Story: Just days before New Year’s Eve, 1999 – presumably while his seventh self is turning into his eighth somewhere across the Atlantic – the sixth Doctor and Mel visit London, where the Doctor attends a celebration of the life and career of Anne Travers, who, at a much younger age, helped the second Doctor and his companions defeat the Yeti. Since then she has been serving as the British government’s leading scientific advisor, but a dark cloud hangs over her – she constantly fears the return of the Great Intelligence. In the meantime, Mel attends a college class reunion, and though she’s unable to explain away her lack of aging, the greater mystery comes in the form of a former classmate’s plea. Mel is asked to hack into Ashley Chapel Logistics, a London-based worldwide software conglomerate, to uncover an unspecified dark secret. As it turns out, Ashley Chapel himself, head of the company that shares his name, has gathered dark powers in his new software, which will be unleashed on New Year’s Eve. Even though the Doctor arrives at ACL just before midnight to thwart this deadly scheme, he is powerless to stop Chapel from transforming the world into a place where magic is real…and where the Doctor’s worst nightmare can overtake him at any moment.
Review: I really did like most of this book. The extremely brief on-screen adventures of the sixth Doctor and Melanie were just enough to convince me that they would’ve continued to make an appealing team. Both personalities are captured well by Craig Hinton, and the first 2/3 of “Millennial Rites” – setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not New Year’s Eve 1999 truly constitutes the eve of the new millennium – are extremely interesting and suspenseful. But when midnight hits and the foreplay is over, the sinister secret turns out to be a transformation of the Earth into a world somewhere between Mirror, Mirror and Magic: The Gathering…with sometimes silly results.
Just about the only glue that holds that last 1/3 of “Millennial Rites” together is the constant threat that, like everyone else around him, the Doctor will turn into some dark, twisted version of himself, and in his case that means the Valeyard. This is an interesting development, and it’s given a twist reminiscent of Survival when it is revealed that the Doctor has at least moderate magical potential – and even the slightest use of that magic brings him closer to becoming the Valeyard forever. At one point, the Doctor’s self-preserving inaction comes dangerously close to destroying everything.
The Valeyard’s appearance also gives Hinton a chance to do some retcon, in which he draws parallels between the dark psychological manipulations of the seventh Doctor and the evil nature of the Valeyard. The sixth Doctor flatly denies to himself that he could ever become such a manipulative player of games, believing that this would be too much of a step into the darkness. And given that the seventh Doctor’s later adventures alienate Ace dozens of times over, get Roz Forrester killed, and gets dozens of innocent bystanders killed, perhaps this isn’t such a far-fetched analogy. Whether it was intended or not, Hinton also paved the way for the seventh Doctor’s epiphany in Kate Orman’s New Adventures novel “The Room With No Doors”.
Or perhaps I’m retconning now.
Year: 1995
Author: Craig Hinton
Publisher: Virgin