The Knight, the Fool and the Dead
EMMA REEVES
Book
BBC Books RRP £9.99 Written by Steve Cole Featuring the Tenth Doctor
Titles are important. Certainly to Time Lords, and especially to the one known as the Doctor - whose self-chosen identity as a healer is clung to desperately and only rejected at moments of great personal crisis.
The Knight, the Fool and the Dead takes place during the Tenth Doctor’s spell on the lam from Death, when he declared himself the Time Lord Victorious in his frantic attempts to avert Ood Sigma’s prophecy of the ending of his song.
Until now, the Doctor’s attempt to rebrand himself (fi ttingly at Bowie Base, named after the master of personal reinvention) had appeared to be a brief episode of manic overreach, triggered by grief, pain and loss, and brought to an abrupt halt when Adelaide Brooke convinced him that he’d gone too far. The Knight, the Fool and the Dead turns this around. It transpires that Brooke’s death, rather than curbing his hubris, pushed the Doctor further into narcissism, megalomania, and indeed a quixotic quest to destroy Death itself.