TYPE: New Series
FEATURING: Tenth Doctor, Martha Jones
AUTHOR: Trevor Baxendale
PAGE COUNT: 239
SYNOPSIS:
The old village well was just a curiosity - something to attract tourists intrigued by stories of lost treasure, or visitors just making a wish. Unless something alien and terrifying could be lurking inside the well. Something utterly monstrous that causes nothing but death and destruction.
But who knows the real truth about the well? Who wishes to unleash the hideous force it contains? What terrible consequences will follow the search for a legendary treasure hidden at the bottom?
No one wants to believe the Doctor's warnings about the deadly horror lying in wait - but soon they'll wish they had...
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
REVIEW:
After a day of hopping through time and space, the Doctor and Martha return to Earth for a cup of tea. They arrive in the village of Creighton Mere, and while they don't find a tea room, they do find an old wishing well. Legend says Jack the Lad, famous highwayman, dumped his stolen loot down the well, and wound up sharing the fate of his ill-gotten booty. This legend has brought Nigel Carson and his friends, Ben Seddon and Duncan Goode, hoping to dig up the treasure. But while dreams of riches motivate Ben and Duncan, Nigel harbors a dark secret.
The Doctor and Martha fall in with Angela Hook and Sadie Brown, a couple of older ladies who are part of the village's well resoration committee, and butt heads with Henry Gaskin, the local aristocrat who is dead set against anyone touching the well. The Doctor senses a malevolent presence about the well, and when he goes down it, he discovers a threat that could destroy the entire world...
This was my first foray into the New Series novels, and as such I was hoping that it wouldn't bomb and ruin the experience. What I found was a good adventure story in the tradition of Doctor Who, though not without it's flaws.
The story dealt with an alien force that had lain dormant in a English village for centuries. This concept has cropped up in the series several times throught it's history, so it isn't anything new. The alien menace this time is a creature known as a Vurosis, something that's neither planet nor animal, but grows underground like a weed, and reproduces by altering the molecular structure of other life forms. Of course, like most extraterrestrals, it needs a human agent to assist it: in this case, Nigel Carson, who possesses a stone that is actually the Vurosis brain. Once the brain is connected with the body, the Vurosis grows and can spread itself across the planet, consuming it and converting humanity into more of its kind.
All of this constantly reminded me of the serial, The Seeds Of Doom, in which a carnivorous alien plant took people over and grew and grew until it was ready to germinate across the whole Earth. In this way, the plot loses it's originality, but salvages some of it with the ending: rather than having the military blow the Vurosis away, the Doctor and his friends are able to reverse it's mutagenic telepathy back on itself.
The characterizations of the Doctor and Martha were both executed accurately to their portrayal in the TV series. My favorite moments were in chapters 20 and 21:
- Having been unconscious for most of the chapter, the Doctor wakes up suddenly, yelling, "Marmalade!"
- The Doctor chides Gaskin for attempting to shoot the Vurosis brain: "But then again, you are only human, I suppose. Total destruction is always the preferred method of dealing with a problem for you lot. Goes right back to prehistoric times, when the first caveman picked up a whopping great bone and bashed his mate on the head with it... Oh, it was the usual stuff: his mate had been fancying his girlfriend, all that kind of thing. Sollution: whack 'im on the head and be done with it. Problem solved."
- When faced with a mutated Duncan holding Sadie hostage, the Doctor flushes the Vurosis brain down a toilet.
Among the supporting characters, Angela Hook and Henry Gaskin stood out the most. Gaskin was an old friend of Angela's husband, but she blamed Gaskin for his death, and so there was a deep-seated animosity between them for many years. This bit of personal history helped to round out their personalities, adding that extra layer that allowed them stand to out from the others.
In the end, the book felt very much like an episode of the New Series: slick and quick. These books are written primarily to appeal to the younger audience: the plots aren't terribly complex and the pace cracks along. It was definitely a very different experience to read. The novels that were published between the cancellation of the old series and the start of the new were written for the older, die-hard, original fans; they were more complex, darker, and much more graphic in terms of violence, language, and other mature content, as their mandate was to push the series into territory it could never explore on television. These new books reverse that mandate, and you feel like you're reading an episode.
That said, Wishing Well is not a bad book. It only disappointed me in its "been there done that" feel, and that fact that it was over so soon. But as a quick read, the New Series books are just as good as other printed media out there related to the program.
