Some highlights of the latest EDA I’ve read (The Last Resort).
I took these screens while reading, along with my reactions. As usual, this is full of spoilers.
What happened. No seriously, what happened.
I should love this book. It's written by Paul Leonard. His "worst" EDA so far was Dreamstone Moon, and I rated it 7/10 and even made fanart about it. His previous books were full of emotion, examined what it means to be human, what made a person a person even when they looked completely alien, talked about cosmic tragedies viewed from a small, personal angle. And now, here's a book where the stakes are higher than ever, and suddenly, nobody cares about anything.
From one scene to the next, we're following different versions of the same characters interchangeably. People die again and again, and little to no weight is given to any of it. We're told Sabbath and maybe the Doctor have a plan to solve the whole situation, but we can't parse what it is, so we don't really care. There's a lot of technobabble. About a third of the way into the story, it gets obvious that all of this is going to get hit by a big red RESET button at the end, so you're just waiting for it to happen. Thankfully, there's some very good imagery near the end, but it's too little too late.
It took me two years to get through The Last Resort. It's experimental, exhausting, convoluted but not complex, weirdly one-dimensional for a thing about multiple realities colliding, and more than a bit nihilistic. I want to care about things again, please. 3,5/10
