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11.10.23
The "final" book in the Faction Paradox / War in Heaven arc is very controversial. I actually quite liked it but I get why some people hate it. It started off very good and the concepts in here are very very interesting but the payoff is just. Not great. Spoilers!
Generally the book is very silly and very disturbing at the same time. I think that's actually a big plus. While Interference was largely political and serious, The Ancestor Cell is more lighthearted, more Doctor Who-ey in a way. This book is Filled with callbacks / little references to previous Doctors. Here are some:
‘Castellan Vozarti,’ Ditrec yelled at him. ‘Permission to employ the mind probe, sir!’
‘No,’ said Vozarti calmly. ‘Not the mind probe.(…)
This whole scene, where the Doctor looks for his shoes (Where are my shoes?), tries to put his trousers on while wearing his shoes, notices that doesn't work, puts them aside and looks for them again afterwards. The person he is talking to during all this is very annoyed, so their conversation concludes like this:
‘Oh dear,’ said the Doctor, sitting down heavily on his bed.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mali. ‘Are those the wrong shoes after all?’
‘No, no, these fit perfectly,’ said the Doctor.
And finally this bit said to the Doctor by Mother Tarra of Faction Paradox:
‘But our lives, Doctor, shall be different from anybody else’s. That’s the exciting thing. No one in the universe can do what we’re doing.’
[In order these references stem from: The Five Doctors, Spearhead from Space, The Movie, The Tomb of the Cybermen]
Generally the book has many silly parts! But it also has some deeply gross horror stuff too, very fitting to Faction Paradox, of course! A giant bone flower in the sky and bone spiders walk around on it, eating peoples heads, people being burnt alive, people taking their faces off to reveal that their face is really just a bloody skull. Childrens faces being burnt off. Stuff like that. Also this part which was silly and edgy in a way that's almost silly again:
‘How long have you been here?’ he asked softly.
‘No idea, old chap,’ the dust Doctor answered, smiling kindly. ‘Once I started threading electrons on a string ... one a second for eight hours a day. But when the string was two tenths of a millimetre long, I had to give it up. I was becoming obsessive, you know.’
Mali told herself the apparition was joking, but still processed the nonsensical information anyway. If true, he’d have been here for over five thousand years ...
‘Silly old fool,’ the Doctor said, and she could hear the smile in his voice trying to mask the pain. ’ Should’ve used hydrogen atoms: you’d have twenty‐five metres or so by now, you could’ve decorated the room.’
The face in the dust closed its dark eyes. ‘Had to be careful. Didn’t want to give myself enough rope to hang myself with. I have to hold on ... to hold on ...’
Anyway, why do people hate this book so much?
Well, as I said it starts off great. For the first 120 pages I read it I was thinking "this is great, I haven't been bored once so far". The ideas in here are great. The Doctor's TARDIS, believed by all to be dead, has turned into a giant bone flower hanging over Gallifrey and growing and doing time disturbances or something. The Faction Paradox virus is threatening to take hold over him finally, and all the other Time Lords are roasting him about it. Father Kreiner, the original version of Fitz, has been rescued by the Faction out of I.M. Foremans bottle universe (I'm so happy about him he's like the best part of the book but more later). The history of Gallifrey seems to be changing without anyone but the reader and Fitz noticing that the number of founders and the number of "Gallifreys" keeps sinking. The Panopticon starts out with 6 walls and by the end it is just one circle. That was done really well I think.
So anyway these are pretty weird but that's normal. Why do people hate it?
Well first of all it's confusing. I'm cool with technobabble but what even happened in this book? I'm not sure. Then of course there's the main reason of "we'll just resolve this by making everything unhappen". Very unsatisfying! Also this is probably the first story to destroy Gallifrey. I don't know if the books unkilled Gallifrey again, but it's very funny to me that they were killing the planet already 5 years before the new show. WHILE the audios were going on and their Gallifrey was ay-okay.
Obviously people were mad about that but I personally can't really care about Gallifreys ever-changing state of destroyed/undestroyed. Schrödinger's Gallifrey is both there and not there and you can only know if it's been undestroyed again if you check up on it.
But I do find the Faction's ending very unsatisfactory. That does bother me, and it also bothered Lawrence Miles, the guy who came up with Faction Paradox, so he basically retconned as much of that as he could if I'm not mistaken.
(I also forgot to mention that the Faction's leader Grandfather Paradox (this is so silly, wait til you hear about where they set up their home base) is revealed to be the Doctor himself, just older and with short hair and only one arm. Apart from the arm he looks basically as Paul McGann looks now. That's pretty much exactly the description)
Faction Paradox on Gopherpedia
So let's back up a bit to Interference. As I've explained to my supremely uninterested and confused friends in a 7min WhatsApp voice message; in that book Fitz creates a paradox by basically accidentally travelling to the future and giving the aliens who put him there the idea of coming to his time in the first place. The human colony where he lands (which is obsessed with TV and what we now know for realsies as Influencers) is or will be under the control of Faction Paradox, so they think a paradox is super nice and cool. The Faction helps them travel back and settle on Anathema (a "planet" that turns out to be a Time Lord weapon sent to destroy Earth eventually) in the 1700s. The Faction is super interested in recruiting Fitz because he travelled with the Doctor and all. Fitz spends I think 3-5? years waiting for the Doctor but when he lands in 1700 he knows he won't live to see him again in 1996. The Faction left the "planet" but promised to come back Once. The people on the "planet" do not have children normally, instead when they die they are remembered by people who knew them and grow into a new person out of those memories. Anyway he ends up going with the Faction but leaving his "biodata" behind so that he can keep being remembered and reborn – this version of him ends up being remembered properly by the TARDIS at the end of the book so the normal Fitz from there on is basically a clone.
