#12
Mission: Impractical
By David A. McIntee
In his customary introduction David A. McIntee calls Mission: Impractical “something to cheer [him] up” following several much heavier books. He also announces that it is “shallow” (“damn right”) and that you can “check your brains at the door.” Boy, I hope he saved space on his shelf for that Salesman Of The Year trophy.
Is he wrong? Well, no, it’s most definitely a romp. There’s not much in it you need to think about and now that I’ve finished it I can already feel chunks of it floating away like candyfloss in a puddle. Is that bad? I think not. I wouldn’t want every book to be all icing and no cake, but once in a while is fine.
The plot is pretty straightforward. (“So straightforward!” screams McIntee through your letterbox. “A buffoon could read it!”) Ten years ago an item was stolen from the Veltrochni. They know it found its way to Vandor Prime and they are threatening war (really more just slaughter) if it is not returned to them. The current owner, a Vandorian who works for the President, discretely arranges for the original thieves to steal it again and take it to its rightful home. The scheme also ensnares our larcenous friends from The Trial Of A Timelord, Glitz and Dibber, as well as the Doctor and his shapeshifting friend Frobisher. (Mostly to be found as a talking penguin.) The Doctor, meanwhile, has a contract out on his life; two bounty hunters/assassins are making unnaturally fast progress in tracking him down, so the TARDIS goes on a random jump right into Mandell’s path. What follows is a “get the gang back together” story, then a heist, and then hopefully not all out war.
I didn’t make a lot of notes on this one, which probably means there’s not a lot to say about it. (“No wonder!” booms McIntee, squinting through the window. “Surprised you finished it!”) But let me see… The gang are likeable enough. There’s Jack Chance, a thrill-seeker who went into (semi) legitimate business running a café. Chat and Liang, twins with incredible acrobatic skills who ended up working for the circus. Monty, an older gent who gripes a lot but probably prefers a life of crime to his mechanic day job. And Oskar, a master of disguise with surprising insecurities, who sits most of it out for various reasons. This kind of thing is familiar territory, and then some, but there are enough little quirks for it not to feel like Terrance Dicks dutifully transcribing a favourite movie. I would say I cared about them the right amount.
Best of the bunch is Glitz, of course, the most developed one by simple virtue of being off the telly, and still sporting that charming Holmesian wit. He bounces off the page and remains one of those characters you wish they’d made more of in the series. (What a shame he never fancied doing any Big Finish.) McIntee is no stranger to continuity, and he has a few things to set in motion in order to get Glitz from his apparent doom at the end of Trial to his carefree arrival in the ship Nosferatu II in Dragonfire. I’m not sure that journey from A to B has ever even occurred to me, but it’s safe to say that if you have any questions about it, McIntee has answered them. (Dibber’s good too, by the way. His was always the more thankless part, but there’s a charming loyalty to him that comes through here, like a Sgt. Benton from the wrong side of the tracks.)
What else, what else. Well, I like the Veltrochni. Introduced in McIntee’s The Dark Path — indeed a heavier book than this one, and not nearly as enjoyable — they feel like a more rounded species here without needing McIntee to do his frequent tic of spending far too long describing everything about them. (Maybe it’s easier because it’s not their first appearance. Also: that’s Virgin continuity, baby!)
It helps that one of the bounty hunters, Karthakh, is a Veltrochni: we’re frequently seeing his point of view and there’s a good amount of pathos to him despite his stoic professionalism. He’s still on some level reeling from a family tragedy, which makes him sufficiently unlike his people that he can partner up with a Tzun — another species from Virgin canon (First Frontier, also by McIntee) and one that the Veltrochni all but wiped out. He and Sha’ol have an unconventional working relationship/friendship; you sense that they are each all that the other has, and time spent in their company isn’t wasted. (Sha’ol, too, has some depths. He’d have to being a Tzun working with a Veltrochni.)
