A review by siskoid
Doctor Who: Bullet Time by David A. McIntee

2.0

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.