#40
Endgame
By Terrance Dicks
There’s something quite apt about getting Terrance Dicks to write for the “amnesiac Doctor” arc. After all, his last McGann book was all about the Doctor losing his marbles.
The Eight Doctors struggled to put this to good use. It facilitated the need to meet other Doctors and borrow a few brain cells, but otherwise the latest incarnation was just some brown-haired guy who oscillates between moral objections and murderous fighting skills. Dicks didn’t seem interested in the whole characterisation bit. Endgame is more interested, and more successful, but it’s still not very much of either.
We find the Doctor living listlessly in 1951. He goes to museums to soak up information and resolutely refuses to get involved in other people’s affairs. Gone is the escalating need to take part and, if possible, leave the planet entirely which Paul Leonard introduced so pointedly in The Turing Test. (You could read his ennui here as a direct response to his failure there, but that will have to stay as head-canon. Which is annoying. Perhaps this is a minor point but I thought one of the main reasons for doing this soft reboot was to make the Doctor easier for the writers to grasp and more consistent to read? At this point it feels like handing McGann a new outfit every week and telling him to wing it.) Despite his disinterest he becomes involved in the hunt for a missing document. He soon comes to the attention of the British, American and Russian governments, not to mention a certain shadowy cabal whom he met previously but now can’t remember.
I got the impression that Dicks was mapping McGann onto another Doctor here. His curmudgeonly insistence on being left alone, and his refusal to help with “politics and causes and crusades” all reads a bit like Pertwee during his exile to Earth. (The shared exile is another canny enough reason to get Dicks involved.) The way we find him is almost a “What if the Third Doctor avoided UNIT and got on with his life” setup — with the unfortunate excision of his attempts to get the TARDIS working, since it’s still just a hollow blue box that he’s only glommed onto out of sheer habit. The Doctor is a rather pitiful figure in Endgame, clearly depressed.
There’s something to be said for this portrayal, even if it does bump irritatingly against The Turing Test. It gives him somewhere to go, and that’s the direction the book takes: the Doctor eventually roars into action, despite objections, and others note that he has “come alive.” (While still noting that “There’s a long way to go.”) There are moments of that old Doctor brilliance, such as a masterful (so to speak) deconstruction of a psychic training camp, and an impassioned speech to a villain about the virtues of humanity and their right to survive.
Dicks can be a good team player with plot arcs — Exodus and Blood Harvest both lobbed the ball to Paul Cornell for his follow up books — and he’s on good form with that here. Despite what I read as mismatched characterisation, he makes direct use of the events of The Turing Test, bringing in background player Kim Philby for a key role. The aforementioned “long way to go” is also more than just lip service: it’s clear that the Doctor has a conflicted relationship with his missing memories, at one point saying “Don’t tell me these things. I don’t want to know them. I am past all that,” and later responding to an offer of mental help by dropping to the ground and sobbing “I mustn’t know! I mustn’t know!” It’s perhaps not too much to assume that his blowing up Gallifrey is getting in the way of things like remembering who the Brigadier is or how the Daleks felt about stairs. More on that later, I assume, which is an altogether more productive approach than I was expecting from Terrance Dicks.
If my expectations seem low it’s because, well, I’ve read his novels. The more of them I read, the more I picture the revered script editor picking the name of a famous person out of a hat and spending perhaps five minutes concocting a reason for the Doctor to meet them. (I’m increasingly sure this is all a conscious effort to show some of the Doctor’s name-dropping in action — something the Classic era rarely did.) Endgame indeed makes some interesting points about the amnesiac Doctor, but it also flubs it a few times, as well as surrounding him with the usual mid-effort Uncle Terry plotting.
As for the Doctor, you can explain away and justify his total failure to keep a friend alive (very unlike him generally) as rock bottom for his refusal to get involved. The Burning and Casualties Of War did similar things. What Endgame handles poorly is the Doctor’s attitude to violence. He’s quite clear about his distaste for guns, yet he’s also quite capable of strangling an assailant to death — only pulling back because a friend tells him to stop. Even worse, there’s a moment where he gleefully attempts to kill a man with his own gun, in that case only being stopped by the villain vanishing in front of him. So what is it he actually dislikes about guns? The colour?
Dicks had a similarly bizarre attitude towards Doctorly violence in The Eight Doctors, with McGann engineering the deaths of multiple Sontarans and actively splatting vampires and a giant spider, not to mention generally Kung-fu fighting when the situation called for it. It’s really not enough to say “guns are bad” if you’re going around trying to kill people anyway, especially if you throw a gun into the mix as well.
