom attracted a whopping 9.1 million viewers, enough to garner it a comfortable ninth place ranking among the week’s televised offerings. This also separated it immensely from the ninety-first place which Doctor Who had attained with the broadcast of the final episode of the classic series six and a half years earlier.

The message was pretty clear, then. Doctor Who still had legs, but the feet at the end of those legs were not likely to find any kind of solid grounding in the cutthroat world of American prime-time television. Here, though, that ugly question of “Why?” raises its head once again, and I think the big answer ultimately just comes down to a question of poor timing and shifting network priorities.

The decision to turn to Fox had very much been a desperate last resort for Philip Segal, with Rupert Murdoch’s fledgling network pretty much standing as his one remaining viable port of call after facing rejection from the Big Three networks of ABC, NBC and CBS. When Segal secured a deal with Fox in June 1994 to broadcast the completed film, the network was still less than a decade old.

Even in these preliminary stages, however, Fox was already undergoing a transformation just as profound as that facing Doctor Who itself. The previous December, a $1.58-billion deal had been struck with the National Football Commission for Fox to gain exclusive broadcast rights to the NFL, managing to outbid CBS in the process.

The real scheduling coup would be announced to the public just over a month before the network put ink to paper in their agreement with Segal, as no fewer than twelve local affiliates which had enjoyed a long and storied association with the Big Three networks suddenly switched allegiances to join Fox.

This, in hindsight, was one of the most seismic upheavals in the history of American broadcast television, and the start of Fox’s meteoric ascension to the lofty heights of unquestioned “fourth network” status. Like most topics over here at Dale’s Ramblings, we’re going to underline just how meteoric this rise to power was by reference to, you guessed it, The X-Files.

See, The X-Files is obviously a crucial televisual document in understanding the general history of cult television in the 1990s, but it also speaks quite well to the history of Fox in particular, and even the Doctor Who television movie itself.

In many respects, Chris Carter was quite lucky to receive the greenlight from Fox when he did, with the first season of his soon-to-be hit show premiering just three months before the historic deal with the NFL. The X-Files, therefore, would arrive at a point in time just after the network had begun to truly stretch out its hand into the television arena – before January 1993, the channel had failed to produce a full seven-night television schedule – but just before the big boom.

This sense of perfect timing pretty handily explains why the show returned for a second season in September 1994, despite failing to even crack the top one hundred shows of the 1993-94 season. That second season, however, would see the show rise to sixty-third place, and it seemed like the series was destined to be another shining jewel in Fox’s increasingly lustrous crown.

The parallels and overlaps between The X-Files and Segal’s Doctor Who are pretty obvious, and have been remarked upon often enough that it’s hardly a novel observation. Not only did they share the Fox connection, but both productions would conduct the bulk of their filming – as with most genre fiction shows in the 1990s – on location in Vancouver.

As I observed back in my review of Christmas on a Rational Planet, the network even dropped the first commercials for their shiny new telefilm in the premiere broadcast of Jose Chung’s From Outer Space. What isn’t quite as well-discussed, however, is the sense in which this relationship had a profoundly detrimental impact on the show.

To be fair, as I kind of just alluded to, it does receive some share of discussion. When the topic is raised, though, it’s usually in service of a point that the decision to ape shows like The X-Files was a fundamentally flawed one in its own right. As Elizabeth Sandifer writes in her 2012 TARDIS Eruditorum essay on the TV movie:

“The problem isn’t that it’s American, but that the specific type of American television it’s emulating is mediocre, and it has no ambitions whatsoever towards surpassing that mediocrity. The TV Movie is trying to be bland and pointless American sci-fi, it succeeds admirably, and for that, at least, it is rightly hated.”

On the level of first principles, this is a take that I would broadly agree with. While books like Who Killed Kennedy and The Scales of Injustice had argubly proved that there was some mileage to be gleaned from a premise like “Doctor Who does The X-Files,” I can also point to countless examples of novels that seem content to simply offer up inferior renditions of Star Trek storytelling in an era where there were as many as two Star Trek shows on television at any one time.

