BBC Past Doctor Adventures Reviews: The Ultimate Treasure by Christopher Bulis (or, “Holy Rovan’s Empire”)

As we’ve gradually eased ourselves into the shifting status quo for Doctor Who over the course of 1997, it seems fair to comment that my reviews for the past Doctor fiction published by Virgin and subsequently by BBC Books have hit upon a certain formula that I have found to be a broadly effective means of structuring and organising my thoughts. At its most basic, this approach boils down to the consideration of each Doctor’s allotted novels as a subseries of the larger corpus that is the Missing or Past Doctor Adventures.

If we wanted to get more specific about it, we could note that there actually exist two distinct phases to this method. The first of these phases was concerned with the business of summarising and drawing down the curtain on Virgin’s Missing Adventures series, attempting to tie all the various threads together into something resembling a closing statement. That being concluded, we’re now entering the second phase, ushering in the new Past Doctor Adventures line and continuing to elaborate upon some of those threads in an attempt to weave a whole new tapestry.

To a certain extent, of course, this merely speaks to the inherently fragmentary nature of Doctor Who as a television programme, even by the standards of television, a medium that presupposes a certain level of fragmentation by dint of most shows being formatted into a set of discrete and individualised episodes. For its first twenty-six years of existence, the audience primarily engaged with the series in a mode that favoured weekly, multi-part serials – barring the occasional oddity like Mission to the Unknown or The Five Doctors – which was largely unheard of for such a long-running show once you discount soap operas and the like.

Coupled with the constant rotating door cast policy, the structure of Doctor Who therefore naturally lends itself to the strange and idiosyncratic format of the MAs and PDAs. While their “present day” counterparts in the grand scheme of Wilderness Years fiction can maintain a generally forward-looking, unidirectional progression, the past Doctor novels are more logically read as… well, like I said, as six or seven insulated subsets of the larger whole.

Generally speaking, our transition across the Virgin Publishing/BBC Books divide hasn’t been an especially bumpy one. With both of the PDAs’ first two Doctors of choice having been met with a pretty lukewarm reception in their outings for Virgin, there was a sense that there was not really anywhere to go but up. But, to shamelessly channel Torchwood for no particularly good reason I can think of at the moment, the Fifth Doctor is where everything changes.

Readiness is strictly optional.

Of the first six Doctors that the Missing Adventures played host to throughout their lifetime, the Fifth Doctor was perhaps the most consistently solid of the bunch. The only real competition, for me at least, would probably be the Sixth Doctor, but I’ll readily concede that I have a much more positive read on books like State of Change, Time of Your Life and Burning Heart than fandom orthodoxy, which generally reacts to said books with a half-hearted shrug and a muttered “Yeah, they’re fine” at best.

(It’s also worth noting that I think the appeal of the Colin Baker novels is of a much more singular kind than that enjoyed by other Doctors, stemming more from the apparent presence of a relatively coherent and consistent thematic arc which seems to find the writers at Virgin grappling directly with the question of how to write for the most reviled of the Time Lord’s incarnations, and developing a rough framework along the way upon which companies like Big Finish could subsequently build. But there’ll be time enough to discuss all that when we get to Business Unusual.)

Still, loath as I am to appeal to fandom orthodoxy – oh who am I kidding, I love to do that, if only in the capacity of a general illustrative aid – the Sullivan rankings would generally seem to concur with the spirit of my sentiment. Of the five Fifth Doctor MAs published from Goth Opera through to Cold Fusion, three of the novels manage to land in the top ten as voted on by fans, while a fourth sits comfortably within the top fifteen.

The lone outlier in this pattern of general acclaim is Lords of the Storm in twenty-fourth place, and while I certainly won’t quibble with that placement, even this factoid goes to show the generally high calibre of novel that the Missing Adventures afforded Davison’s affable, celery-apparelled cricketer. Lords of the Storm may have been an aggressively mediocre work, but it was a far cry from the tedium of true, out-and-out stinkers like The Ghosts of N-Space and Invasion of the Cat-People.

Yet if one casts a cursory glance over the comparable ranking of the Past Doctor Adventures, a rather jarring pattern reveals itself. Far from the critical plaudits with which books like The Sands of Time were being lavished barely a year ago, the Fifth Doctor’s tenure in the PDAs seems to have met with supreme antipathy from fandom.

