Love and War

Novel Adaptations #1

Released: 24 October 2012

Listened: 11/30/20

This was one of the more popular novels, and therefore the first of the Big Finish adaptations, likely because it introduces Bernice Summerfield. Honest admission: I don’t much care for this story, and that affected my view of all the novel adaptations. I suspect the adaptations are a lot more palatable if you were fond of the original novels. Unfortunately, I sat out most of the wilderness years, and quit reading after the first couple of novels. The novels go to a different, darker place than the audios, so the characterizations seem inconsistent with the rest of this timeline. In addition, the pacing feels odd; there’s a lot of content to stuff into two hours of audio story, no matter how well acted. In this case, Ace falls deeply in love with someone she’s only just met, which seems bizarre. Benny is remarkably trusting of both the Doctor and Ace, even though she’s just met them, and she isn’t a trusting person in general. Minor characters die almost immediately after being introduced. There are a ton of characters compared to the average audio, and it can be difficult to keep them straight. There’s a version of virtual reality that was written in the early 90s, and it shows. There are bunches of big ideas flying around, which is typical of Paul Cornell’s novels -- a planet of the dead, futuristic Romany who use VR, malevolent fungus creatures, and tying the whole thing to the ancient history of the Time Lords, as the novels loved to do. Most objectionable of all, though, the Doctor is more manipulative than ever, deliberately keeping things from people for no reason, and deliberately taking on the role of Time’s Champion while also embracing that he’ll have to sacrifice and lose things he loves, which doesn’t make a ton of sense. When he sacrifices something that affects Ace directly, she goes ballistic on him -- justified, and maybe even overdue, given how much she puts up with in the rest of this timeline, but it really seems like she’s unpleasantly over the edge. The story ends with Ace departing as a companion, and Benny taking her place, although given what she’s just seen, I’m not sure why she does.