In short, if the niche market of readers of the Doctor Who novels proved itself unable to warm to the prospect of cod Star Trek, then there was virtually no hope of the wider television audience being willing to stick around to watch a poor substitute for The X-Files or Sliders when they could just… choose to watch The X-Files or Sliders instead. What’s more, they wouldn’t even have to change their channel viewing habits to do it.

All this is true, but I do think that the above assessment remains incomplete. Yes, Doctor Who may have suffered for the decision to imitate mediocre cult television, but the deeper problem had less to do with the fact that this television was mediocre than with the fact that it was simply not the type of television Fox seemed to want to make.

Sure, Sliders was renewed for a third season on the network for 1996-97, but this would mark the end of its original run on Fox. When it returned in June 1998, it would migrate to the much more niche Sci-Fi Channel.

The X-Files, too, went on to have a nine season run, even releasing a full-on theatrical film in the gap between the fifth and sixth seasons, but it’s still hard not to consider this the exception rather than the rule. It could quite handily be pigeonholed as something of a genre show, but it was also a bona fide ratings success.

Just ten days after the publication of Eternity Weeps, Leonard Betts would be chosen as the lead-out programme for Super Bowl XXXI, scoring the series’ highest ever ratings of 29.15 million viewers in the process. At the next Emmy Awards in September, Gillian Anderson would snag a coveted Outstanding Lead Actress win, and Peter Boyle and Darin Morgan had both already received Emmys for their work on Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose the previous year. These are the kinds of prestigious wins that so-called genre shows don’t often achieve, so the fact that The X-Files was able to attain them at all is noteworthy in and of itself.

If you want to name genre outings cancelled by Fox after somewhat abbreviated runs, the task is much easier. Space: Above & Beyond, Firefly, Millennium, Harsh Realm, The Lone Gunmen. Hell, if you broaden the criteria by which a cancellation would “count” on this list, you can even see the network gleefully pulling the trigger on numerous comedies like Family Guy or Wonderfalls.

Even if Doctor Who had somehow scrounged up the ratings necessary to convince Fox to proceed to series, then, it seems unlikely that it would have really flourished in such an environment for very long. From the standpoint of 2023, it’s perhaps tempting to say that it might have fared better on a premium cable network like HBO, but in January 1997, we’re still six months away from the premiere of Tom Fontana’s Oz, and nearly two years removed from The Sopranos and the so-called “Golden Age of Television.”

And so we must slightly alter our perspective on the TV movie’s ratings. Doctor Who was pretty definitively a non-starter in America, but it had proven potentially lucrative in the United Kingdom. Not lucrative enough to go ahead with a full-on series, but certainly enough to convince the BBC that it might not be especially wise to keep handing out the license to print official fiction to random companies like Virgin.

Which, in turn, brings us back around to the New Adventures, and the shift that we’ve been talking about for the past few months. By this stage, the shift has been all but completed, and nowhere is this more glaringly apparent than in Jim Mortimore’s Eternity Weeps.

This shift makes itself known right from the front cover, in fact, and even the least observant and plugged-in of readers surely couldn’t fail to notice the absence of the familiar and reassuring Doctor Who logo designed in 1987 by Oliver Elmes.

The feeling of a profound distance from any of the familiar landmarks of the New Adventures or, indeed, Doctor Who at large can only have been exacerbated once they actually read the book, containing as it does a pronounced dearth of scenes which actually feature the Doctor himself, a focus on the miserable dissolution of a marriage between two fan-favourite novel original recurring cast members, the violent death of a former companion, and the utter annihilation of a tenth of the Earth’s population.

With all of these factors in play – and I certainly recognise the dramatic weight of the proclamation I’m about to make here, but bear with me – I think it’s fair to say that Eternity Weeps might just represent Jim Mortimore at the absolute pinnacle of his own particular brand of brutality and cynicism.

Because, y’know, Blood Heat and Parasite were just such a bundle of laughs, weren’t they?

