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The Doctor’s been everywhere and everywhen, and seems
to know everything. But ask him what happened to the Starship
Brilliant and he hasn’t the first idea. Did it fall
into a sun or a black hole? Was it shot down in the first
moments of the galactic war? And what’s this about a
secret experimental drive? As Martha is so keen to find out,
the Doctor lands the TARDIS on the Brilliant, a few
days before it vanishes, so they can see for themselves...
Soon the Doctor learns the awful truth, and Martha learns
to be careful what you wish for. She certainly wasn’t
hoping for mayhem, death and badger-faced space pirates...
Simon
Guerrier is less prolific in terms of previous Doctor Who
output than many of his fellow contributors to the new series
novels, having penned just two full-length Who stories
prior to this book: The
Time Travellers, for BBC Books, and the audio
drama The
Settling,
for Big Finish Productions. However, he has plenty of short
stories to his name, having contributed to most of Big Finish’s
Short Trips collections, and edited a couple of volumes
in the series, The
History of Christmas
and Time
Signature. Guerrier is also the Range Editor
of Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield audio dramas
and books.
The
latter role accounts for the presence of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
mention of the Mim. The author also fleetingly references
the
Ood,
the Monoids and the Voc robots, and possibly also the planet
Yemaya 4 (from the New Adventures novel SLEEPY).
You can tell he likes his continuity (as do I), because, despite
the stand-alone nature of these books, he explicitly establishes
that the events of Wishing
Well occurred just a couple of days ago from
Martha’s perspective. A decision that Martha takes at
the end of the story suggests that this batch of novels takes
place not long before Utopia.
A
less fortuitous connection is the presence of a spaceship
that resembles an old-fashioned sea vessel, rather like we
just had in the Christmas special Voyage of the Damned
(and in Enlightenment before that). However, this is
a very different tale from Voyage.
Owing
to a rather bizarre time loop (which means the canapés
never run out), the Doctor and Martha end up separated in
time. The separation isn’t as great as in Mawdryn
Undead,
Fear
Itself
or The Girl Who Never Was, involving hours rather than
years, but it nevertheless makes for intriguing reading. At
first, I thought the travellers might have been split into
alternate timelines, as you will see if you read the book...
It’s best not to think about the time loop too much,
as I don’t think it makes total sense, but just go with
the flow.
And
what is it with this series and adversaries based on cute
wildlife? Following the porcupine-like Quevvils in Winner
Takes All
and the otters of Wetworld,
here we have genetically engineered badger pirates! They talk
and act like children much of the time, but receive something
of an education from Martha and an endearing alien passenger
called Mrs Wingsworth (imagine, if you can, Iris Wildthyme
trapped in the body of Mr Tickle). The morals of the story,
or two of them at least, are that you get on much better in
life if you say “please” and that surely it’s
preferable to have a party than to perpetrate acts of violence.
The
Pirate Loop is certainly a frivolous tale (the Doctor
and Martha seem to take the Time Lord’s status as the
last of his kind very lightly, and Guerrier channels Russell
T Davies’s penchant for silly names by referring to a
place called Milky-Pink City and giving a couple of his characters
the surnames Wet-Eleven and Five-Shoelace) but it is an enjoyable
one. Worth buying, or (if you’re one of our younger readers,
at whom this book is aimed) badgering your parents to buy
it for you.
Richard
McGinlay
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