| SNOWGLOBE 7 by Mike Tucker |
| Story 23 Synopsis: Promising Martha a sunny holiday, the Doctor lands the TARDIS in a frozen landscape. They find it's SnowGlobe 7, part of a global effort to preserve parts of the environment. A mysterious illness is affecting people at the nearby SnowGlobe 6, and the Doctor soon deduces something alien and dangerous is inside the other Globe. Leaving Martha to treat the sick, he heads back to SG7. He takes a repaired robot, Twelve, with him. He finds the base of the aliens, and barely escapes alive, thanks to Twelve. He does find a way to communicate with one of the infected humans, and learns the race are the Gappa, who crash-landed on Earth thousands of years earlier, and were defeated by fire. He returns to the TARDIS, locates the ship they crashed in on, and ignites its fusion core, destroying the SnowGlobe, and incinerating all the remaining Gappa. This has the helpful side-effect of neutralising the spores that had taken over most of the people in the vicinity. The day saved, the Doctor and Martha head back to the scene of the downfall of the Gappa, so the Doctor can identify the ship that crashed, and inform them of what happened. |
| Review:- It's monster time again, as man's inhumanity to his home rebounds to deadly effect... A conveniently-timed trip into the future (although the year, 2099, is only mentioned on the back cover) and the eco-system is up the swanny. Some bright spark has decided a great idea would be to transport enormous chunks of endangered arctic environments and plonk them down around the world. The mind boggles at the incredible engineering that would be involved to achieve this, but luckily, that kind of negative talk is not wanted. All that matters is that something nasty has been scooped up as well, and although there are supposed to be 12 SnowGlobes (or Snowglobe, as the cover has it) located around the world, #6 and #7 appear to be a stone's throw from each other! How very fortunate! The dreary bit about commercial pressures is so much flab to introduce a few characters and justify the small scale keep-it-contained approach to keeping a plague under wraps. Sadly, the plague spreads, leading to long chunks of pseudo-zombie piffle, with Martha the fearless trying to save the alive and uninfected. That this is opaque to the main plot with the Doctor just shows that it was mere window-dressing to fill some pages and divert interest. What really grates is that after the initial zombie-ness in the hospital, a contrived mass release into the atmosphere allows a blatant rerun of the same, but on a bigger scale. As if once wasn't already more than enough. That main plot involves the aliens. Presumably wary that finding alien objects that take over humans might jog memories of The Seeds Of Doom, or even The Ice Warriors, Tucker instead goes for broke, making his new aliens a bit like deadly mongrels, combining several creepy elements into one single hotchpotch. Later, the Doctor goes into mental contact with them to learn about them, which blatantly homages The Ark In Space. At least their name, the Gappa, is original. Just duff. One small ray of sunshine comes from Twelve, the didactic robot whom the Doctor rescues and repairs, and who then saves his neck when he does his utmost to get it broken. In some senses, Twelve is just doing what K9 used to do, only more effectively, and less mawkishly. With imminent disaster, the Doctor goes back to the TARDIS and saves the day, igniting the shop the Gappa crashed in on. Well, I didn't see that coming, but such a blink-and-you-miss-it ending doesn't make up for the silliness that went before. And the incineration somehow destroys just the Gappa, which releases all the humans under its control, which is doubly convenient and incredulous. Whilst tediously derivative, at least it does improve on its unpromising start, and though only treading water by the end, at least it does provide some surprise and drama on the way. But Tucker, and the NSA range, have proved capable of better things. |
| Disclaimer: I've read the book. |