Even amidst the surroundings of the New Adventures’ rather sombre and subdued endgame, this book sticks out. Novels like The Room With No Doors, Lungbarrow or even The Well-Mannered War might display a certain frustration at the impending relegation of the New Adventures to the role of “a spin-off of a spin-off,” but there was always a sense that this was tempered with a dose of optimism for the franchise’s future. Not so for Eternity Weeps.

Choosing to adopt the rather skewed metric of Mortimore’s own prior novels as our baseline for judgments of gloominess cannot even help us here. The fictional worlds of Lucifer Rising, Blood Heat and Parasite might all have been devastated by the events contained therein, but even these veritable orgies of carnage, death and destruction went to the trouble of offering up a tiny morsel of hope at the end.

Where a novel like Blood Heat saw the Doctor allow the gradual dissolution of the Silurian Earth timeline rather than wiping it out in an instant as he had originally intended, here he becomes directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings. There’s no convenient reset button, no last-minute out to allow Mortimore to pull his punches, just an overwhelming sense of futility and despair. And divorce, I suppose.

Returning to the bigger picture for a minute here, it must be said if the TV movie’s flop had cemented the notion that there was little space for a cult series like Doctor Who within the American network system, the great irony was that it still managed to ensure that the New Adventures would shortly become marginalised as a cult property in their own right.

This had, to a certain extent, always been true. It was always going to be true of any novel series that tried to offer up a continuation of a cancelled oddity of British science fiction like Doctor Who. With the impending loss of the prose license, however, even that small claim to legitimacy – not to mention that ever-dreaded buzzword, “canonicity” – was soon to be withdrawn.

All of this is to say that at this very moment, fandom was in a very confused and uncertain place, and the decision to proclaim the NAs’ new identity with a book as angry, downbeat and jaded as Eternity Weeps smacks so strongly of a chronic inability to read the room that it’s almost laughable. “Everything you’ve ever loved will die horribly” is not exactly the message you want to hear in the immediate aftermath of your favourite show’s failed attempt at a revival.

This probably goes a long way towards explaining exactly why the novel met with the reaction it did. If you cast a glance at the final version of Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, the contrast between Eternity Weeps and its contemporaries is marked.

Of the final five New Adventures, four managed to fall quite comfortably within the top twenty; even Bad Therapy, cutting it quite fine, nonetheless straddles the very edge of this divide in the #20 spot. Eternity Weeps sits at #48, somehow managing to fall quite some ways below such utter rubbish as GodEngine and St Anthony’s Fire. It is, in fact, the second-lowest rated Mortimore book on the list – being beaten out by Parasite at #59 – and, alongside The Death of Art, one of only two New Adventures from the period of 1996 and 1997 to fall within the bottom quartile of the ranking.

It’s therefore quite clear that we’ve reached another one of those books which could understatedly be described as “a bit controversial,” in the grand tradition of works like Transit or Falls the Shadow. This is a book where to even state a strong opinion one way or the other is almost akin to planting a battle standard on the great Bosworth Field of fandom.

(As you might guess, I don’t really agree with taking such an attitude towards what are, at the end of the day, just a bunch of science-fiction tie-in books. But hey, if fandom will insist on trending towards pomposity, I have to at least pay lip service to it, I suppose.)

Of course, long-term readers of Dale’s Ramblings will know that I’ve gone on record as a bit of a Mortimore fan – well, of his books at least, we’ll leave discussions of the man’s own recent conduct until the Miscellaneous Observations – even as I recognise that there are definitely flaws aplenty within his work that tend to make their presence known if he’s not careful.

Even allowing for those issues, the fact remains that – for better or worse – nobody is better at writing like Jim Mortimore than Mortimore himself, despite the best efforts of many other NA authors. There’s simply a certain mind-boggling, purely bonkers sense of scale and propulsive force that drives the best of his novels that I can’t help but find strangely captivating in spite of my better judgment.

Could I honestly sit down and argue that Parasite, say, is a flawless masterwork that deserves to be considered in conversations about the best of the New Adventures? No, but by the same token, I certainly don’t think it deserves to be considered the third-worst in the series. Even on the most basic, rudimentary level of “avoiding typographical and grammatical errors,” I think it still scores significantly higher than Shadowmind, ranked directly above it at #58 by the almighty Sullivan list.