The disjunction, as ever, can be illustrated quite starkly with the application of some handy statistics. By my count, there are seventy-six Past Doctor Adventures in total, seventy of which make the final form of Sullivan’s list, excluding as it does the scattered outlier here or there like Paul Cornell’s novelisation of Scream of the Shalka or the last few books in the range, which were simply unable to secure enough votes to make the main body of the ranking before updates ceased in January 2006.

From this pool of novels, there are ten Fifth Doctor stories, and only a single one of those – David Bishop’s Empire of Death, for the curious, which is also conspicuous in its status as the last of the books to be published – manages to land in the upper half of the list. In fact, between The King of Terror, Divided Loyalties and Warmonger, the list’s bottom three slots are Davison all the way.

So if there is to be anything approaching a unifying central question throughout these coming Fifth Doctor reviews – and it should be noted that these ten novels are spread out across a period of more than 160 books, all told, so I use words like “unifying” extremely loosely – we would seem to have had it presented to us here in no uncertain terms: What, exactly, happened here? In the mere eight months since Cold Fusion, how have the attempts to capture the Davison years apparently undergone such a dramatic reversal of fortunes?

And with Christopher Bulis’ The Ultimate Treasure, it seems we’re off to the races early with these questions. Coming in at fifty-first place, it falls on the lower end of the spectrum of Fifth Doctor books, being the lowest-rated instalment not to merit inclusion in that ignominious cluster at the very bottom of the list.

(Although it should be noted that, being placed right below Superior Beings and Bulis’ own Imperial Moon, it’s apparently part of a cluster all its own. Actually, the Davison books seem to have a marked tendency to do that, if the similarly consecutive rankings of Fear of the Dark and Zeta Major are anything to go by, so that’s kind of strange for those of us who get unreasonably excited by the granular minutiae of life.)

At 59.4%, it is admittedly unable to claim the title of “Most Disliked Davison Novel To Date,” what with Lords of the Storm having achieved a score of 58.3%, but as the first of what we can now acknowledge with the benefit of hindsight to be a great many Fifth Doctor novels to come that will accrue a rather indifferent or outright hostile critical consensus from fans, its comparatively diminished standing cannot help but take on a deeper significance. So I ask again, what went wrong here?

This is the point where I think I’m supposed to pithily exclaim “Christopher Bulis” and refuse to elaborate. But, because we generally like to avoid unmitigated and unexpanded snark around these parts, we’re going to elaborate regardless.

Bulis is, as I’ve discussed over the course of a whopping six reviews dedicated to his works so far, a bit of a strange author for me. If first impressions are the most important, then it seems fair to say that he somewhat bungled things with his debut effort, Shadowmind. While I was certainly not the first to pan the novel by any stretch of the imagination, my rather scathing review was most definitely a product of a very particular period in my own development as a critic that, I’m pleased to say, didn’t actually last that much longer beyond that point once I actually started taking the whole blogging thing a mite more seriously.

It may not be the worst offender to ever grace the pages of Internet fan reviews in regards to getting needlessly personal towards the author of a book of lesser quality, but it took a tone that was much more aggressive and belligerent than I would like to believe that I would countenance today. Even more than that, there were certain basic factual errors that could have been quite easily dispelled with a minimum of research, most notably in my taking cheap shots at the somewhat shoddy cover and insinuating that Bulis was the first New Adventures author to contribute their own cover art, when Jim Mortimore had actually managed to beat him to the punch with Lucifer Rising some two months earlier.

In short, the review was honestly quite flawed looking back, the product of a sixteen year old who thought he was much cleverer than he probably was, and the only meagre saving grace, as I’ve said time and time again, is probably that there remain people twice the age that I was when I posted that review in 2019 that have continued to build much more successful careers than mine out of significantly worse and frequently outright bigoted opinions on media. So y’know. Swings and roundabouts.

