TITLE

Sometime Never...

AUTHOR

Justin Richards

PREVIOUS FORM

for the defence: Theatre of War (NA), Demontage (EDA), The Burning (EDA)

for the prosecution: Option Lock (EDA), Time Zero (EDA)

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT ALFIE?

Frankly all you need to know is that with this one out of the way, we are finally free of the whole Sabbath saga!!! As to what it's about, well, "time-travelling predictive pre-emptive needlessly-complicated crystalline entities Versus free will" is pretty much it. Yep, that old chestnut...

THE 100 WORD REVIEW

Evidently Justin Richards had a very clear view of how the Sabbath Arc should end - whether he knew before it started, or just pieced together a conclusion out of the wreckage of the Arc to date, I'm not so sure. The book is well-written in Richards' usual, delicate manner, but it's blatantly the plot rather than the characters that drive the book. Even the regulars are only used as pieces in the mechanics of the plot, and in that sense bringing in so many 'guest' characters was probably a mistake. A definite, if not entirely satisfying, end to Sabbath's stories.

THE C WORD

Much to my surprise, considering this book is The Final End to the Sabbath saga, there isn't that much continuity in it. I had expected a very dry and laborious trawl through events of the past however-many-it-is books, but there's none of that. There are references back to The Adventuress of Henrietta Street which first introduced us to Sabbath [see I.T.M.A. below] and a passing reference to Sabbath's alias of Mr Mistletoe in Anachrophobia, but that's about it Sabbath-wise.

On other continuity fronts, however, in either a rather neat merging of the EDA & PDA ranges, or alternatively an absurd overdose of fanw**k (place your votes now) there are references to various books which feature the deaths of companions. So the deaths of Harry Sullivan (Wolfsbane), Mel (Heritage), and Ace (Prime Time/Loving the Alien) are 'explained' as being due to the temporal intervention of the Council of Eight. There are also references to the organised death of "that Jones woman" who is summed up as "insignificant druggie to eco-campaigner" - the description leads me to conclude that it is a reference to the original eighth Doctor companion Samantha Jones. Admittedly at a push it could be Jo Grant, whose married name would have been Jo Jones, but since she appears alive and well (and pointlessly) over pages 249 & 255, I don't think she's the one we're intended to think of. Interestingly, the notion of Sam dying (although we haven't actually had an adventure in which that happens, so arguably the Doctor might not know of it) does tie in with the epilogue to The Bodysnatchers, one of the very first EDAs, in which the Doctor is sombre and evasive in response to Professor Litefoot's enquiries after Sam's health.

Trix spends a portion of the novel in disguise (for no reason whatsoever since she's not hiding her real identity from anybody, but I'll let that pass) as one Crystal Devine. For a moment I thought I had stumbled upon the shocking truth that Justin Richards is actually an alias for our own Lissa Levesque, but then I realised that I was just being pathetically stupid.*

Miranda (Father Time) also reappears, although rather arbitrarily. In fact, this is a failing of the book, in that various things happen simply because the plot requires them to. Miranda's daughter appears out of thin air, and nobody questions it; Miranda appears out of thin air, and there's no surprise on either the part of the Doctor or Miranda; Trix visits the end of the universe, appearing (yes, out of thin air) on a space station, and nobody is in the least bit surprised or curious.

Rant over, and back to Miranda - she is older here, having been Empress of the Universe (or whatever she went off to be) for some time, and having produced a daughter and lost a husband in that time. Her presence rather over-eggs the pudding, since she serves no real function in the story - before the villain can start threatening her in order to control the Doctor, Miranda kills herself. The description of her death, though, is interesting ("...as the skin on her face tightened in death, she looked like a young girl asleep in the snow") in that it is a clear reference to the cover of her first story.

At the end, in a rather superfluous and heavily-contrived epilogue, the last surviving member of the council and Zesanne (Miranda's daughter) escape in Sabbath's Jonah. The council man has absorbed some of the Doctor's DNA, and the last we see of the duo is with them both suffering from amnesia: the white-haired councillor thinks he IS the Doctor, Zesanne thinks she IS this Doctor's grandaughter, and the Jonah, landing in a 1960s junkyard, thinks it should adopt the inconspicuous disguise of a police telephone box...

Even more bemusing and pointless and contrived, since we're on the subject - the Council's leader has a weapon which is a mass of crystal rods, and which is designed to destroy (or customize) stars. As the device is damaged at the end, another Councillor idly notices that it resembles a Hand. At the end of the story it gets lost among the timelines (at a guess where somebody called Omega might pick it up) and its progress is followed by an unidentified spherical eye. Quite what sort of mind would read through the first draft of this book, and think that what it needed was a tortuous lead into Remembrance of the Daleks, I don't know, but I do now have severe concerns for Mr Richards' (or Ms Levesque's) sanity...