This, too, is a pretty good summary of my thoughts on Eternity Weeps. In many respects, it’s quite probably one of the most unapologetically Mortimore-like books (is “Mortimorean” too pretentious?) that Mortimore has ever written, and this sense of archetypality magnifies both the good and the bad aspects of that particular authorial style.

In the end, this ensures that the novel almost plays like some kind of weird, apocalyptic Rorschach test. If you like the way Mortimore tends to write his stories, you’ll probably find it strangely enthralling from cover to cover, but if you aren’t… well, you’ll probably just find the experience so excruciating that you might just end up envying the faceless hordes who fall victim to his literary bloodthirst throughout its pages.

With everything I’ve just said, I think it’s no surprise that I fall pretty firmly into the former camp. Oh, don’t get me wrong, this book has its issues, and I will be among the first to admit it, but nothing in Eternity Weeps really manages to shake my belief that the continued commissioning of an author as creative, as polarising and, frankly, as batshit insane as Mortimore is a testament to the atypical commitment to stylistic diversity which Virgin’s editorial staff repeatedly exhibited.

So, I suppose we had better begin with the actual plotting of the thing, such as it is. Like Parasite and Lucifer Rising before it, Eternity Weeps is pulling pretty heavily from the kind of slow, wondrous – or ponderous, depending on who you ask – “artifact” science fiction typified by Mortimore’s perennial muse, Arthur C. Clarke, and the result is a book which feels, as you might expect, unapologetically huge in its sense of scale.

Only in the prologue to a Jim Mortimore novel could you so offhandedly reveal that the subsequent story will span over six billion years and conclude with six hundred million deaths. The fact that it’s a Jim Mortimore novel does also mean that the audience’s primary reaction to this information isn’t likely to be anything more moving than a simple “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

This fact is emblematic of perhaps the most routine complaint thrown at Mortimore’s books, and Eternity Weeps in particular. When the death toll of your novel reaches such astronomically high levels, you do rather run the risk of desensitisation. If you’ll permit me to indulge in a particularly bloodthirsty and nihilistic form of Cartesian psychology for a moment, the fact is that the human brain simply can’t adequately distinguish the impact of six hundred million deaths from that of five hundred million.

I could attempt to construct some kind of grand defence here as to why this isn’t the case, but it’s true. If the sensation of numbness managed to creep in around the edges of a book like Damaged Goods, in spite of a significantly lower death count and far more characterisation of the supporting cast from Davies than you could ever realistically hope for from a Mortimore production, then Eternity Weeps hasn’t got a prayer. Six hundred million is simply too big a number.

Yet even as I’ll grant you these points, I do think Mortimore manages to quite deftly lessen the impact of these issues, and a lot of it boils down to a simple question of pacing. Realistically, that’s what it has always boiled down to, and I’ve been saying words to that effect since at least the time of my Blood Heat review four whole years ago.

Basically, the thinking seems to be that if you ratchet up the speed of your novel to maximum, the audience simply won’t have enough time to process any possible gaps along the way. It might not be the most traditionally skilled or thoughtful form of art under the sun, but it still requires a certain finesse to successfully pull it off. Supporting evidence for this claim, again, is quite readily available in the form of the many failed attempts at replicating the exhilarating success of Blood Heat.

If nothing else, Eternity Weeps is an expertly paced work. Initially, the opening chapters seem to run against this impression, with Mortimore dutifully going through all the necessary archaeological minutiae to get Bernice, Jason and their respective cadres of assorted doomed extras onto the mountains.

While these segments could have quite easily become monotonous, they were handled well enough that I never really found myself getting bored. Although set in the midst of a warzone – including the retroactively eerie inclusion of a heavily mobilised Iraqi military in April 2003 – there was a surprisingly relaxed tone to it all that almost seemed to recall the successes enjoyed by Justin Richards in his own similarly Bernice-led, Doctor-lite opening to Theatre of War.