Since that time, I’ve made a conscious effort to be a bit more charitable to Bulis, though he hasn’t always made it the easiest of tasks. State of Change was a massive improvement over Shadowmind, being more fairly described as a sophomore leap than a sophomore slump, and began the aforementioned work of providing a redemption of sorts for the Sixth Doctor and particularly his relationship with Peri, softening off some of the rough edges of Season 22 while Steve Lyons geared up to tackle those edges head-on with Time of Your Life.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, meanwhile, was a fairly pedestrian affair that seemed to aspire to little more than a rote imitation of classic fantasy tropes and especially The Lord of the Rings, and I can honestly barely remember a single thing about it besides that. Then again, apparently it seems to be reasonably well-liked by fans and is even Bulis’ highest-rated book ever per Sullivan, so it remains entirely possible that I’m just missing the point entirely and it’s some unsung gem.

The Eye of the Giant was an improvement, though it suffered from a similar sensation of mechanically replicating the stylings of 1930s adventure fiction, even down to some of the more questionable gender roles. Still, it was one of the better Third Doctor novels to that point, and was buoyed somewhat by the novelty of offering new, post-Inferno adventures for Liz Shaw.

As if to confirm my gradually dawning realisation as I write these paragraphs that any attempts to graph the quality of Bulis’ books over time would look alarmingly like a sine wave, however, Twilight of the Gods offered one of the longest and most tedious reads I’ve ever subjected myself to for this project, arriving at perhaps the absolute nadir of the Missing Adventures’ increasingly irritating flirtation with sequels to classic Doctor Who stories with an attempt to follow up on the visual eccentricity of The Web Planet. Bulis being Bulis, this largely meant a whole lot of gritty, hard-edged science-fiction militarism and debates about monarchism versus communism, alongside some wholly unasked for attempts to explain the minutiae of Menoptera biology.

With A Device of Death, the writer’s fifth and final Missing Adventure, having managed to unexpectedly win me over with its surprisingly creative and ambitious attempts to provide the missing link between the gloomy Gothic horror of the Hinchcliffe Era and the more comedic, light-hearted antics of the Williams years, the stage seems well and truly set for me to tear this most recent Bulis offering apart in the most polite and apologetic fashion I can muster.

Any such expectations were quickly dashed when I actually sat down to read The Ultimate Treasure, however. Not because it really managed to surpass all the odds and become a true classic by the somewhat skewed standards with which such terms can be applied to Bulis’ novels, mind you. Make no mistake, it’s an appreciable step down from books like A Device of Death or State of Change. By the same token though, it never sinks to the absolute depths of awfulness achieved by Shadowmind or Twilight of the Gods.

If the arc of the Bulisometer (patent pending) as applied to the entirety of the author’s career resembles a sine wave, The Ultimate Treasure seems more akin to a flatline. But… a more optimistic flatline, I suppose. A flatline that hovers not at a point of cardiac arrest, but rather at a sort of vaguely pleasant readability that doesn’t actively offend one’s sensibilities in the moment, yet which also doesn’t exactly leave one with much reason to pore over the intricacies of the plotting or thematic work in the aftermath.

So anyway, let’s try to pore over the intricacies of the plotting and the thematic work…

The first thing to note about The Ultimate Treasure is that it has chosen to adopt a placement that has, to this point, been rather atypical for the Fifth Doctor stories, coming at the very end of Davison’s tenure in the narrow gap between the arrival of Peri in Planet of Fire and Five’s regeneration into Six at the close of The Caves of Androzani.

To date, the tie-in books have only fleetingly explored this gap with David J. Howe’s Fascination, a short story from the very first of Virgin’s Decalog collections, so The Ultimate Treasure is notable as the first extended, novel-length story to be set in this gap. Indeed, BBC Books would go on to prove noticeably less reluctant to fill this lacuna than their predecessors, with the PDAs playing host to books like Nick Walters’ Superior Beings and Terrance Dicks’ Warmonger.

Readers of the Short Trips series, meanwhile, could expect to be treated to such Five-Peri short stories as A Town Called Eternity courtesy of Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham, and even a rare excursion from Bulis into the realm of short fiction with Hot Ice. The Telos novellas, perhaps reflecting their status as the brainchild of Howe’s own publishing company, would make a similar attempt with Blood and Hope, with Big Finish-original companion Erimem added into the mix for good measure.

As that last item suggests, of course, this is a gap which is primarily notable these days for Big Finish’s rather prodigious catalogue of audio dramas that they would go on to retroactively insert into the Fifth Doctor’s timeline, beginning with Red Dawn in May 2000. Like much of the company’s early output starring Davison, it’s a production decision with a rather prosaic motivation, coming about as a result of Janet Fielding’s prolonged refusal to return to the role of Tegan Jovanka.

