A couple of weeks ago, the BBC announced an exciting new multimedia Doctor Who story initiative titled Time Lord Victorious. Coming later this year, the massive story arc involving the Eighth (Paul McGann), Ninth (Christopher Eccleston) and Tenth (David Tennant) Doctors will span novels, comics, audio dramas, VR games, escape rooms – virtually every piece of Doctor Who media outside of the TV series itself.
Details were slim on the plot in the original announcement, but these first releases under the Time Lord Victorious umbrella title finally give us a taste of what we can expect. It seems the arc will kick off with a duo of novels titled The Knight, The Fool and the Dead by Steve Cole and All Flesh is Grass by Una McCormack, both of which will be released this December. You can check out the covers in the gallery below.
And here’s the synopsis for The Knight, The Fool and the Dead, which promises that the event will hinge on drastic actions taken by the Tenth Doctor and evil death-bringing monsters the Kotturuh.
We live forever, barring accidents. Just like everyone else in the universe.
The Doctor travels back to the Dark Times, an era where life flourishes and death is barely known…
Then come the Kotturuh – creatures who spread through the cosmos dispensing mortality. They judge each and every species and decree its allotted time to live. For the first time, living things know the fear of ending. And they will go to any lengths to escape this grim new spectre, death.
The Doctor is an old hand at cheating death. Now, at last, he can stop it at source. He is coming for the Kotturuh, ready to change everything so that life wins from the start.
Not just the last of the Time Lords. The Time Lord Victorious.
The crossover element of the story will then be introduced in All Flesh is Grass, which sees the Tenth Time Lord encountering two of his other selves as he discovers the destruction he has inadvertently brought about.
Even a Time Lord can’t change the past…
A wasteland. A dead world… No, there is a biodome rising from the ashes. Here, life teems and flourishes, with strange, lush plants and many-winged insects with bright carapaces – and one solitary sentient creature, who spends its days talking to the insects and tending this lonely garden. This is Inyit, the Last of the Kotturuh.
In All Flesh is Grass we are transported back to The Dark Times. The Tenth Doctor has sworn to stop the Kotturuh, ending death and bringing life to the universe. But his plan is unravelling – instead of bringing life, nothing has changed and all around him people are dying. Death is everywhere. Now he must confront his former selves – one in league with their greatest nemesis and the other manning a ship of the undead…
It’s believed that, similar to the Star Wars: The High Republic materials, you’ll be able to dip into the Time Lord Victorious content however you want – it all adds up to something bigger but still works on its own. That said, it definitely sounds like these two books are the proper starting place for the storyline, so Doctor Who fans will need to buy these to understand the rest once they roll out in winter 2020/2021.