And then, about a quarter of the way through, everything just went to hell and I found it very difficult to put the book down. Right when I had started to be lulled into a false sense of security, all my illusions were shattered, and Mortimore never let up on the accelerator for a second.

While none of the guest cast’s personalities had been especially deep and nuanced as presented to the audience before this point, the almost clinical precision with which they were all dispatched was truly something to behold in a perverse, slow-motion car crash kind of way.

Enhancing this sense of raw, visceral chaos is the decision to tell the book from a first person perspective. With the exception of an oddity like Who Killed Kennedy, I’m pretty sure this is the first time one of the New or Missing Adventures has chosen to adopt such a structure for the entirety of its length, and it’s certainly effective at creating a sense of immersion. Depending on your own personal tolerance for death and destruction on such a Biblical scale, that might well be counted as a negative, but it worked well enough for me that I’m mostly willing to count it as a success.

Lest you dismiss this first person perspective as a trivial narrative contrivance on Mortimore’s part, it ultimately ends up fundamentally changing the novel’s character, and only further contributes the sense that this is effectively an attempt to push the established confines of the New Adventures to their breaking point.

In all probability, the decision to drop the Doctor Who logo starting with Eternity Weeps was a decision dictated by nothing more than the abstract logic of the Gregorian calendar, but it somehow feels entirely in-line with the way in which the Doctor is presented throughout. Being told from the perspective of Benny and Jason – who trade off on narration duties with each chapter in a prototypical use of a technique Mortimore will later employ in next year’s Eye of Heaven – the novel manages to effectively keep Time’s Champion on the very edges of the frame for much of its length.

Even with his presence being so actively minimised, the printed page somehow still feels too small to contain the raw, elemental power that he seems to be here. This is, without a doubt, one of the biggest and most mind-boggling portrayals the character has ever seen, and the ominous moniker of “the whirlwind” that he’s acquired here seems wholly appropriate. At times, it goes so far that it almost seems determined to make Dave Stone’s novels collectively crawl into a dark corner and cry themselves to sleep.

This is obviously very difficult to square with the Doctor as seen in either of the books sandwiching this one, but you almost get the suspicion that that’s the point. When all is said and done, Eternity Weeps isn’t really supposed to be the Doctor’s novel at all. It’s Benny’s. If Return of the Living Dad was a proof of concept for the idea of Bernice Summerfield’s personal history serving as the driving force behind one of her own adventures, then this is… well, it’s been called a backdoor pilot, but I’m hesitant to use that term since it implies a sense of conventionality that I don’t really think is applicable.

Mind you, that’s not to say that the steps taken here don’t fit the broad objectives of any good pilot worth its salt, and Mortimore would go on to confess in later years that this was very much intentional.

“When I found out Virgin was planning a New Adventures spin-off series,” he explained in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, “I asked Peter Darvill-Evans if I could write the first one without the Doctor in. Peter, as usual, had other plans. The lack of Doctor in Eternity Weeps was no coincidence. It was my first go at being genuinely mental in a book and he just didn’t seem to sit comfortably there unless as this mythic, rumoured presence; a force of nature almost.”

“Genuinely mental” feels as good a description as any, and even if the book technically fulfills the broad strokes of its editorial mandate – namely, break up Benny and Jason – the beats with which it chooses to fill the remaining gaps are so utterly off-the-wall as to make it extremely difficult to neatly categorise and quantify.

Still, the divorce of Benny and Jason is a big enough deal for the NAs that we very much have to address it. Coming just eight months after their joyous, celebratory wedding in Happy Endings, it was understandably quite a shocking development for fandom at the time.

To hear Rebecca Levene speak on the matter in conversation with fellow New Adventure alumni and frequent DWM contributor Matthew Jones for his regular Fluid Links column in the magazine’s 252nd issue, the reasoning was purely one of pragmatics. “The more I thought about it,” she explained, “the more I realised that we would have to lose Jason because books whose central character is happily married don’t work.”