Naturally, given the character’s presence in all but two of the Fifth Doctor’s televised stories – to say nothing of the way that Five’s stories tended to open with scenes directly referencing the events of the previous serial as a matter of recent history, making it rather difficult to invent gaps in Five’s timeline from whole cloth without various shades of quirky temporal hijinks – this presented a bit of an issue.

Until Fielding finally relented with the recording of 2010’s Cobwebs, the incarnation’s audio adventures were primarily confined to three specific “eras”: travelling solo with Nyssa between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity, travelling solo with Turlough between Resurrection of the Daleks and Planet of Fire, and the previously discussed adventures with Peri and later Erimem.

One of the more frequent observations about the latter subset of Fifth Doctor audios is to point out that it seems hard to invest much credence in the existence of a gap of sufficient magnitude based on the on-screen evidence available in The Caves of Androzani as to the length of Peri’s travels with the Doctor, with The Kingmaker alone taking up at least two years from her and Erimem’s perspective.

In retrospect, then, The Ultimate Treasure‘s ambitions can’t help but feel almost quaint by comparison. As one might expect from Bulis, the novel seems to go out of its way to reassure the reader of its maintaining verisimilitude with Davison’s televised adventures, directly referencing Peri’s choosing to travel with the Doctor as a means of filling out the remaining three months of her vacation per the closing scene of Planet of Fire, and making it crystal clear that this is her first trip in the TARDIS post-Sarn on account of her only having heard the TARDIS’ dematerialisation once before.

In spite of this, the duo’s relationship feels ever so slightly off, primarily in the earlier segments of the novel. Generally speaking, it seems fair to suggest that the relationship between Five and Peri, transitory though it is, is held by fans to be much more healthy and level-headed in comparison to her rather more caustic interactions with the Sixth Doctor.

This might initially appear to be little more than a simple case of fandom extrapolating rather too much out of two stories totalling eight episodes all up, until you remember the rather pertinent fact that the show decided to have Six attempt to strangle Peri in one of his very first scenes. Even if Peri had known the Fifth Doctor for a grand total of five minutes before his regeneration, it would be extraordinarily difficult for them not to seem like the very pinnacle of cordial, good-natured friendship when measured against the benchmark set by The Twin Dilemma.

The Ultimate Treasure, on the other hand, opts for a slightly unexpected tack. While there’s definitely nothing here that approaches the level of sheer, sustained unpleasantness contained in Season 22, there remains a strangely pronounced streak of what I can only think to describe as pseudo-condescension in some of the pair’s early interactions.

When Peri finds herself possessed with the sudden urge to purchase a souvenir of her jaunt to Astroville, the Doctor leaps right to chastising her for her perceived materialism. “Isn’t the experience itself enough for you?” he asks, in the tone of a grandparent wondering why those darn youngsters can’t just put down their phones and live in the moment without all those selfie sticks and Snapgram posts. His companion’s subsequent attempts to explain her need for a souvenir to uphold the grand tradition of tourists everywhere are met with a quietly withering, “I thought all those clothes might suffice.”

Perhaps the most incongruous moment of all comes after Peri expresses her mounting irritation at being detained on Astroville Seven as part of the investigation into the murder of an ill-fated antiques dealer, with the Doctor letting loose a veritable torrent of almost Sixish condescension: “You come from an impatient species, and you have youth against you as well.” Following this up with a patronising pat on the hand, he continues in much the same vein, assuring her that “[she’ll] learn in time.”

The problem isn’t necessarily that this note of exasperation is all that out of character for Davison, and it certainly remains a far cry from the downright cruelty of the Baker years, but the impression remains that Bulis has accentuated this particular trait just a little too much. One can’t help feeling that this dynamic would probably have worked better with, say, Tegan, who was never afraid to verbally spar with the Doctor in some of his more pompous and overblown moments. Even in the Big Finish audios, Peri’s bond with Erimem generally enabled the two of them to deflate and tease their travelling companion in a good-natured fashion that kept things from feeling too unpleasant, and the inability for The Ultimate Treasure to dabble in those kinds of interactions does hurt it a bit.

