Keeping up with the Joneses

"If she wasn't Christina de Souza, who was she?"

Writer: Nick Harkaway
Format: Short Story
Released: February 2014
Series: Time Trips 03

Featuring: Tenth Doctor

Synopsis

Deep in the gap between the stars, the TARDIS is damaged by a temporal mine. It's not life-threatening, but the Tenth Doctor will need a while to repair the damage. But he's not alone. The strangely familiar-looking Christina thinks the Doctor has arrived in her bed and breakfast, somewhere in Wales. In fact, the TARDIS seems to have enveloped Christina's entire town – and something else is trapped inside with it. A violent, unnatural storm threatens them all and – unless it's stopped – the entire universe.

Verdict

Keeping up with the Joneses was not the best of stories to continue my reading through the Time Trips series. I found this a bit of a struggle to read at times, and that was nothing to do with the ear infection I am currently enduring. I thought the characterisation of the Tenth Doctor was quite poor throughout and actually seemed more like Matt Smith's incarnation than that of David Tennant. It was okay in some passages but as a whole the writing of the Doctor had him far too excited for the Tenth Doctor, especially at this stage in his life with The End of Time clearly looming. The idea of reuniting him with Christina de Souza was fantastic but the utilisation here was not great at all. Everything was inside the TARDIS and we had Christina in her own little house in a Welsh village morning the death of her husband Simon. I thought it was very good to get to know a little more about who Christina actually was and her history, but the writing of her was so far removed from that of Planet of the Dead and I was quite disappointed by that. One thing I did very much enjoy was the use of a temporal mine being leftover from the Time War. A weapon being given consciousness is a fantastic idea and I liked that it was able to attack the TARDIS. That is of course usually a place of safe haven but the barriers were broken down here and we didn't know whether we were in or out of the TARDIS for some moments. Whilst that was fantastic, I felt there was a considerably lack of clarity at important moments of the story. The writing style was just a little over the top for me and tried to be flashy and flamboyant and somewhat similar to the eccentricity of the likes of James Goss in his Fourth Doctor books, but this was just a little rubbish I'm afraid to say. The pace was full of action throughout but I felt the ending came a bit sudden which wasn't great for a sixty-plus page story as that is a considerably long page count for a short story. I think it's the longest Time Trip so I felt the pace could have been improved for the last quarter or so. I didn't like the hinging of Rose always getting mentioned. I think by now the Doctor was definitely over her so I'm not sure about that. I'm also not sure about the story's title either as I thought we were going to have the Doctor reunited with Martha! That was hinted at, but the only connection close was the setting of the created town of Jonestown. How that came to be though was absolutely ridiculous. Dampness falling onto psychic paper creating psychic mould which formed into a Welsh town with Christina de Souza in a house? Come on. That's beyond barmy and I just couldn't buy it. I thought the Doctor's coin flip statement when he came to meet Heidt was so out of character and just not at all what the Doctor would do! He didn't know for sure that Heidt was evil yet he bursted out that statement? Not for me. Something else that isn't for me is when the story acknowledges through the Doctor that things are difficult to explain and then doesn't make much effort at all to explain things to the reader! Ughh. This was a lot of temporal timey-wimey nonsense and I usually like that when explained. Sigh. I've focused on a lot of the negatives in this blog entry but my rating does show there were some elements I enjoyed. Regardless, lots of room for improvement.

Rating: 5/10