| THE FACE-EATER by Simon Messingham |
| Story 18 Synopsis: Responding to a distress call, the Doctor lands the TARDIS on Proxima 2, a very early Earth colony, where leader Helen Percival is disdainful of the need for help, or the panic caused by Jake Leary, a killer on the loose. She is suspicious of the Doctor. He fakes credentials for himself and Sam, and starts to investigate. He soon tracks Jake down, but is attacked by a shadow creature, and breaks his ankle, Jake keeping him hostage. Sam struggles to make sense of things, but suspects Jake is not the killer. As shadow creatures attack, Percival orders zero tolerance, which makes things worse. She tries to frame Jake and Sam for the chaos, but the Doctor makes contact with a creature in the mountains, which then attacks Proxima City. The native Proximan creatures built a giant defender, now dubbed the Face-Eater, whose programming has eroded. The Doctor manages to break its hold, and the Proximans attack and destroy it. With the humans now safe to develop the planet, the Doctor and Sam leave them to it. |
| Review:- Humanity's first steps into space, but terror lurks in the shadows... The society of Proxima City is easy to follow and being a wider transposition of human behaviour, it's easy to understand the people we're introduced to: trustworthy Fuller, well-meaning Clark, idiotic Percival. Indeed, the latter represents the biggest problem in the book. It may be that great administrative capability is seen as a mark of great leadership in the mid-22nd century, but it would surely have been a colossal error to have her in charge of running a colony like this, one so vital to the future of humanity. Paranoid at the smallest provocation, and utterly unable to think in rational terms, she would surely have been better in any other role. Still, it might be less of a book without her. The Doctor and Sam's investigations go badly because they work separately and so head in differing directions. By the time he's tracked down the elusive Leary, she's still struggling to get one over on Percival. And then things really start to go wrong... In the middle of the book, the Doctor is absent, so Sam has to carry the story, whilst Percival continues to fall apart. Sadly, Sam isn't that interesting, and has a major off-day about the environmental damage to the native Proximans. Despite the later irony of the damage already caused by the native Proximans, she never particularly learns from this, which doesn't enhance her as a person. When the Doctor appears to return, his slips out of character make it clear that he isn't genuine, but somehow nobody spots it until they're told. It's a nice conceit to attempt, but it still fails (and later the same things is attempted, with the same lack of success, in Fear Itself). So the Doctor finds the answer in the mysterious mountains, where a gigantic creature has been created for protection and then gone out of control. Its spooky need to consume identities is rather more compelling than the average impressionist (and most are very average), but it just seems like a plot contrivance. It might as well have expressed itself in any number of ways. All it does is ensure a snappy cover, and the coincidence that the Proximans call it F'Seeta, or Face-Eater. The ending, where the Doctor goes through the wringer, and then luckily tips the scales enough to ensure a Proximan revolt, is deeply unsatisfying, only marginally better than the ludicrous moment when Percival ends up framing Sam and Leary in front of a crowd, which they walk blithely into. A solid enough book, but a let down on too many levels. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy of the book. |