It also doesn’t help matters that the novel as a whole feels a bit mean-spirited towards Peri, having her roughed up and imperilled in a consistently uncomfortable fashion, including a particularly wince-worthy moment where Dexel Dynes – who is admittedly not supposed to be a sympathetic character in the slightest – violently yanks off one of her shirt buttons to show off a bit more cleavage during her interview spot as Gribbs’ hostage.

Coupled with Bulis’ decision to highlight the character’s wide-eyed enthusiasm at the beginning, and to contrast that with her eventual creeping sense of self-loathing at having dragged herself and the Doctor into the whole mess – hell, she apologises to him for it on two separate occasions, even if he’s quick to downplay things – the book skirts uncomfortably close to suggesting that its driving impetus is, in some way, to show Peri up for believing that the universe could ever be a vaguely optimistic or wondrous place for her.

This certainly fits with the television show’s decision to have her essentially remain trapped in an abusive relationship with the Sixth Doctor until she can be off-handedly pseudo-fridged in Mindwarp, but it doesn’t make the entire experience any more pleasant.

Even with all of that being said, I’d probably be willing to grant considerably more leeway here if it didn’t feel as if this slight glitch in characterisation was reflective of a larger tonal and aesthetic mismatch at the heart of the novel.

One thing that’s always been very clear about Bulis’ particular style, beyond its staunch traditionalism, is a certain penchant for a rather pulpy aesthetic. Of course, this framing assumes that the one is not merely an outgrowth of the other, which is probably a matter of some debate. Nevertheless, I believe both points hold merit, regardless of their precise relationship to one another.

For proof of this claim, one need only re-examine the premises of his novels. State of Change, for example, played upon one of the most archetypal and enduring “alternate history” conundrums science fiction has ever known, asking what would happen if Rome never fell. The Eye of the Giant combined the gigantism-tinged anxieties of such fifties B-movies as Them! or Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman with the pulpy thrills of jungle-bound adventure serials from the thirties. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, as we’ve already alluded to, was so blatantly intended to be Bulis’ take on “Doctor Who does The Lord of the Rings” that it was frankly something of a minor miracle that he had enough self-restraint to refrain from having Ian namedrop Tolkien’s epic outright.

As the rather generic title implies, The Ultimate Treasure is quite plainly playing in the same conceptual wheelhouse, and Bulis seems to be practically jumping at the opportunity to indulge his taste for pulpy genre fiction, especially as regards one of his greatest passions of all: space opera.

Ever since Shadowmind, we’ve noted Bulis’ affinity for the genre of space opera, placing particular emphasis on the stylistic debt that much of his work seems to owe to the contemporaneous Star Trek shows. He’s far from the only culprit as far as the New Adventures were concerned, mind you, with 1993 alone also seeing Peter Darvill-Evans and Daniel Blythe fall under the influence of the franchise in penning Deceit and The Dimension Riders, respectively.

(Perhaps not coincidentally, both books ranked right alongside Shadowmind as my least favourite of the year, with their Trek imitations ultimately feeling rather lifeless and superficial.)

Much as traditionalism and pulpy science-fiction seem to go hand in hand, Star Trek and space opera make for comfortable bedfellows. As Darren Mooney has noted, the phrase has its origins in a pejorative moniker first applied to a specific school of science-fiction storytelling by author Wilson Tucker; drawing from the term “horse opera,” a similarly scathing put-down applied to the wave of generic Western films which so gripped Hollywood in the 1930s, it was a term that carried an obvious resonance for a franchise so famously described by Gene Roddenberry as “Wagon Train to the stars.”

And The Ultimate Treasure dutifully contains a few token nods from Bulis towards his Trek tendencies. It’s very hard not to read the descriptions of the bustling, extraterrestrial-packed Astroville Seven space station without being put in mind of Deep Space Nine – or, I suppose, Babylon 5 if you happen to swing that way – even before you factor in the presence of one Inspector Myra Jaharnus, who bristles at her superiors’ requests that she come to them with actual, tangible evidence against her suspects before subjecting them to a surveillance operation, lest those suspects hide behind the protection of those pesky civil rights charters. One suspects that she ought to get together with Rene Auberjonois’ Odo some time and discuss the merits of incorporating a tad more authoritarianism in the running of a space station and its environs.