The violence is also a bit boring as well as incongruous: the Doctor’s handy ability to “slip back into some kind of atavistic state” when attacked and promptly morph into Jackie Chan is an amnesiac carry-over from The Eight Doctors, and it feels just as ridiculous now as it did then. The Eighth Doctor has been in dozens of books now and he’s not in the habit of relying on Venusian aikido, so it feels like a lazy Pertwee default to get him out of lots, and I do mean lots of scrapes that way. (At one point he Vulcan-neck-pinches two people on the same page.) If all of this is intended to be yet another sign of the character needing to move towards a more familiar centre — “he’s only violent because he doesn’t remember” — which might be the only excuse for it, well, forgive me but I don’t buy that. Terry clearly isn’t a writer to keep such intentions secret from the reader.
There’s no companion to speak of in this amnesiac history tour, so that leaves us with the plot. This works on two fronts, the one self-contained, the other a sequel. Neither is particularly strong.
The hunt for the missing document (which of course becomes a Hitchcockian “wrong place, wrong time” deal for the Doctor) is suitably action packed, but this falls into a routine of the Doctor effortlessly fighting his way out of trouble and cutaways so that government organisations etc can go “wow, can you believe how effortlessly that guy fought his way out of trouble?!” The document eventually points us to a strange conspiracy involving random acts of aggression and mind control — which to be honest feels like an idea we could have seeded earlier. By the time we arrive at it, roughly halfway, Endgame struggles to get up a head of steam about it, merely reporting a few unprovoked attacks and promising big trouble if, for example, Truman or Stalin gets in on this. It’s underwhelming to say the least, although the aforementioned scene of the Doctor deconstructing a psychic training camp is a highlight.
The other plot strand is a direct sequel to Dicks’s earlier PDA, Players. I liked his idea about a group of time travelling malcontents, sort of malevolent versions of the Meddling Monk. I didn’t feel like he did enough with them in Players so I had no objection to seeing them again. Sadly, he still can’t seem to muster much enthusiasm about them. Their plans usually amount to little more than random irritations during historical events in the hope that it will create some vaguely defined level of mess, and their rules rarely matter to anyone playing the game, as they constantly cheat. For a big shadowy org they just don’t have their shit together.
Individually they’re not much better. The main antagonist is a guy called Axel who periodically shows up, monologues foolishly and then allows the Doctor to effortlessly kick him in the posterior. Not very inspiring. When the Doctor meets the enigmatic Countess, the aforementioned speech comes into effect — but unfortunately while this is a very Doctor thing to do, it’s quite a limp way to defuse the entire crisis all on its own, which again leaves this organisation looking utterly hapless. If the Doctor can run rings around them with barely half an idea who he even is, why are we supposed to be intimidated by them? (This ending should probably count as character development for the Countess, but given her handful of scenes across both books, readers are unlikely to be keeping score.)
All in all, it’s not looking good for Endgame. But it has its upsides. First of all you have that usual stand-by, Terry’s writing style. It’s all quite jolly, if flawed. (Philby more than once does an “As you know, Bob” spiel about the CIA and other such groups for the Doctor’s, and transparently our benefit.) But as for the pace, this one whizzes along even faster than Players, which made the awkward choice of spreading its plot across three short stories featuring two Doctors, one of them sequelising a TV story that mostly had nothing to do with it. Not so with Endgame, which might globetrot like a Bond film but does at least stick to one core plot and protagonist. There’s an absurd thrill to watching the Doctor (who, remember, is not the proactive character of old, more closely resembling a Hitchcock patsy) get forced into one shenanigan after another, and while it cumulatively becomes very dull to see him extricate himself over and over through fights, his success in itself is fun to read.
You also have another staple of Terrance Dicks books: historical hobnobbing. Endgame doesn’t disappear into fanboying as Players did over Winston Churchill, but it has a lot of fun spinning the various plates of Kim Philby’s loyalties, and arguably the most fun with Guy Burgess, hedonistic gay double agent. While the writing for Burgess is cartoonish, having him refer to himself over and over as “Brigadier Brilliant!” and occasionally offer his flirting services to get out of trouble, I suspect it all comes from a good place. He’s an enjoyable presence and his scenes fleeing the country with the Doctor are further book highlights. Meanwhile Truman and Stalin don’t appear much, and they don’t meaningfully escape from just having two dimensions — The Wages Of Sin this ain’t — but I think Dicks just about acquits himself within the bounds of his plot. They’re not in it much, so maybe they don’t need to impress all that much. (Hey, I’m trying to be positive.)
I was thinking of Players quite a bit during Endgame, and for what it’s worth I think this is a better book. Dicks makes a point (as well as missing others) about the Doctor within this story arc, and he leaves something for others to pick up on; he tells a coherent and reasonably engaging, if underwhelming story about spies in the meantime. I wish it had been more, and I certainly wish he could think of a more hands-on approach for his “players” idea, but the bar for his books is fairly low at this point and Endgame just about stretches a leg over it.
6/10
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