I.T.M.A.

Well, as this is the last adventure featuring The Remarkable Mr Sabbath, we should now have answers to all those niggling questions that we've amassed about him, shouldn't we. Let's make sure:

How did he survive being drowned in the Thames in 1762? He was rescued by a Time Agent, sent specifically to save him, by his employers.

Who are his employers? A mysterious group called The Council of Eight. They gain their power from successfully predicting future events - which, I know, doesn't really make any sense. However, it is skilfully sketched in just enough to carry the plot, but not so much that the sheer absurdity of the notion becomes apparent, so let's just run with it.

So what has Sabbath been doing? The Council have apparently hired him to (a) dispose of other time-travellers (presumably such beings have the potential to interfere with the future events the Council predict, so the Council want them nobbled); (b) to keep the Doctor out of the way of the Council for a while; and (c) to ultimately, and at the right moment, lure the Doctor to the Council's lair, as indeed he does in this book.

What was all that faff about crystals a couple of books back? Even that is picked up on - the crystals seeded throughout reality from the Big Bang onwards are designed to transmit data back to the council. So basically, it was an exercise in bugging the universe.

What happened to Juliette, who went off with Sabbath on the Jonah back in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street? The Council disapproved (maybe they have a 'no hanky-panky on the Jonah' rule) so they had her 'removed', a fact Sabbath was induced to forget. Shades of Shada there (or should that be Shadas of Shade?).

I suppose the only other question remaining is... was Sabbath worth it? I can see that, in theory at least, he may have seemed a good idea: another time-travelling explorer, not an evil one like the Master, but equally not one with the same sense of moral justice as the Doctor. An amoral force for rationality, I suppose. In practice, however, he hasn't lived up to his potential, and has either been portrayed as the evil mastermind that he actually isn't, or has just been shoehorned into books for no good reason. Even in his final book, it is his employers who drive the action and force the climax, and frankly Sabbath himself only plays a small, albeit crucial, role here, in choosing to kill himself rather than the Doctor.

I - AM - THE - DOCTOR!

All in all, not a bad book for the Doctor's character. As the story reaches its climax, he has managed to piece the villain's plan together and is enough steps ahead of the game to know that he needs Sabbath to kill him to change the Council's prediction and save the day. It's nice to see the Doctor in command of the situation for a change.

On the other hand, when Sabbath surprises even the Doctor by killing himself instead, and throughout the brief exchanges with Miranda, there is no real evidence of any great feeling on the Doctor's part. He foolishly promises to save Miranda, but her death is dismissed with a "He could grieve later. There would be time for it later. Many lifetimes" which somehow fails to convince. Maybe the Doctor has been too distant recently.

In fact arguably the best indication of the Doctor's state of being here is early in the book, where he muses, "If only there was time to sit and talk and make friends and be happy" - that strikes me as being precisely the 'problem' with the eighth Doctor of late. He is no longer a man who enjoys life. Maybe now that Sabbath is out of the way, he'll rediscover his joie de vivre. Mind you, with only half a dozen EDAs left to go, he'd better be quick about it...

At the end of the book the Doctor goes into a mysterious locked room in the TARDIS (one assumes it's on the other side of the wall from where Fitz heard some odd noises back in Trading Futures). There the Doctor communicates with a face on a screen, somebody who is an old friend ("At least, he tells me he's an old friend... I really dont remember") discussing the price of saving the universe again. Whoever the old friend is, the face is described as "wise and whimsical with hard eyes and a beard flecked with grey" and he refers to being "trapped in here". The Doctor leaves the room, locking it behind him, but not before quoting the final lines from Survival about the tea getting cold. Who this old friend is, I'm not sure. The Master? A bearded Seventh Doctor? Barry Letts? Again, if we're going to find out, it'd better be soon...

MONEY IN THE BANK ZILDA!

This Book: I got fed up loitering around eBay and Amazon like a hooker on a Friday evening, so I just went and bought a brand new copy from Play.com. It came within two days, the p&p was free, and at £4.99 it was a saving of £1.00. Sometimes it's just nice to buy a new book isn't it?

Running Score: £106.81 saved against RRP to date.

*If, on the other hand, next year's book schedule includes Justin Richards' The Terrifying Return of the Vervoids or The Toast Monster, then don't forget you heard it here first.