The same feature saw Jones note, as one of the authors invited to the preliminary meetings on setting the shape and scope of a proper Bernice Summerfield line, that “several of the writers [were] quite perturbed that a divorce was on the cards.”

Whatever the feelings of the individual writers may have been, and for all that I think Virgin may have still been able to craft a workable structure for the solo Benny books in which she and Jason were still married, I can’t exactly begrudge Levene too much for making this decision.

Admittedly, it’s hard for me to appraise the relationship from the standpoint of a Doctor Who fan in January 1997. When I read Death and Diplomacy back in November, it was with full knowledge of the fact that the blossoming romance between these two characters would be torn apart by Eternity Weeps in nine months’ time.

Even so, I’ve always felt that it would make complete sense that this kind of marriage, whose beginnings were marked by such emotional turbulence, wouldn’t exactly prove the most stable in the long-term. There are a lot of things about Eternity Weeps that feel consciously heightened and exaggerated in that typical Mortimore fashion, but I don’t think that the deteriorating relationship between Benny and Jason is one of them.

The aggression and venom which both of them manage to fling at each other in their moments of stress here don’t exactly paint them in the most flattering of lights, but the characters still feel completely and totally recognisable in the midst of everything. Indeed, the novel repeatedly plays up the almost blackly comic juxtaposition between the vast, epoch-spanning, sulphuric acid-drenched epic taking place in the overarching plot, and the intimate, small-scale tale of a rapidly collapsing marriage.

It’s an approach that probably finds its peak in the inevitable big emotional blowout between the couple, as the insults and insinuations are hurled against the backdrop of the Astronomer Royal’s narrated holographic infodump about the rise and fall of the Cthalctose civilisation. The scale of this exposition is simply jawdropping, taking in black holes and destroyed solar systems and everything in-between, but Mortimore very deliberately and cleverly prevents us from hearing the narration directly.

Instead, we are only provided with descriptions of the stunning visuals, alongside distracted second-hand reports of the Astronomer’s words from Benny’s perspective. It’s a fiendishly brilliant and inventive means of conveying an otherwise quite dry set of revelations, and serves to clearly delineate – for at least this one scene – where the novel’s priorities lie in that age-old tension between the cult science-fiction epic and the domestic drama.

The problem is that this prioritisation is only readily apparent in the case of this one plot thread. For the rest of its length, Eternity Weeps leans pretty heavily in the opposite direction. Granted, Mortimore’s vision of what “Doctor Who as a cult science-fiction property” looks like differs considerably from the TV movie’s, if only in the sense that I think the budget of a weekly television series like Sliders or The X-Files would be sorely tested if they were to attempt even a fraction of the stuff contained within this novel.

If anything, Eternity Weeps‘ chief object of fascination would seem to be something more akin to Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s 1994 overnight box-office sensation, Stargate, with the novel uncannily prefiguring the premiere of Stargate SG-1 on Showtime by about six months. In The Inside Story, however, Mortimore offers his own rationale for the dissolution of Benny and Jason’s marriage: “It’s all soap in the end. Watch any episode of EastEnders.”

In the case of that specific plotline, at least, the defence holds water. However, it’s perhaps telling that Mortimore’s non-Doctor Who work contains original novels for shows like Babylon 5 and Farscape. Both these series arose out of the 1990s science-fiction boom brought about in the wake of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and both found homes far outside the traditional Big Three – well, Big Four if you figure in the smash success of Fox – network landscape that we have already established as a rather unforgiving environment for cult properties of this ilk. When a number of New Adventures writers made the jump to an actual soap (Emmerdale) in the mid-to-late ’90s, Mortimore would be conspicuous by his absence.

I don’t intend to paint this divergence as a bad thing in and of itself. After all, an Emmerdale storyline from the pen of Jim Mortimore would quite possibly be one of the most insane things I could ever conceive of, and not every single writer has to make the jump from literature to television.

But this unresolved tension between the cult and the domestic embeds itself at the heart of Eternity Weeps, and it has implications which are, in their own strange way, just as devastating as any pinhead singularity could ever be. It ensures that the story of Bernice and Jason’s failed marriage sits as a lone island of domesticity amid a jagged, hard-edged and downright angry tornado of cult science-fiction storytelling.