OG Fitz ends up as Father Kreiner and he is super pissed at the Doctor and he wants to kill him so bad. When we see him again in Interference he is incredibly old, beyond beyond what's humanly possible and basically held together with duct tape (cyborgy).
‘What’s the matter – you wanna live forever?’ Kovacs had asked him, back in 1944.
‘I dunno yet,’ he’d said. ‘Ask me again in five hundred years.’
In The Ancestor Celll he finally gets to meet the Doctor who abandoned him and also his clone self and it's so good. Genuinely makes the whole book better.
‘You’re an ersatz version of me, created by the Remote over many years. (…) Lifeless biomass, given history and meaning by the remembrance tanks. You’re a fake. You’re a fiction. Truth is, boy, I am the person the Doctor first met, first took from Earth in the TARDIS.’ (…)
Kreiner’s eyes snapped open again. The Faction monster said, ‘I am the real Fitzgerald Michael Kreiner’
‘And I claim my five pounds.’ He’d found his voice at last. Don’t let this crinkly old sod see you’re rattled, Fitzie. “The Doctor reminded me of what I really am. Being me is more than just existing in a continuous line for ever, you know. You can’t be me any more. Not even if you live for another four thousand years. You could never be Frank Sinatra, like I was on Drebnar. You could never be Fitz Fortune, or Simon Templar, or Alphonse Lebleu. Because you’ve forgotten what it ever meant to be the real Fitz Kreiner.’ He gulped, watching for the Faction man’s reaction. ‘Ersatz? I don’t think so. I’m more Fitz Kreiner than you’ll ever be, you sad, forgotten nobody. Don’t think you can manipulate me like the other poor fools' (…)
Eventually, Father Kreiner said, “The Doctor certainly must have thought I was nobody. The same Doctor who you speak of with such affection. He abandoned me, you know. Left me to rot on Earth, left me to the Faction. How convenient, then, to have you –another version of me that he could shape as he wished, that he could control.’ He gestured around him at the fallen coven members. “That he could manipulate, like these poor fools.’ Kreiner stepped up close to him now, and Fitz could smell the stench of his ancient breath, icy on his face. Fitz felt the cold seep into him, filling him with dread and despair. As a kid, he’d dreamed of living to a ripe old age. Well, be careful what you wish for, Fitzie: it may come true.
For the convos between Father Kreiner and the Doctor there's too much material. I guess here's one
‘Look out!’ warned the Doctor (…) Mali could see that the relief on the Doctor’s face was heartfelt. He’d saved one life.
But Kreiner had grabbed Tana’s gun and, with precise aim, shot Tragdorvigan himself. The Doctor yelled in outrage as the man’s body was knocked back shaking into a bank of instruments before melting away into thin air.
‘Why?’ the Doctor shouted. His nose was bleeding again. ‘Why, Fitz?’
Kreiner shrugged. ‘Why save him and not me?’ he shouted back. Then he aimed at the last surviving guard, and fired again. ‘Or him?’ There was another angry shout from the Doctor as the man went down.
Anyway they make a deal for the Dr to undo all that happened to OG Fitz (or smth) after he gets everything else sorted but Father Kreiner gets stomped on by one of the bone spiders and after this following scene he's going to be killed by Grandfather Paradox. F.
‘Hold on, Fitz,’ the Doctor whispered encouragingly.
‘For what? Christmas?’ Kreiner laughed weakly, and a spurt of blood ran iron over his tongue and teeth.
‘Where there’s life, there’s hope,’ the Doctor said. Kreiner saw the old Doctor mouth the words along with him.
(…)
‘Is there hope, Doctor?’ Kreiner whispered. The pain was sharpening his senses now, and with it came a new determination that he would not die in this place.
The Doctor smiled and his lip split again. ‘Always. There’s always something.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
Kreiner realised, as the Doctor gave his solemn word, that he actually believed him. Perhaps he really had never forgotten what it meant to be Fitz Kreiner.
‘So you’ve saved him,’ he heard the dust Doctor say. ‘A single person. What are you going to do now?’
Kreiner closed his eyes, let his gauntlet trace the gaping hole in his stomach again. He wanted to hear what the Doctor would say, but it was so warm here in the shadows, so comfortingly dark, he just wanted to sleep.
Then his eyes snapped open, compelled by some premonition. Hovering over him, face huge and bright, centimetres from his own, was Grandfather Paradox.
So yeah all in all I did enjoy it, even though the ending wasn't great. By the way, the book ends with 8 getting amnesia again. 8 getting amnesia is his whole thing. Whithout exaggerating he does it probably a dozen times.
I'm not good at giving scored reviews. I guess assuming that Interference is a 9/10, this would be maybe a 6/10? I'd still recommend it though. To anyone who isn't too bothered by books that are a little bad and kind of make no sense