Time Lord Victorious: The Knight, The Fool and the Dead – Review

Love it or hate it, Time Lord Victorious has kicked off across many different storytelling platforms. One of the headline platforms is the BBC books inclusion, which will see two connected books set in this timeline, The Knight, The Fool and the Dead and All Flesh is Grass, will detail much of the Tenth Doctor’s involvement as really showing us what the main villains, The Kotturuh are getting up too.

Within the opening pages, we can see this is a Tenth Doctor who is deeply disturbed by what happened at the end of The Waters of Mars and the small recap serves as a reminder to old fans and a bit of needed prologue to new readers who might not have discovered that brilliant story just yet.

This is also a Tenth Doctor like we’ve never seen him before. He’s really angry and living up to the Time Lord Victorious name, a man where you only get one chance. It’s a little strange then that even though this is an angrier Tenth Doctor, author Stephen Cole does keep him in a more jovial mood for the opening chapters of the novel before things take a more serious turn in the second half.

However, Cole makes it obvious that this is a Tenth Doctor who is completely in control and one wonders if some inspiration was taken from the Seventh Doctor Virgin Novels, he’s really quite manipulative here, tricking the baddies into making their mistakes and allowing them to defeat themselves. It’s an excellent take on an incarnation that could have been, and definitely has been, written a little too jovial and jokey.

To complement this, Cole’s descriptions of the unfolding events is rather dark and grim, especially for a Tenth Doctor story. If this is the direction these novels will take, then I’m all for it, the situations are quite disturbing especially the fate of one of the characters who you think of as the ‘companion’ for the foreseeable future. Cole also uses the location of the book, being set in the mythical Dark Times, things feel really primitive and ancient, but he really taps into this time zone we’ve never seen, read or heard the likes of before.

For me where the novel really succeeded was in its depiction of the big bad for this saga, the Kotturuh. They are truly evil in what they do and for the first time, we’ve got to experience what they are capable of. Decimating whole planets and universes, I did wonder if the opening prologue might be a little too near the knuckle! But it all works in the book’s favour as it really makes you want the Doctor to defeat them, even if they feel as much a part of the universe at this point as the planets in the solar system are. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is why the saga unfolds, you can’t have the universe without the Kotturuh, but I’ll enjoy finding out all the same.

They also work as creepy ghosts, who haunt the spaceship where the Doctor is trying to find a way to stop their deathly abilities and they even manage to get inside the TARDIS, really taking away the idea of feeling safe, something the show has rarely done but it works really well. Personally, the Kotturuh are such a presence across this novel, I’d love to see what could be done with on-screen one day!

Brian the Ood is also another great inclusion. I’ll be honest, when this saga was announced I did wonder what on Earth they were going to do with this character and no doubt he will tie into things a lot more as the saga unfolds. But here, he seems to be the companion the Doctor needs, someone who isn’t afraid to tell the Doctor what he needs to do rather than what he wants to do. It’s an interesting Doctor/Companion dynamic where, unlike companions like Turlough, the Doctor knows Brian would kill him without a second thought if he wanted or had too. And I’m sure that the catchphrase “Mr. Ball says,” will become a fun Doctor Who game, drinking or otherwise!

As a result, The Knight, The Fool and the Dead is a great place to start the Time Lord Victorious saga if you are wondering how too. And the ending makes for a great cliffhanger which I can’t wait to see resolved in the next book, All Flesh is Grass.  Cole also includes a number of cameos from Doctor Who’s past which make a great inclusion and he proves to have a handle on many of these characters, if they ever wanted to relaunch a classic Doctor Who range of novels, then there are some TARDIS teams I would let him tackle!

And while there are some elements that don’t work quite so well, I wasn’t too sure of the location hopping, especially in the opening chapters and the beginning of the final third of the book, this is a book that represents the main plot of the saga. It’s bleak, it’s disturbing and its ancient, and it sees the Tenth Doctor taken in a wholly original direction, setting him on the path to becoming The Time Lord Victorious. I don’t think we’ve ever seen the Doctor fall this far before and I can’t wait to see where it leads.