It’s not even that this tension ruins the novel. At times, both approaches are equally capable of producing momentary flashes of brilliance. For all I know, the tension might well be completely intentional, with the ultimate aim of constantly keeping the audience off balance. I certainly wouldn’t put it past Mortimore, and if that was his aim, then he succeeded admirably.

Still, if Eternity Weeps can be said, like many of its contemporaries in this period of the New Adventures, to speak to the current mood of Doctor Who fandom, it doesn’t do so in an especially complimentary fashion. The sharp edges here are at times distinctly off-putting, with a sense that Mortimore is raging against the dying of the light in a way that feels far louder and more embittered than the reflective contemplation of a work like The Room With No Doors.

Perhaps most significant of all is the central threat of the novel. Although the Cthalctose are long since dead, they’re determined to reshape the world in their own image, at the expense of killing off all life on Earth. While there may well be no deeper meaning to the terraforming virus beyond the way in which it enables Mortimore to really hammer in the religious symbolism, it’s also not hard to spot the way in which this narrative might resonate with the frustrations of those at Virgin.

Segal’s reboot may have been dead in the water in all but name, but it had still effectively begun its own process of terraforming the untamed landscape of Doctor Who books. In short order, the New Adventures would be forced to drop the guise under which they had seen so much success for the past five and a half years.

With the loss of the Doctor Who logo from the front cover, it seemed that the process was already well underway by January 1997. The flood had come, and it looked as if the only lasting legacy of the TV movie was to drag the franchise back into the frothing sulphuric acid seas of cult television.

The issue with Eternity Weeps, then, is that it seems completely and totally resigned to that fate. Free will only exists so that predestination can operate properly. On an abstract level, I don’t necessarily object to this. Pessimistic and dejected fiction certainly has its place in the world, and even if the novel’s decision to take such an oppressively downbeat tack in one of fandom’s darkest hours pretty much ensured it would receive a widespread lambasting on release, that doesn’t automatically invalidate the whole exercise.

By the same token, however, this fatalism causes Mortimore some problems. And it’s now that we have to talk about Liz.

Eternity Weeps is, as I alluded to back at the beginning, the novel that kills off Liz Shaw. It is quite possibly one of the most horrific and awful deaths suffered by a former companion, as she is forced to endure excruciating pain after being infected by Agent Yellow, kept alive so that the formula for an experimental antidote can be retrieved from her mind.

We’ve already said, multiple times, that companion deaths are an extremely tricky device to throw into your story without running the risk of seeming crass and emotionally manipulative. The best case scenario is probably what Kate Orman gave us in her handling of Roz’s death in So Vile a Sin, where the character was treated with respect and dignity, never sidelined or brushed aside for the sake of scoring cheap points off the back of the audience’s affinity for a member of the regular cast.

Liz in Eternity Weeps doesn’t get this treatment. In fact, we don’t even see her death occur, and the news is only conveyed to us after the fact by Imorkal. Make no mistake, my objection here is certainly not based on any kind of desire to bear witness to the slow, lingering death that surely awaits someone whose organic matter is rapidly transforming into sulphuric acid. What scenes we did get showing the aftermath of Liz’s infection were, to my mind, already more than enough, and I don’t think that showing the audience more would have even come close to being a decent solution.

This underscores just how bad an idea it was to reserve such a gruesome and horrible fate for a companion while clearly giving such little thought to its integration into the larger novel, and it’s an impression only reinforced by the fact that Liz’s presence in the story is already extremely cursory. Overall, it’s extremely difficult to escape the feeling that her role could just as easily have been filled by a faceless UNIT functionary, if it weren’t for the consequent loss of shock value.

That’s the ugly and cynical side of Eternity Weeps‘ flirtation with cult fiction, and it arguably goes some way towards explaining why Mortimore will have virtually disappeared from the radar of Dale’s Ramblings by the time we come to the end of 1998.