There’s also a ship full of Ogrons led by the ambitious Gorrak. They don’t entirely need to be here, plot-wise, but Ogrons make good comedic fodder, and there is some substance to them if you squint. McIntee takes a page out of the Space War novelisation and highlights their determined, rock-oriented culture. Gorrak’s desire to break his people away from servitude is admirable, even if he is horrible. Before long the Ogrons end up working for Karthakh and Sha’ol anyway, but the arrangement feels equitable enough to put up with.
Ogrons still trigger pretty guttural laughs at the best of times, like a moment where they’re all arming their guns and one Ogron explodes, prompting another to say that his gun works. There’s also the moment Gorrak orders his men to “stun any creature who is alone,” not realising that he has walked into the hall alone “until seven different stun blasts hit him.” (“When he woke up, he knew that at least his men had understood their instructions.”) Is it high art? No. Did I chuckle? Like a drain.
The action has, dare I say it, a whiff of Pratchett with its gung ho bunch of scumbags just trying to get by at the whim of a sinister smart guy. (Mandell, not the Doctor.) The heist itself is reasonably clever, with some neat disguises and enough rational preparation that it genuinely seems to have helped having the Doctor along. For his part, he injects warmth and sense into their machinations wherever possible. You get the sense Colin Baker would have enjoyed his slightly uncouth but-not-outright-horrible storyline here.
Some of the complications don’t really blossom into anything. The whole bit about bounty hunters and who really wants the Doctor dead is paid off, but only in an academic sense where the Doctor knows who did it, beats them at their own game and then that’s enough of that apparently. We don’t, like, go and bring the fight to them. This probably makes more sense when you consider that we’re going more comic book than usual here. Mission: Impractical seems more invested in pay-offs that you can have right this second with whatever’s in front of you, like the machinations of Mandell and how that ultimately impacts on his family. Surprising depth for a somewhat cartoonish baddie.
And I mean, speaking of comics and cartoons, I haven’t even talked about Frobisher! I’ve never read the comics he appeared in but I’m a fan of The Holy Terror, the brilliant and creepy-funny audio from Robert Shearman. This Frobisher seems consistent with that impish character: a loyal friend of the Doctor, clearly with some insecurities but balanced against incredible shapeshifting powers. He isn’t so overpowered that you feel he’s never in danger, and he needs to use some ingenuity to put his powers to the right use. I’m glad we got a novel with him, and I’d read more. (That said, there is a development late in the book that should give Frobisher some serious conflict to work with, but the book seemingly isn’t interested. Oh well, it’s a romp etc. But then why introduce something like that if you’re just going to fire a blank? Okay, it’s a pretty good surprise. Which I suppose answers that.)
McIntee peppers the thing with a decent amount of jokes, and that’s not even including Frobisher’s amusing shape choices. He spends some time laboriously arranging for a character to say “four-sprung duck technique”, sort of like those car adverts innit, boom boom. Perhaps more ambitious is a bit where he both leans into the comic feel and (unintentionally?) rips the piss out of his own writing style: “Wreckage was torn from the hull and scattered far and wide, while the fuel and atmosphere ignited in the sort of explosion that was usually only created by firework specialists on drugs, and would have needed a dictionary full of adjectives to describe properly.” McIntee of old would probably just find the adjectives.
Then there’s his usual intertextuality, with adjustable levels of on-the-nose. The Doctor, watching Star Wars on opening night, observes that Peter Cushing looks familiar and he might once have met his granddaughter. Even better is the moment just before when I thought for sure McIntee had gone the whole hog and sent the Doctor and Frobisher to Tatooine. He definitely got me!
Showing our heroes at the movies seems an appropriate way to start. Mission: Impractical certainly ain’t Star Wars, but it feels more like a trip to the flicks than a novel, flashing before you in a way that doesn’t seem like a wasted ticket but is also, as sometimes happens, mostly just a nice time in a comfy seat with popcorn. Possibly helped by the author’s cautionary lamp-shading, it still sent me away in a good mood. Shallow be damned.
7/10
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