Thursday, 8 March 2018

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #64 – Shakedown by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#45
Shakedown
By Terrance Dicks

If you think the New Adventures were an odd avenue for Doctor Who, you should see the other guy.  Armed with assorted talent from the show but no license, fan videos were a (relatively) popular way to get your fix in the ’90s, provided you could stomach budgets that made… well, Doctor Who look lavish.

I was a timid young fan and couldn’t wrap my head around books with new companions, let alone unlicensed videos about some random people who may or may not look like the Doctor (or worse, no one that did), so I missed the boat.  Most of the stuff I know now is from Dylan Rees’s excellent non-fiction book, Downtime.  But I’d still heard of Shakedown: one of the more successful efforts, it was a self-contained thriller with Sontarans attacking humans on a spaceship.  They shot it on a real battleship and the cast would all be familiar to the target audience.  Terrance Dicks wrote it; you might remember him from Pretty Much All Of Doctor Who.

It was apparently Virgin’s idea to novelise it as a New Adventure, and in his introduction Dicks admits this is an odd choice.  Shakedown featured no Doctor Who characters besides Sontarans and Rutans, and it’s 55 minutes long – a quick read even by his standards.  To compensate the book begins before the video, novelises it, then carries on afterwards.  Think of it as the most lavishly expanded Target book ever written.

In case you were optimistic, Dicks’s last book was Blood Harvest.  A shoddy mix of gangster fare and unnecessary State Of Decay sequel, it felt rushed and it lacked the thrills of his earlier Exodus.  And now I’ve seen Shakedown, which pretty well achieves its aims – the monsters look good, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, I liked the music – but is, shall we say, generally one take away from its best?  Shakedown has Michael Wisher competing with a (comedy?) Sontaran for the hammiest turn, and it includes some spectacularly bad “romantic” dialogue between the two varyingly wooden leads.  As with most of the ’90s fan videos, you probably had to be there.  Even then I’ll bet it didn’t scream “This would make a really good book!”

Sure enough, the best bits are not taken from the video.  Dicks throws himself into What The New Adventures Characters Did, or as it’s actually called, Part One: Beginnings.  (Yeah, the subtitle’s not great.)  We need a reason for the Doctor and co. to get involved, a reason for them to miss about 55 minutes of the action and then a reason they’ll be needed again afterwards.  You get most of this just by splitting them up to hunt the Rutan who caused all the trouble in the video, and simultaneously find out what – besides the obvious – he’s done to annoy the Sontarans.  Dicks adds a lot of colour to these side quests.

(Before I get into that, splitting up the characters used to be an irritating excuse to juggle too many of them, but it has become de rigueur since Chris and Roz joined.  It feels right to have a police investigation with two ex-Adjudicators on staff, and it suits the Doctor’s rampant game playing to put it on several fronts.  With novels like Toy Soldiers, Head Games and this, they’re sort of reclaiming that trope.)

We know the Doctor previously met Kurt (the erstwhile Shakedown hero) thanks to some cheeky references to a mysterious “dentist”, among other misremembered monikers.  (Sue this!)  The encounter is a slightly bigger deal now: the Doctor is mid-adventure (generally how I like it) on a planet about to be invaded by Sontarans, only he’s already trying to fend off some human colonists as his sympathies lie with the natives.  Not a problem, now he just has two oppressors to get rid of.  He and Kurt, the latter fleeing a compromised smuggling deal, turn things sour for the Sontarans and Kurt vows to pay him back for saving his life.  The whole vignette fits into a pacey prologue and it makes for a memorable start, with the Doctor wholeheartedly toppling regimes just like the old days – although he seems a little too at ease teaching the natives to kill their oppressors, just as later on he has no problem at all offing Sontarans.  (His characterisation is mostly all right, apart from wholesale murders and sounding oddly like the First Doctor at times.)  The Jekkari, who only communicate by tapping, are an interesting bunch.

It neatly establishes Kurt’s knowledge of Sontarans, but it also creates a few hurdles.  Kurt barely remembered the Doctor in the video (which was mighty convenient, of course), and there’s no sign that he had previously met the two Sontarans who would menace him later, as he does here.  Dicks gets around such discrepancies – which to be clear, didn’t exist until the book! – but he ain’t exactly subtle.  He has Kurt deliberately fudge his facts about the Doctor, essentially because uh, reasons?  And on Commander Steg not recognising him, brace yourself: “Lucky I got rid of that beard!  Later when Steg miraculously survives his screen death to wreak some Act III revenge, we get a whole bracketed-off paragraph explaining Sontaran death comas.  Truly seamless.

Getting back to Shakedown: The Expansion Pack, Roz and Chris are following a trail of Rutan murders.  It’s an obvious avenue for them, but hey, it fits.  This leads them to Megacity (Judge Dredd lawyers on standby), a place that practically runs on corruption.  Things are so bad that the police are Ogrons.  You can immediately tell Terry is enjoying himself with hokey sentences like “In Megacity, everyone was on the make”, and it’s also a fair bet he enjoyed the lack of a TV watershed, what with spectacular gore, generous swearwords and a horny topless waitress.  It’s pulpy, moreish stuff.  (I read the entire book in a day, going to Wales and back by train.)

More pertinently, Roz and Chris are sort of well written.  “Sort of” because, while we’re not learning anything new about them – because this isn’t The Also People or anything of that sort – the salient points are covered.  Chris is characterised as a “seven foot infant”, which is just about what every other writer thinks.  (Anyone fancy building on this?)  I’m not sure I follow the odd preoccupation with his size (he’s a “giant,” apparently: “The chair, like most chairs, was too small for him”?) but his almost inane optimism rings very true, and a surprising reference to body-beppling – along with a clever reprise of the Adjudicator credo – reminds us that Terry does his research.

Roz’s short temper borders on cartoonish at times, such as nearly strangling an informant, but her long-suffering partnership with Chris is appropriately fun.  Even better is what happens when she gets arrested.  Dicks is justly proud of Garshak, the eloquent and witty Ogron police captain, but deliberately or otherwise he uses Garshak to slap Roz’s problematic prejudices right back at her, as she tries talking to him as if he were a typical Ogron.  It’s a very funny scene on a couple of levels, spoofing the reliably foolproof Ogrons (who make adorable policemen, naturally) whilst upholding a sore character beat for Roz.

Over in the other strand of the Doctor’s web, Bernice is visiting a university, which is another obvious path to take but oh well, it’s an easy win for the reader.  Looking past the comfortable academia we have an unusual insect world, where shimmering universities exist on deserts and only winged contraptions can take you anywhere.  Of course Sentarion has its dark underbelly or it wouldn’t be a place for keeping Rutan secrets: someone there wants Bernice dead, just as Roz and Chris are on Megacity’s hit list, and simply mentioning the native religion can get you instantly murdered and your death denied afterwards.  Bernice encounters treachery among the different kinds of insect people, and she is satisfyingly methodical about whom she can trust, as well as the requisite level of witty.  (“‘Hang on,’ yelled Bernice.  ‘I refuse to be murdered on a technicality.’”)  Roz/Chris and Bernice’s subplots are loads of fun and Terry measures out the action expertly, though we obviously drop them completely when we’re in video territory.

Things eventually move to Space Station Alpha as the Tiger Moth prepares for its shakedown cruise, where fans of the video know the Rutan stows away on their shakedown cruise, turning what should be a simple shakedown cruise into a full-blown shakedown cruise...  of death?  (Terry gets the title in so often, I wondered if he’d printed “We’re Going On A Shakedown Cruise!” T-shirts.)  It’s surprisingly cool to start incorporating the characters from the video as we prepare to blast off into it, especially as Terry doesn’t need to do any acrobatics to mesh this bit into his original script: the whole Space Station Alpha thing goes pretty well how it was described, for once.

And then we’re into Shakedown proper, after the space station is locked down by Sontarans and the Doctor fatefully comments that “the Rutan is on board that solar yacht – and there’s nothing, nothing I can do about it!  (Some more subtle justification for you, there.)  Despite what I said about Shakedown being a spectacularly lavish Target book taken as a whole, the actual novelisation is one of Terry’s most bare-bones efforts.  It’s 43 pages; you get considerably less than one page per minute of video.

That’s hardly surprising if you’ve seen the video.  The plot is pretty slight: the crew of a solar yacht are boarded by Sontarans looking for a Rutan, they have to survive both and ultimately get away.  Some beats don’t make a lot of sense, such as why carefree rich people are doing the day-to-day running of the yacht rather than betting on it from afar, why Captain Duranne’s scheme to help the Rutan defeat the Sontarans lasts as long as that sentence, why Zorelle is so determined to betray Kurt, and why Terry wrote a base under siege thriller about a monster that can look like anyone on board (and thus hide in plain sight) without bothering to disguise it until they already know about it.  None of these points make more sense in the book.  The characters were paper-thin to start with, and not really worth embellishing as most of them are going to die, and so they remain.  At least the performances work a little better in my imagination: Michael Wisher drops the dodgy American accent (“Space Station Alpher One”?) and Vorn is no longer played by Dame Edna.

It’s as economically written as any of Terry’s Targets, and shows off his knack for an apt description.  He describes Kurt as “medium-sized, sturdy-looking” with “a lazy pleasant smile”, which is perhaps more accurate than he intended when it comes to his performance energy.  (The description “not young, not handsome, but strong and dependable” made me laugh, given how hard Brian Croucher is trying to look dashing in that particular shot, and at most points in the video.)

It’s inevitable given the length, but Terry does tighten up the script.  A moment when the Sontarans introduce themselves by throwing a stun grenade carries an awkward pause on screen, as Kurt seems not to know a bloody obvious grenade when he’s staring at one, but he shouts “Run!” straight away in the book.  The bit where Sophie Aldred’s boyfriend dies is followed by “You killed him, you monstrous bastard, you killed him!”, which is subtly less hilarious than “You killed him, you bastard!  You bastard, you killed him!  Sadly all the laborious references to “sexual pair-bonding” are still there – a phrase you might blame on the Sontarans but is actually down to Kurt – which suggests Terry also has “Are You Sexually Pair-Bonded?” T-shirts on the go.  Overall Part Two of Shakedown dashes by like a contractual obligation, which is rather odd when it’s the main reason for the book to be here; it seems pretty clear to me that all Terry’s real energy went into Part One.

Sadly, the “sequel” part is not quite as arresting.  Which is hardly surprising, as while there might be room to set up those events, they certainly had an ending in the video.  Terry hastily adds Steg’s survival and the Rutan having reproduced in order to cobble together a third act, and the book almost audibly strains with the effort.  But we still need to find out what military secrets the Rutan knew, and those are tied to Bernice’s sojourn on Sentarion, so there’s a mad dash as the Rutan, then Steg, then the Doctor and co. (with Duranne and Kurt) go to put a stop to things.  It’s roughly the same measured pace as Blood Harvest when it neared the finish line, i.e. bleary-eyed and out of breath.  When all that’s done, the Doctor does his traditional fill-everyone-in-on-what’s-happened round up, only it’s 100% known information.  This is followed by a spirited, but almost word-for-word repeated scene from Shakedown only with the Doctor and friends in it.  The entire epilogue feels like a weird postmodern exercise.

Shakedown is rather odd, isn’t it?  A colourful and fun prequel, a lean novelisation of a by-the-numbers story and a frantic wrap up, it could be the work of three writers, or at least three distinct Terrys.  There’s a basically upbeat tone to the whole thing which just about buoys the less good bits; even when it’s rushed, or flogging a more or less dead horse, it’s still enjoyably kinetic to read.  Terry has done an okay job with the insane brief he was given.  Sometimes it holds together so tenuously it squeaks, but it’s still more of a laugh than some New Adventures written in earnest.

6/10

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