The Kaleidoscope is Jo Martin’s stunning debut novel, with the actor’s deep understanding of the Fugitive Doctor creating a compelling tale of memory and identity
Circuit Breaker is Doctor Who’s third epic cross-media event, following 2020’s Time Lord Victorious and 2023’s Doom’s Day. It was already head and shoulders above those efforts, but new full length novel The Kaleidoscope establishes it as one of the most compelling and significant Doctor Who stories of recent years. In many ways it calls to mind the old New Adventures credo. Like them it tells a story too deep and too broad for television. Time Lord Victorious’ concept of the Tenth Doctor going off the rails was enticing on the surface. But it could never really take that idea very far. Meanwhile, Doom’s Day asked for a lot of in investment in a brand new character. Both contained some great stories, but Circuit Breaker really shines in taking advantage of the Fugitive Doctor’s mystery and rougher edges.
Circuit Breaker is already the strongest of these events so far, and the new novel gives it true heart
The actual plot throughline of this arc has been looser than ever. All summer the Doctor’s been on a reverse scavenger hunt – returning items to their proper place in space and time. But that’s been the perfect way to give more breathing room to the storyline’s emotional core. The Kaleidoscope brings this to the forefront. Its novel format allows more access than ever to the Fugitive Doctor’s thoughts and feelings. Traditionally, few Doctor Who novels are told in the first person from the Doctor’s perspective, in order to help preserve their sense of unknowable mystery. But this Doctor is a mystery to herself, and more closed off than most to sharing with others. In addition, she’s an incarnation we barely spent any time with on screen, so she benefit from this chance to know her better.
The Kaleidoscope’s greatest asset in this is Jo Martin herself. The actor takes up the challenge of exploring her own character’s interior life with thoughtful precision and deep emotional intelligence. While this is her debut novel, Martin has written for stage and screen before and the result stands apart from other recent celebrity Doctor Who novels. It’s telling perhaps that the acknowledgements don’t suggest an established co-author. Instead, there’s merely thank to MG Harris and Steve Cole for editing and for providing details of Doctor Who lore. Meanwhile, the author’s notes make it clear that Martin has thought deeply about her version of the Time Lord. Far more than just tough and ruthless, this is the Doctor about as vulnerable and uncertain as we’ve ever seen them.
The Fugitive Doctor gains more depth and shades, as Jo Martin grants us a view behind the gruff exterior
The Fugitive Doctor series over at Big Finish tries its best to keep to Chris Chibnall’s suggestion of a vague placement for this incarnation. However, Martin herself obviously feels entitled to her own strong ideas about that. The result is the most satisfying and emotionally impactful story for her yet. It reframes the tale told in The Timeless Children, from one of a Division agent mind-wiped at retirement, to something more like Marvel’s Winter Soldier. A weapon to be reset and rebooted whenever, inevitably, she rebels again and again against their cruelty and cowardice.
This element skillfully unfolds from the Doctor’s initial boasting of her ‘Great Reserve’ – a Sherlockian mind palace of information and experience she doesn’t remember acquiring – to growing concern about why she doesn’t remember it. Why does she keep encountering people she’s never met but who definitely know her face? And why does she have such an instinctive affection for a second rate backwater planet like Earth anyway? These questions bring her from confidence through self-doubt, to ultimately a new determination to reclaim her own life.
In its closing chapters, The Kaleidoscope similarly redefines one of the most important relationships in the whole of Doctor Who. In doing so it also provides a compelling and heartbreaking new understanding of just why, as Amy Pond observed, the one thing the Doctor can’t do is leave a crying child.
Their quest takes the Doctor and Martha from London to modern Jamaica to a Jamaican space colony in the distant future, infused with Martin’s clear love for the island
All this character development for the Fugitive fits beautifully with the details of her and Martha’s latest mission. The supposed ‘kaleidoscope’ itself is actually an alien device for grounding memory at both at a cultural and personal level, designed to ensure a society never loses touch with its history. Appropriately, the main villains here to stop our heroes unlocking its secrets are the Silence. After all, another way to stop the Doctor ever speaking their name is to make sure they can’t remember it…
The Doctor’s personal journey and mission intersect in Jamaica. In the future, an isolationist colony world tries to hold a nostalgic notion of Old Earth Jamaica in amber forever. In the present, the Doctor and Martha travel to the real Jamaica and encounter a woman claiming to the Time Lord’s mother. Throughout both, Jo Martin’s love for her own parents’ homeland shines through. The novel is full of fond observations about the island’s people, language, and unique character. It’s this, as much as the author’s closeness to the role she played on television, that gives Kaleidoscope a sense of deep authenticity.
All the chapters in Circuit Breaker stand alone as well as being part of the wider arc, but if you only pick up one it should be The Kaleidoscope
The science behind the kaleidoscope may be questionable even by Doctor Who standards. Clues about a particular character, presumably to pay off in Circuit Breaker’s finale, may be laid on so thickly you could hang wallpaper with them. But this is a blisteringly good Doctor Who novel. It’s also an astonishing debut novel in its own right, if one likely to be overlooked by critics due to its TV tie-in nature.
Big Finish provide the climax of Circuit Breaker with next week’s Full Circuit. Yet The Kaleidoscope will likely prove to be its real heart. Even if you only pick up one entry in this year’s event, make it this one.
Doctor Who: The Kaleidoscope
When memories lie, the truth can be fatal.
In the aftermath of an improbable mission, the Fugitive Doctor and Martha realise that something is interfering with their minds. Something that doesn’t want to be found.
Their investigation leads to a curious artefact in the British Museum: an apparently medieval toy known as the Kaleidoscope. But the object refuses to stay in one place, one time – or one identity. And when the Doctor is repeatedly mistaken for someone she’s never met, fragments of unfamiliar memories begin to surface.
Across the Earth, a hidden pattern emerges; evidence of a secret that someone has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal. As ancient enemies close in and innocent lives are put at risk, the Doctor learns the hard way that some truths were buried for a reason…
The Kaleidoscope is out now, and you can buy your copy at all good bookshops or at the links here.