(This being Bulis, it’s a little difficult to tell precisely how uncomfortable we are meant to be with Jaharnus’ “dogged inspector” routine, or if we’re just meant to take her rather heavy-handed view of law enforcement as part of the cost of doing business, as it were, particularly since the bulk of her scenes seem to place great stock in her status as a reasonably and unambiguously heroic figure.)

The Gelsandorans, meanwhile, would feel right at home among a line-up of Star Trek‘s many, many God-like beings, particularly when they curb the belligerence of the various treasure-seeking parties by rendering their weapons non-functional, bringing to mind a similar manoeuvre pulled by the Organians at the close of Errand of Mercy. Even Bulis’ terminology is suitably Trek-tinged, with the TARDIS food machine only being referred to by its traditional, David Whitaker-given name once. On all other occasions, it’s simply the “food synthesiser.” If you really want to stretch the parallels past the point of breaking, Peri’s order of an unspecified sandwich and coffee might even be said to bring to mind one of the most memorable jokes in The Trouble with Tribbles.

For all of these smaller beats, however, it’s tough to avoid the sensation that The Ultimate Treasure is also pulling quite heavily from the aesthetics of Star Wars, the other big “space opera” franchise dominating the cultural zeitgeist in the mid-to-late 1990s.

There are the requisite superficial points that one would be remiss to avoid noting, like the conspicuous prominence of a ship named the Falcon, but the most telling details are far more basic and fundamental. As we’ve said, The Ultimate Treasure‘s all-encompassing title might serve well enough as a signifier of its pulpy aesthetic, but it also denotes a consciously mythic quality that feels much more of a piece with Star Wars and its so-called “Skywalker Saga” than it does Star Trek.

Throughout the length of the novel, Bulis includes a panoply of not-so-oblique references to classical Greek mythology, from the nightmare sequence in which Arnella finds herself trapped in a bush, destined to be constantly pecked by crow-like beings a la Prometheus, to Brockwell’s being stuck in mud, taunted by a vine that offers the possibility of escape only to shrink away when he reaches out for it in a manner that recalls the afterlife of the infamous King Tantalus. At one point, forsaking all sense of subtlety, Bulis even has the Doctor exclaim of his party’s narrow brush with an artificial atmosphere of overpowering lethargy and apathy, “We were becoming lotus eaters!”

Outside of this mythological atmosphere, even the way that The Ultimate Treasure approaches spaceships and space travel sits ill at ease with the idea of its being a mere Star Trek pastiche. Unlike other Bulis novels like Shadowmind or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, there exists no readily identifiable Starfleet analogue to offer up a vaguely militaristic portrait of spacefaring. Rather, The Ultimate Treasure tends to lean rather more heavily into the idea of space – or, at the very least, space treasure hunts – as the domain of less strictly regimented bands of private individuals, and while such a portrayal certainly isn’t wholly alien to Star Trek, such examples as do exist within the franchise generally stand as a deliberate contrast to the world of our typical Federation protagonists.

Furthermore, the book’s very structure, with the treasure-seekers encountering a new obstacle every couple of chapters, could quite readily be adapted to suit the format of the old serial films that inspired George Lucas in the development of Star Wars – and, for that matter, Raiders of the Lost Ark – to begin with.

But herein lies the essential oddity of The Ultimate Treasure. The choice of Star Wars as the object of Bulis’ inspiration, rather than his seemingly more traditional Star Trek milieu, underscores the extent to which the novel feels like a rather odd fit for the Saward years. If anything, the shared artistic sensibility with Lucas’ galaxy-spanning epic – perhaps spurred on by the controversial twentieth anniversary Special Edition of the original trilogy, which would have been making its way to theatres at around the time of Bulis’ last novel in February 1997 – and the frequent allusions to Greek myth would seem to make it a better fit for the Williams Era, feeling like a far more natural fit alongside stories like Underworld and The Horns of Nimon than it does when forced to rub shoulders with Earthshock and Warriors of the Deep.

