Lay Away Book Special: A good end, but troubled by Zoe

The Wheel of Ice recovers in its final fifty pages. Everything gets resolved, there's that familiar pang of regret felt by the Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie as they once more must leave on the cusp of celebrations, and there's the characteristic cliffhanger, which, more often than not, involves something going wrong in the TARDIS.

I've seen and heard enough Doctor Who to be aware of all of that, but I'm not sure that I've seen enough of the show while Zoe is an active companion. I understand that she's supposed to be from the future, and the product of an educational system (not to mention a culture) that prizes logic and calculation above creativity and emotion. But the reason that she went with the Doctor in the first place (which reason is specifically referenced in The Wheel of Ice) is to broaden her horizons and to see what, aside from logic, is out there.

For the most part, Baxter shows Zoe doing just that, and any sort of apprehension on her part is explained away by it being so close to her own time. What she sees around her, the drudgery, the poverty, the strife, it all makes her uncomfortable since it's so unlike her own time despite much of the tech and ambitions being similar.

This discomfort is fine in most events and cases, but she seems oddly stiff in the final chapters of the book where she's responsible for babysitting Casey, Phee's younger sister. Not just stiff in the way that someone who's not fond of or used to children would be, but almost to the point of her seeming to be some sort of logic-only robot. As this part of Zoe's arc moves forward she loosens up and becomes more comfortably supportive, but the way there felt forced.

It makes sense within the story that Zoe would be put on babysitting duty, as she had been before, but placing this part of her development parallel to Jamie's running about with kids from the Wheel to disarm a bomb, and the Doctor and Phee's trip to Mnemosyne's core make it seem like she's being shuffled off to the side. It just doesn't sit well with me.

Aside from that smudge, Baxter keeps well to Doctor Who's internal logic throughout the book's ending. In fact, making the beginning and the ending bookend the story as they do completes the sense that this story isn't something just recently created, but that it's a novelization of some lost Second Doctor serial.