Let's change history so it doesn't happen...

Many Doctor Who enthusiasts view the Season 9 Jon Pertwee adventure The Time Monster - to which Quantum Archangel is a sequel - as a bit of an embarrassment. Cheap, tacky, overlong, dated, badly acted... yep, check. It's almost heart-breaking to report that without the original's stringent limiting constraints of shoestring budget, horrible design or atrocious acting, Quantum Archangel lives down to its predecessor's reputation.

The premise is that the Master - his strength waning in tandem with his senses - attempts to steal the power source of the time-hungry Chronovores, from whom he is on the run. This is fair enough, I suppose, as is the idea that Stuart Hyde, The Time Monster's young and groovy scientist, would become jaded and demotivated with age. Similarly, the central philosophical question of how different people would react when faced with the power to change history is - while not startlingly original - not a terrible basis for a book. What renders this book almost unreadable - as so often in the past, and more here than ever before - is the amateurish reliance on Doctor Who.

The common and highly exasperating game of spot-the-reference is taken to ludicrous extremes here - it would be easier to list those few stories which aren't mentioned in passing. One does not need to have seen The Time Monster in order to follow Quantum Archangel, but it is necessary to be conversant with Doctor Who minutiae just to comprehend some of the dialogue. In many cases, a line doesn't read especially like what the character spouting it would say in a particular situation - but someone else once uttered the same line in (say) Earthshock or The Five Doctors, and out-of-context recycling here is in some way witty, or something. The clearly sought-after insights into the likes of Mel and Stuart are scarcely better - their moments of introspection are not so much inner monologues as internal rhetoric, entire paragraphs being given over to declamatory hypothetical questions.

Cheap, tacky, overlong, dated... check.