Make no mistake, this isn’t necessarily tantamount to a declaration that “gritty, hard-edged science-fiction militarism” is the only thing that should ever be done in the Saward Era, particularly since most of the Era’s problems can be boiled down to a profound unwillingness to aspire to anything but. Yet at the same time, it can’t help but feel curious that Bulis, an author with such a pronounced fondness for that particular strand of science-fiction, should pretty much only choose to restrain himself from such impulses when writing for the Saward Era, at least if State of Change is any indication.

(The Eye of the Giant also lacks any sort of “space marine” storytelling, but its being set in the UNIT years – whatever decade that might actually denote – and latterly in the 1930s does rather tend to foreclose most of the opportunities to explore that artistic avenue.)

But whereas State of Change was able to coast by on the back of a breezy, well-told story with a few memorable scenes here and there, The Ultimate Treasure feels rather barebones. It avoids the active tedium of Bulis’ lesser novels, but only by steadfastly refusing to add much of consequence to the rudimentary quest narrative at its core.

Nevertheless, the novel does make some token stabs at thematic depth. Of these, perhaps the most consistent throughline is the recurring idea of the quest as a rather cyclical endeavour, with the participants each being caught up in their own unbreakable patterns of behaviour. The Marquis te Rosscarrino is probably the most explicit culprit here, becoming obsessed with carrying on his dead brother’s crusade in search of Rovan’s treasure and attempting to elevate his niece Arnella to the throne of a restored Earth Empire by proving the prestige of his family bloodline.

(Naturally, this kind of preoccupation with family and inheritance is, in itself, pretty much bread and butter to a franchise like Star Wars. It would almost be a wonder that the Marquis never starts harping on about Midi-chlorians, if it weren’t for The Phantom Menace still being some twenty-one months away…)

Tellingly, Arnella ultimately chooses to break with her uncle’s fixations and avoids sharing his fate by entering into a relationship with Brockwell, putting an end to the perverse ouroboros-like perpetuation of the aristocracy – though having said that, the Gelsandorans’ deceptive cycling staircase might be a more apt visual metaphor – but not before we get some hair-pullingly irritating scenes of her jealously assuming him to be more attracted to Peri, which merely add more fuel to the fire of my suspicion in the wake of similar love triangles in The Murder Game and The Bodysnatchers that the BBC Books authors can conceive of precisely one character dynamic for a companion. Ah well.

Qwaid, Drorgon and Gribbs find themselves locked in a bitter cycle of their own, with the former trying desperately to assert his own individuality and break away from his boss, Mr. Alpha. Even as he murderously usurps his former employer, Qwaid remains unable to conceive of any sort of wider-reaching ambition beyond simply continuing to run the same operation, a failure of imagination that ultimately costs him dearly when Alpha’s robot duplicate inevitably enacts violent judgement upon his betrayal. It’s a reasonably elegant literalisation of the novel’s central moral schema, if not exactly a subtle or nuanced one.

Bulis also vaguely gestures at the idea of each of the seekers finding themselves caught up in a narrative of their own devising, trying desperately to exercise some form of control over the events of their lives and impose a measure of structure upon them, most plainly seen in the arc of “Sir John Falstaff,” a minor aristocrat who has adopted the persona of the Shakespearean character in an effort to seem more interesting.

Even a character like Dexel Dynes, sleazy and contemptible though he is, exercises a very literal sort of control over the narrative, repeatedly contemplating the question of how to edit the footage of the quest in order to elicit the highest ratings.

(In a way, with his consistently treating the quest for Rovan’s treasure as little more than idle, mindless entertainment, Dynes’ brand of journalism seems almost to tip over into the realms of modern, competition-based reality television. Bulis’ timing here is actually kind of impeccable, with The Ultimate Treasure arriving just over a month before the premiere of Charlie Parsons’ Expedition Robinson on Swedish television, later to be reformatted overseas under its more recognisable name, Survivor.)

Entirely unsurprisingly, however, putting aside all these rather underdeveloped ideas, my final impression of the novel is that Bulis’ traditionalist impulses have managed to win out over any paltry attempts he might have made to spice things up or offer some semblance of a subversion. The Ultimate Treasure does exactly what it says on the tin and not a syllable more, down to an honest-to-Rovan attempt to sell the audience on a “The real treasure was the friends we made along the way” type ending, as if a decently savvy science-fiction reader wasn’t likely to have been clued in to that possibility from the start.

