Doctor Who: Bullet Time

Past Doctor Adventures #45

by David A. McIntee

'You're not the Doctor I knew.'

'Perhaps you never knew the Doctor.'

Hong Kong 1997: the handover to Chinese rule is imminent, and investigative journalist Sarah Jane Smith is on the trail of corruption in the Far East.

Street gangsters lurk round every corner. And when one decides to confide in Sarah, she is thrown headlong into danger. What are UNIT doing in Hong Kong, and why are they following missing backpackers? What is causing a spate of strange and unnatural deaths? And how is Sarah’s old and trusted friend the Doctor involved? More importantly, whose side is he on?

The truth can now be told, and the outcome of Sarah’s investigations revealed. But will her world ever be the same again?

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction, Doctors, Media Tie In

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2001

About the author

David A. McIntee was a British author who specialised in writing spin-offs and nonfiction commentaries for Doctor Who and other British and American science-fiction franchises.

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of my least favourite PDA’s.

Having read it after Sarah Jane Smiths appearance with the Tenth Doctor in School Reunion also meant that it didn’t feel like cannon.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sarah Jane Smith is investigating the Triad. The 7th Doctor seems to be in charge of them.

I was really disappointed in this novel, usually, I like the authors Dr Who work. This was not a Doctor Who novel, neither him or Sarah Jane are the main characters. They just happen to appear now and again to move the story along. It's more about the Triad characters and some odd UNIT people. I usually like experimental Doctor Who books, but I feel that this one really did not work.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hong Kong in April 1997 is a city on the cusp of change. With the British preparing to hand over the territory to China, there is a heightened degree of tension in the air. The discovery of the ash remnants of a body in an apartment does little to lessen this, especially given the circumstances surrounding it. For while the man was completely combusted, the apartment itself bears no signs of a fire. The detectives assigned to the case soon find UNIT operatives hovering over their investigation. But what does this have to do with a mysterious crime lord? And who invited the inquisitive Sarah Jane Smith to conduct her own investigation into the situation?

David McIntee ranks among my favorite authors in the Doctor Who franchise, with his previous novels providing sure-fire entertainment. This one was a disappointment, however, as he never seems to get a handle on the messy plot. Part of the problem may rest with his choice of Doctors, as his use of Sylvester McCoy’s arch-manipulator leaves him off the page for much of it. Instead the story is told through a handful of characters who, apart from his former companion, in which I found it difficult ton invest much concern. McIntee fills the plot with his usual twists and turns – with a notably shocking, if non-canonical development at the end – but the overall effect falls flat compared to his previous work. While the idea of a Doctor Who novel mixed with elements form a James Bond novel may have possibilities, they weren’t realized in this one.

[Kelly Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read the other reviews here and listen to them. I wish I had. This is not a good book.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has been labeled as the last 7th Doctor book, allegedly set just before the TV movie. I've put off reading it for a while and now that I finally have … I'm disappointed.

To start with, it's not really a 7th Doctor novel. It's a Sarah Jane Smith novel. The Doctor largely appears in side views, and as an adversary. It's a nice complement to his portrayal as a manipulator throughout the Virgin New Adventures, but it doesn't hold up very well when it's used for most of a novel, leaving us with a confusing array of secondary characters to try and hold the book up.

Worse, the Sarah Jane Smith inclusion doesn't fit into continuity well. I mean, none of the Sarah Jane Smith appearances between "The Hand of Fear" and "School Reunion" seem to fit into continuity very well, but this one is particularly egregious because it doesn't even fit well into the continuity of the time. Smith is correctly characterized as being somewhat bitter for being left behind by the Doctor, but that ignores the "Train-Flight" cartoon from the time, and from what I've heard this whole novel also ignores an Eighth Doctor Adventure called "Interference".

Of course this novel's most egregious sin is that it kills Smith. Gratuitously and without reason. Maybe. The author never actually commits to what happened (and if we want to possibly include this in continuity with "School Reunion", it didn't).

And speaking of continuity, I have no idea why you'd consider this the last 7th Doctor adventure, except perhaps because the Doctor is traveling alone. However, "Lungbarrow" is much more obviously a finale for Seven. This should be read some other time (or not at all).

It's a pity, because there are nice elements in this novel. UNIT features heavily and is fiddling with some cryptozoological problems. Meanwhile, they're being really military and heavy-handed … and it's eventually revealed that this is due to an anti-alien conspiracy within the agency. There's also some nice depiction of late 20th century Hong Kong.

It's not enough to save the novel from mediocrity, however.

[Jacob Licklider · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Past Doctor Adventures as a book range have done an interesting job of taking untraditional Doctor Who Doctor/companion pairs and explored what they could be. David A. McIntee pioneered this idea by pairing the Third Doctor’s UNIT family and the Master with Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright in The Face of the Enemy while Peter Darvill-Evans, taking the idea from McIntee, went one step further and included Nyssa with the Fourth Doctor long before they would actually meet in Asylum. Bullet Time feels like David A. McIntee is almost writing in response to Darvil-Evans’ poor handling of Nyssa by taking the opportunity to pair Sarah Jane Smith with the Seventh Doctor. McIntee uses this to similarly compare the 1970s vision of Doctor Who to the late-1980s/1990s vision of the show, much like The Face of the Enemy comparing the 1960s to the 1970s while being a stealth sequel to First Frontier. As such the plot is straight out of a VNA, with Sarah Jane investigating corruption in Hong Kong where the Seventh Doctor has found himself at the head of a Chinese Tao, echoing his dealings with Al Capone in Blood Harvest. There are alien dealings while UNIT is continually investigating the situation which becomes more and more dire as shadows from the past are revealed to be occurring.

The Doctor doesn’t actually appear until about the halfway point of the novel, but like with some of the absolute best New Adventures novels, his presence is felt. McIntee is incredibly intelligent in executing the Doctor’s involvement, using it as a mystery as to where the Doctor could be with the most obvious misdirect being where he actually is. This is done incredibly well since the book puts the reader in the mind of Sarah Jane who at this point would be expecting the Fourth Doctor, or maybe the Fifth Doctor at a stretch. Having her meet the Seventh Doctor, implied to be at a point very near the end of his life. There is this horror when Sarah Jane finally realizes who the Doctor is, as here he’s doing something morally ambiguous to say the least, only because there are aliens that need to be fought. It’s something that works for the Doctor, but Sarah Jane cannot really approve, McIntee bringing into question just how deep the Doctor/companion friendships of the classic series (and especially the mid to late 1970s) actually went.

The Doctor suggests that Sarah Jane never really knew him, certainly not after he left her in Aberdeen, which is only exacerbated by the fact that Bullet Time ends with the implication that Sarah Jane dies. As far as I am aware, this is one of multiple companion deaths in the Past Doctor Adventures that gets an explanation in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, but if that wasn’t the case it would be a genuinely interesting version of Sarah Jane’s potential death. It recalls echoes of Eternity Weeps where Liz Shaw dies trying to save the world from a plague, though here there isn’t a plague. This is also a book that being a sequel to First Frontier does everything but confirm that the aliens being dealt with here are the Tzun who have developed their plans and Confederacy since that novel. McIntee makes it a shame that the Tzun haven’t really been utilized since as here they are excellent.

Overall, Bullet Time is a book who’s cover implying fractures in the world is something that thematically works for the idea. It’s a dark tale reflecting gangster films and the grit of the 1990s imposed on a character from the 1970s. The big issues really only come in a lot of the supporting cast not standing out outside of the two major characters, which is an issue with the first half focusing so much on Sarah Jane without the Doctor. Still, it’s a wonderful book that shouldn’t be overlooked. 8/10.

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Past Doctor Adventure featuring the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Sarah Jane Smith.
Sarah Jane begins investigating rumours of UFOs in Hong Kong and soon finds that she's not the only one, with UNIT and others already in the mix. The trail leads into the criminal world of the Triads where Sarah Jane is shocked to discover that a new and darker incarnation of the Doctor is up to his neck.

This is the second of McIntee's Who books I've read (after 'The Face of the Enemy') and both of them barely feature the Doctor for most of their length. I don't know what it says about the author that he wants to write Doctor Who novels that don't feature the Doctor as the main character, but for me as a reader of Doctor Who novels it's very disappointing. I was genuinely excited to see Sarah Jane Smith and the Seventh Doctor working together, but their interactions are thin on the ground and mostly acrimonious.
I did like that the author uses Sarah Jane's perspective to comment on the more scheming and ruthless nature of McCoy's incarnation of the Time Lord, but there wasn't nearly enough of it to be satisfying.

Most of this novel is a jumble of confused and misleading subplots wherein almost all of the point-of-view characters can be considered as unreliable narrators and therefore you never actually know what's really going on at any point. There are also some pretty major narrative jumps and plot holes that the author never addresses and which leave you thinking 'Wait... what?!'. The most egregious of these is right at the end where a main character is shot in the heart at point blank range and then turns up two pages later none the worse for wear. If there was an explanation in there, I certainly missed it.

It's not all bad and, in the brief scenes that the Doctor has, McIntee does a nice job of capturing the tone of McCoy's onscreen performance. Unfortunately, there's just too much bad stuff drowning out the good bits.

