NA #25 Legacy

Legacy by Gary Russell

In Brief: There's intrigue a-plenty as the Doctor returns to Peladon and has to tackle giant hamsters, shrieking religious zealots and his favourite one-eyed monster.

Legacy is terrible. However it's a "fun" version of terrible. It's sort of the Plan 9 From Outer Space for the Doctor Who world as all of the poor writing, terrible dialogue, campy characters and awful plot mix together into a strangely entertaining (and bewildering) whole.

I suspect that the big problem is that Gary Russell *desperately* wanted to write a 3rd Doctor story but was stuck with the 7th and his companions. The result ends up being what is in some ways the oddest New Adventure so far in terms of tone. The Doctor meets with an "old friend" in the 39th-century Galactic Federation who asks him to track down a shape-changing murderer on the planet of Peladon, which he visited twice while looking like Jon Pertwee (in the not-bad "The Curse of Peladon" and the terrible "The Monster of Peladon"). It just all feels like a complete departure from pretty much everything else that's happened in the New Adventures series so far.

However the main plot involving the murderer and a hunt for the stolen Pakhar Diadem is really just an excuse for Russell to totally roll around in all things old-school Who. I quickly lost count of how many random references to old stories and characters he threw into the novel, most of the time in attempts to make the 26-years of the original show fit into an all-encompassing continuity. While it may have been fun for him to write it ends up being somewhat torturous for the reader.

And this is from someone who actually got all of the references, I can't imagine what a post-Eccleston reader would make of it all.

But the core of Legacy is really Gary Russell cramming the 7th-Doctor and Bernice (he sends Ace off on a sub-plot that is rarely mentioned, which is probably for the best) into the mould of a 3rd-Doctor story. As expected the result just doesn't fit together. The other big problem is that he's also a rather poor writer who can't manage convincing dialogue or interesting characterisation. The best "new" character is probably Keri the Pakhar from a species of a metre-tall hamsters. The rest of the book is really our revisiting an old location, to the point where I could practically *see* events happening as if filmed like an early-70s story.

Complete with fuzzy videotape picture and the theme going NNNNNNEEEEEOOOOWWWWWW whenever a cliff-hanger happened at the end of a chaper.

If something good can be said of Legacy it's that Russell's obvious love for the Ice Warriors (who are *way* overdue an appearance on the show) as he captures their characters particularly well. The Federation delegate from Alpha Centauri is also well captured, in all of it's One-Eyed Hexapoidal "glory".

How could you not love that face?

But yeah, otherwise a bit of a slog. It's sort felt like revisiting a holiday-spot that you *really* liked when you were 10 but which hasn't held up well. Unfortunately while accompanied by someone who still finds it totally amazing.

So I think any enjoyment of the book may have came more from the author's enthusiasm rather than any quality found on its pages. In the quickly mounting pile of New Adventures (I'm now through 25 books?!!) I'd have to put it very definitely in the "not good" section. But at least unlike some of the real dregs I at least had some fun while reading Legacy, albeit often in a "I can't believe he just wrote that" sort of way. I know after giving No Future a drubbing for having a lot of the same faults (over-reliance on the past) I should be giving this book a harder time, it's just that the earlier book was really a disappointment from a very good author. Here on the other hand we really have as good a book as we're going to get from this author and story.