This isn’t one of Bulis’ worst novels by a long shot, and when I was actually in the middle of reading it, I found myself reasonably well-entertained, but it’s largely just a small, insubstantial thing with paper-thin characterisation and a few neat puzzles to hold the reader’s attention without taxing their brain too unduly, and it’s hard to really begrudge fandom its low opinion of the book. One percentage point above Lords of the Storm sounds about right, I’m afraid.

It’s tough, on the basis of a single entry, to really posit any kind of answer just yet to our initial query as to what went wrong with the Fifth Doctor novels, but it’s plainly clear from The Ultimate Treasure that somehow, somewhere, the Past Doctor Adventures have lost that indefinable spark that so animated some of the best Missing Adventures to feature this particular incarnation of the roving Time Lord. It’s regrettable, but such is the way of things sometimes, I suppose.

Miscellaneous Observations

I’m hardly the first to note this, but the sense that we’re reading a very generic sort of adventure isn’t helped any by the many aspects that feel as if they were lifted from other Doctor Who stories. You’ve got the “Which of us is lying?” test straight out of Pyramids of Mars – though at least the Doctor acknowledges that he’s seen it before – alongside such favourites as “cross a tiled floor in the correct pattern,” making a return appearance after its guest spots in Death to the Daleks and The Five Doctors.

Even outside of the riddles themselves, Thorrin’s ill-informed quest for immortality mirrors the final fate of Borusa – Blood Harvest and The Eight Doctors notwithstanding – while Dynes finds himself doing his best impression of Martin Jarvis’ Governor from Vengeance on Varos, attentively watching the Doctor’s delirious wanderings around a desert environment and hoping to find a suitably artistic place to cut the footage.

I just realised I didn’t even touch on anything to do with the Kamelion subplot, such as it is, but that only serves to underscore how little of an impression it made on me. It’s precisely what you would expect if I told you that an author like Christopher Bulis had decided to tackle the aftermath of the character’s demise in Planet of Fire, complete with a woefully clunky scene at the beginning where Peri sees a silver jumpsuit while shopping and finds her thoughts turning to Kamelion, which might as well be accompanied by a gleaming neon footnote to the effect of “This will be relevant later!”

Maybe it would have felt more organic if it weren’t for the fact that Kamelion’s name is never once uttered past this point until he’s revealed to have been present throughout the narrative in the guise of Red in the book’s penultimate chapter. If Peri is supposed to have been wracked with misgivings about the tormented android’s final fate, there’s nothing within the text of the book to really lend credence to that idea beyond that single scene.

In conjunction with the rather bathetic notion that Kamelion’s true, final destiny was to beat the everliving daylights out of the walking two-dimensional gangster cliché that is Mr. Alpha, the attempt to give the character a heroic send-off ultimately fails to be much more emotionally affecting than the tragic tale of that one nameless soldier who had a sexual relationship with Ace in Shadowmind before being killed off and never spoken of again.

Really, the only thing of note here is Kamelion’s casually revealing that he had “interfaced” with the TARDIS shortly before the Master’s attempts to regain control, which can’t help but read as a stealthy acknowledgment of Christmas on a Rational Planet, and is therefore probably the only time you’re ever likely to find Bulis referencing the works of Lawrence Miles, however indirectly.

Speaking of which, the BBC Books line continues to enact pre-emptive violence against Miles’ controversial and yet-to-be-advanced theory that the New Adventures line happened in a bottle universe, with the Rosscarrino family’s motivation being inextricably linked to the decline and fall of the Earth Empire. Sure, Bulis never really speaks about “the fall” with any more specificity than he did in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but there’s really only one way that you could reasonably expect fandom to read those hints that do exist just a few months after the publication of So Vile a Sin.

Final Thoughts

Another day, another Bulis novel. Oh well. Things definitely could have been a lot worse, but I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a major step down for the PDAs. Even The Murder Game, as ambivalent as I might have come across at points in my review, at least benefitted from Steve Lyons’ gift for a witty one-liner here and there or an entertaining sequence, but The Ultimate Treasure is just a profoundly average experience.

Next time, as the old saying goes, it’s time for something completely different, as that Lawrence Miles chap returns to grace us with a second New Adventure in Down. Surely this will be his most important book of 1997. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper