#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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