The novel “The Forgotten Army” by Brian Minchin was published for the first time in 2010.
The Eleventh Doctor takes Amy Pond to New York just when a Polar Woolly Mammoth found perfectly preserved is about to be presented in a museum. In front of a crowd, what’s supposed to be an animal that’s been dead for several millennia suddenly comes to life and begins to cause panic inside the Natural History Museum.
The Doctor manages to jump on the mammoth and control its movements as if it were a horse, temporarily taking it to a zoo. It seems that some American authorities are the biggest problem for the Doctor, but the situation changes when the mammoth’s true nature is revealed and together with it the real danger.
“The Forgotten Army” is part of a series of novels connected to the new “Doctor Who” series. They’re targeted to a wide audience by being linear enough to be appreciated even by very young readers but sophisticated enough to interest more mature readers.
With the adventures of the Eleventh Doctor there was a small change in the size of the novels about “Doctor Who” new series’ adventures, which have become slightly larger. “The Forgotten Army” is one of the first books with the Eleventh Doctor as the protagonist, published a few weeks after his debut in the TV show.
“The Forgotten Army” is developed essentially as a comedy with all the consequences. The novel was released a few weeks after the Eleventh Doctor’s television debut so it’s unclear if Brian Minchin was able to see a few clips with him and Amy Pond during the fifth season of the new television series’ production. This means that he might have used only the descriptions of the protagonists as their foundations to write this novel. In a comedy it can be OK for the characters to be over the top, but overall the Doctor seemed to me a little too demented and Amy’s characterization more focused on her flaws than on her strengths.
The plot is even more over the top than the protagonists and in its initial part the major twists are ideas that are not exactly original. The Vykoids could still have been an interesting idea if well developed, but in my opinion they weren’t used adequately to try to create a humor that in the end didn’t seem funny to me.
In these “Doctor Who” novels it’s also important that the author creates interesting characters, but in “The Forgotten Army” they seemed to me to be constructed in a very superficial way. In some cases I had the impression that they got used only to fill a few pages, hindering the Doctor’s actions. Don’t get me wrong, the Doctor having problems with some authority in the place where he arrives is a very classic “Doctor Who” device, but is normally used when he can’t assert his connections with UNIT.
Not everything is negative in “The Forgotten Army”. For example, when Amy finds herself separated from the Doctor and is forced to improvise, she thinks about the missions with the Raggedy Doctor she invented for fun when she was a little girl. In the television episodes there were only a few references to Amy’s personal story after her first meeting with the Doctor. For this reason I found it interesting that one of the first novels with the Eleventh Doctor was used to dig a little into Amy’s past by using it when she’s forced to act without the Doctor’s help.
All this forms a novel with a fast pace that, however, I found not very funny and that’s lethal for what’s supposed to be a comedy. The consequence is that for me its flaws definitely overweighed its merits. For this reason, I recommend reading “The Forgotten Army” to anyone interested in having the complete collection of “Doctor Who” novels. Fans of the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond might like it.