* More reviews here: https://fsfh-book-review2.webnode.com/ *

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 2 out of 5]

My least favourite of David McIntee's "Doctor Who" novels. It's a very competently written thriller...but the Whoniverse content -- particularly the Doctor & Sarah -- seem so incidental by comparison. It's as if McIntee wrote a completely non-Who novel...then decided to try and insert the appropriate characters to add the logo to the cover. The result is something that didn't spark much interest in me at all. Luckily, it very much feels like an aberration in an otherwise excellent library of "Doctor Who" fiction.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do you want a Doctor Who novel that hardly features the Doctor, is angsty and squalid for no reason, casually kills the most important companion in the show's history and all hinges upon an extremely cliched story?

Then this is the Doctor Who book for you. McIntee may be the worst of the repeat Doctor Who novelists. He seems actively hostile to the show, to science fiction and to the idea that these books should be entertaining.

I liked his book about The Master, for some reason, but the others I've read of his are terrible.

[Michel Siskoid Albert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I rate David A. McIntee's Doctor Who New Adventures and his 1st Doctor novel The Eleventh Tiger quite highly, so I am especially disappointed by Bullet Time. What McIntee does best, normally, is throw the Doctor into a specific genre, and in The Eleventh Tiger, he showed he knew how do to kun fu. So a novel with a Matrixy title, set in Hong Kong as it's about to revert to Chinese leadership is gonna be a big HK action spectacular, right? An early stunt makes us think so, and there's a big sequence near the end, but no, that's now what this is. Rather, it plays as a sequel to McIntee's own First Frontier, though rights issues makes him cagey about saying so point-blank. But Gray aliens, UFOs and such don't really mix well with Triads and Hong Kong crime thriller tropes. In fact, the novel is a big mess that features too many characters that I'm not sure pay off (like the two detectives). Why does it even have to take place in Hong Kong?! Throw in the CIA and UNIT and a UNIT sub-group and you've hardly got room for the real star, the 7th Doc--no wait, it's actually Sarah Jane Smith's adventure and she doesn't know if she can trust the dark NA Doctor. Let's just say that it's also not my preference for Sarah, of all companions, to have a sex scene, even such a brief one, and if this is the ill-motivated note she goes out on, let's just say I found the puzzling ending maddening. Might just be the first McIntee novel I've disliked, so I'm not complaining about the episode "School Reunion" throwing its canonicity into question.

[Alex Sarll]

The Seventh Doctor: most devious of the lot. Readiest to believe that the end justifies the means. I still suspect he did most of the worst things in the Time War and somehow set the War Doctor up for the fall. And what better setting for this arch-pragmatist than Hong Kong on the eve of the 1997 handover, a monstrous act only justifiable by how much worse the alternatives would have been? A setting, too, which - as the title suggests - allows an homage to the territory's kinetic cinema traditions.
Paired with the Doctor is old companion Sarah Jane Smith, and part of the charm is that this doesn't undercut the touching scenes with Tennant in 'School Reunion', because both of them would probably rather forget this traumatic interim encounter. You know, like if you bumped into an old friend from years back, you likely wouldn't mention the time you'd seen them poking kittens with a stick in the intervening years.
The only problem is that McIntee's prose seems oddly stilted compared to his other books, which all flowed much better than this one. Ironic, given the balletic implication of the title.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2765570.html

The final Seventh doctor novel in terms of continuity, actually it is much more about Sarah Jane Smith in Hong Kong just before the 1997 handover, getting sucked into what at first appears to be a criminal conspiracy but turns out to be the work of aliens - well, one alien in particular... I felt that Hong Kong itself was well conveyed, and the plot had enough twists involving characters I was interested in to make up for the fact that it's relatively light on the Doctor. I'm also not in general a big fan of the Seventh=Doctor-as-cosmic-manipulator, but it worked OK here. However, certain events at the end don't sit so well in overall Who continuity.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit hard to get into, as you feel from the very beginning that you were dumped in the middle of a story and the Doctor spends a lot of time off stage. Plus, there seem to be about three different conspiracies criss crossing each other.

On the bright side, there's lots of Sarah Jane, most of the background characters are interesting, the story never quite goes where you expect it to, the aliens are a bit different than your usual Who aliens and there's a nice scene when the seventh Doctor and Sarah finally meet.

Not Mcintee's strongest Who novel, but his weak ones are still better than the majority of other Who writers best. If I see his name on the cover I usually end up trying it.

[Chomal · Rating 4 out of 5]

i had to read twice to understand the story but once i did, it was a clever piece of work. everything combines in the end to give light to the whole story. a good read.

[Alexis · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish I could give it less than one star. The only book I could not get through besides Wicked....

[Dale Rosso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always enjoy a Doctor Who story.