The problem is not just that these decisions fail to assess the ambient mood of fandom, but that they actively contribute to a vision of Doctor Who that is offputtingly insular and spiky. It’s a vision wherein a companion who was known on television for the ignominy of being written out off-screen between seasons, but who had managed to find a new lease on life in the Missing Adventures, can end up right back where she started, receiving a cursory off-screen death for no deeper purpose than to shock the audience.

As far as companion deaths go, this is much closer to the brutal murder of Dodo in Who Killed Kennedy, and although it was ultimately released a good three months before So Vile a Sin, it serves as a surprisingly handy demonstration of exactly the kind of story that Kate Orman so deftly avoided telling with the death of Roz.

And yet despite all of that, I do think Eternity Weeps is, broadly speaking, a good book. If nothing else, it certainly deserves to be ranked above GodEngine, by the simple virtue of not boring me to tears. It’s filled to the brim with punchy, high-octane thrills in the best Mortimore tradition, and I was so engrossed that I was able to blitz through it in two days. At times – especially as regards the Benny and Jason stuff – it’s even extremely poignant, demonstrating a commitment to a deeper kind of emotional resonance than that of simple mindless spectacle.

It’s unfortunate that it also ends up hamstrung by a troubling tendency towards some of the worst habits afflicting cult/genre series, especially since these are probably the things for which the novel is most remembered in fan circles today. With all the good stuff on display here, that’s perhaps a little unfair, but it’s also entirely understandable, and it tarnishes my enjoyment of what could have been an outright exceptional novel.

What we’re left with, then, is something of a missed opportunity, but it certainly could have turned out a whole lot worse. You might call that damning with faint praise, but it’s still a good summary of how I feel.

Miscellaneous Observations

You’ll notice that I didn’t really touch on Chris at all. This is for the singularly amazing reason that, well, there really isn’t much to say. He spends most of his scenes in the novel in a rather weird mental state, believing that Roz is still alive and just generally acting kind of out of it. As such, my ability to discern any deeper character truths about him is pretty severely curtailed, so… yeah. Sorry. Blame Jim Mortimore, not me.

Whiiiich brings me to the next point, that being Mortimore’s inexorable slide towards posting COVID misinformation on his personal Facebook page. This has actually been going on for a while, but the reason this is my first time mentioning it has something to do with a combination of my not having reviewed a full-length novel of his since Parasite all the way back in April 2020, and sincere unawareness of the matter until a few months ago.

So yeah, it just genuinely slipped my radar. I try to keep up with the big-ticket authorial dickheadedness a la Gareth Roberts or Trevor Baxendale wherever possible, but I also have to balance that with not relentlessly stalking every single writer’s social media. If I did that, I’d never get anything done.

Still, it sucks that Mortimore has decided to go this route, even if I can’t imagine it impinging upon my enjoyment of his books in the same way as Roberts’ transphobia. It’s totally valid to have a different response, mind you, but I feel like the fact that Roberts possesses a much higher profile – from both his work on televised Who and his current cushy columnist position at The Spectator – than Mortimore can ever claim to have had makes his situation the more egregious and noteworthy of the two.

I’m pretty sure this whole thing still isn’t exactly common knowledge among Doctor Who fans anyway, so there’s probably a fair chance that this is the first any of my readers are hearing about it. If so, then I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Anyway, on a much lighter note, I feel obliged to point out the cheeky trick played by Virgin’s editors in the back cover blurb. In case you don’t already know, I won’t spoil it, but I’ll just say to go and read it while thinking of the Bible. No greater hints than that, it’s rather cute, I think.

Final Thoughts

Well, here’s to 1997, folks!

As ever, I didn’t think I’d be back quite so soon, but writing these reviews has genuinely been so much fun this past year that I find myself missing doing them whenever I’m on a break. I suppose that’s a good thing, right?

Next time, we bid farewell to the Sixth Doctor’s adventures within the pages of Virgin’s novels, and turn our attention to the last full-length Doctor Who book from Dave Stone for more than three years. That’s right, it’s Burning Heart. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper