Doctor Who: The BBC Books #114 – Warmonger by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#53

Warmonger

By Terrance Dicks

Duck! It’s Warmonger!

Let’s not beat around the bush here: this one isn’t popular. Warmonger tends to be mentioned when people list the BBC Books they liked the least. Contemporary reviews said things like “Arguably the worst Doctor Who novel ever written” (Discontinuity Guide) and “One of the greatest travesties ever perpetuated [sic] on the ‘Who’ book line.” (I, Who.) It must be quite something to have read it with no preconceptions, but I couldn’t avoid those, so the question became not so much Is it any good as How bad is it?

Alarm bells ring early on when our first sight of Peri is a person “sick of running and hiding and killing.” Yes, killing: we begin the story in media res (I knew I shouldn’t have bought that monkey’s paw) and Peri is installed as the leader of a band of guerrillas on the planet Sylvana. She has been hardened by a year of war and her friends have all been murdered or raped. She is now, for example, enough of a crack shot with a sniper rifle to deliberately wound a fleeing enemy soldier (because he’s only a boy) rather than kill him.

That’s Perpugilliam Brown — you know, the fun American botany student who only recently got picked up by the Doctor while on holiday. I’m not against giving an established character a bit of chutzpah, especially one as frequently abused as Peri, but isn’t this the sort of thing you’d struggle to reconcile with the rest of their telly run? Where was Rambo Peri in The Twin Dilemma?

Things get momentarily worse, then better for Peri as the Sylvana regime is overthrown by the Alliance: an army made up of such disparate elements as Draconians and Sontarans. They are fighting a mysterious enemy and are led by a somewhat less mysterious black clad “Supremo”: you know him as the Fifth Doctor. He commands an army of apparently immeasurable size that also includes Ice Warriors and Cybermen, all of whom are happy in his thrall.

Now: there is something to be said for a bonkers idea. There is, equally, value in placing a familiar character in unfamiliar surroundings — it’s the sort of thing a long-running series ought to rely on, quite frankly. There’s even a precedent for the Doctor seeming to have traded in his values (The Invasion Of Time) as well as actually having done so (Big Finish’s Unbound series, particularly Full Fathom Five) — but those examples came with caveats. You can forget that now: Warmonger presents the idea in earnest, as if everyone else was simply too much of a wally to think of it first. The Doctor of Warmonger isn’t even ambiguous about it; he “[likes] being the Supremo — far too much,” and when it’s all over Peri wonders if he can let his adoring soldiers go.

The loudest point of contention with Warmonger seems to be its treatment of the Fifth Doctor. Well known as the most agreeable and pleasant incarnation, he’s more likely to sit in a jail cell and wait than cause a ruckus. It’s insane to treat him as a man who not only considers all-out-war to be the only possible solution to a problem, but one who would enthusiastically lead it as well. All of that’s true. (Apparently it started life as a Sixth Doctor story, which might have made a bit more sense?) But I’d go further. This setup is antithetical to the Doctor in general, whether he’s rocking a stick of celery or a long scarf. It just doesn’t square at all.

(Point of order: A Good Man Goes To War and The War Doctor come to mind. Both of those either came from a place of character [rescue my friend] or served a wider purpose [crisis and closure re the Time War]. Warmonger, bluntly, doesn’t do that stuff so I’m not sure they’re pertinent here.)

There’s a semblance of a point here, at least. Peri makes occasional reference to how much they’ve both changed; the Doctor is at one point “surprised for a fleeting moment by his own indifference to death”, along with other such reflections; the blurb references “the dark sides of their personalities.” Peri lost a year of her life to all this! It seems — charitably — that the story is pushing them to this dark place so it can interrogate that, which again is a perfectly valuable thing to do. But it’s how you do it.

Terrance Dicks isn’t the sort of writer to deal in complex character journeys. The characters in Warmonger are frightfully simple ladies and chaps who chew over their thoughts in handy chunks rather than explore them through meaningful actions. This includes the Doctor/Supremo, who mentally witters such brilliance as “I must write that letter to Hawken when I’ve had some sleep… I must get this coat and these boots back to him… I’d better get Peri out of here very soon.” (Remember to buy milk, pay the gas bill etc.) If someone was going to reckon with a severe change of personality in this one, believe me, it would be visible from two books over. They’re just not that deep.

This also applies to the plot — because hey, there is one, by the way. After Peri meets the Supremo it’s time for us to whiz back and fill in the gaps. (This process takes around 150 pages.) The Doctor takes a stressed Peri somewhere peaceful, and she is promptly gored by a pterodactyl. Apparently seeing no other recourse, the Doctor whisks her back in time to the planet Karn where she can be treated by none other than Solon. The Doctor is thrown in jail for his slightly-too-mysterious arrival, but he’s so charming that they let him out. Peri suspects malfeasance with Solon and, despite the Doctor’s protestations, she finds a lab full of zombies. The Doctor just wants to stay quiet and keep the timeline straight — after all, who would want to disrupt The Brain Of Morbius? All is going well until a mysterious General arrives by the name of Rombusi, bringing with him a band of intergalactic cutthroats. Solon seems to like this Rombusi fellow an awful lot, by the way.

Disaster strikes and Rombusi, a man of great Brain, kidnaps Peri and heads out into space. The Doctor panics at the insurmountable threat Rombusi, also a Time Lord, poses, so he shoots off to Gallifrey to plead for their help while posing as the Karn ambassador. They guess his identity, but he’s so charming that they don’t exile him to Earth or anything. (I have no idea how the timeline works.) The Doctor insists that they can’t just kill this charismatic figure from Gallifreyan history, as that would make him a martyr. (To a bunch of unruly space thugs who are only in it for the perks.) Only a great battle will do! Well, that’s the Doctor for you. After this he quickly falls into the role of Supreme Commander and has an army to wrangle.

It’s not exactly throwing its back out as plots go, and it continues to progress on easy mode from there, with various alien races all turning up and immediately agreeing to work with/for him, some thanks to a bit of Time Lord trickery on the sidelines. (If this is in any way morally equivalent to what the Doctor is doing, this ain’t the book to say so. Other Time Lords shifty! Doctor generally okay!) Warmonger becomes a thoroughly mindless war story where the Doctor’s cronies visit worlds conquered by Rombusi and take them back, gaining willing new armies into the bargain. Can we say, “colonialism”? The thing that was ostensibly bad in that book Catastrophea by, oh what’s his name, the bloke who says “gween” a lot?

If you’re wondering whether liberation that comes via Sontarans and Ice Warriors is really any better than occupation by space pirates, you are officially thinking too much to have written Warmonger. As it happens the people couldn’t be happier. The soldiers cheer in their Supremo’s honour. The Cybermen (!) turn out for a dress parade at the end. The whole Alliance is one long simpering, obsequious banquet in the Doctor’s honour, without a shred of thought towards the shared history between these characters. It would be hilarious if it was a joke, but alas, this is the Uncle Terry that wrote Players, so the best you’ll get viz satire* is a particularly grovelling underling who gets himself killed for a bit of easy pathos, or the Doctor dispensing war homilies from the likes of Napoleon and Wellington. The overall implication is that, while it’s a messy business, someone’s gotta do it: “We’ve saved hundreds, thousands of people from rape and torture and slavery. We wouldn’t have achieved that by telling Morbius’s soldiers that they were being very nasty and would they please go away.” (And for a bonus point: “Some questions don’t have satisfactory answers.” I guess that’s all the ethical bases covered, then.)

It’s Morbius, by the way. Big fan of anagrams apparently. This is an area where Warmonger could actually do something of note: how did Morbius end up as just a brain? Is there more to him than the lumbering Frankenstein’s monster we met in Solon’s lab? Not much, it seems, as the Morbius we meet here is a garden variety megalomaniac with vanity issues. The vast majority of the war doesn’t even feature him, the focus instead being on the Doctor in his exciting new wardrobe with his best mates, the Cybermen. (Oops, I just remembered Earthshock exists.) It’s hard, based on the evidence, to believe he’s really a be-all-end-all threat. Morbius and his men are just getting up to your typical Genghis Khan schtick on an intergalactic scale, with a particular emphasis on rape to weight the scales in favour of the Doctor and his lovely Alliance that everyone is always pleased to see.

The most interesting thing about Morbius is his incredible power of persuasion, e.g. his ragtag bunch of space pirates who’d presumably follow a bright light, or perhaps more convincingly Peri. What else could explain her sudden turn from having an investigative spirit no matter what (defying the Doctor and finding zombies) to quite fancying this Rombusi bloke and ignoring all the Doctor’s warnings not to go on a date with him? She reasons thus: “What if [Rombusi] was a renegade Time Lord? So was the Doctor, by his own admission, and he’d never used his undoubted powers for evil.” You know, I could swear she’s met a dodgy Time Lord before. Pointy beard and stuff. Quite recently, wasn’t it?

Sadly I don’t think we can blame Morbius’s incredible hypno-eyes for Peri’s lapse in judgement. 1) Because Morbius is so vain and stupid that a quick lie about having a skin condition and consequently being a sex risk is enough for him to pack her safely off in an escape pod, with provisions. And 2) “[Peri] thought about the mild, friendly Doctor she had first known — and realised that this ruthless, tormented Supremo aroused very different feelings in her.” Yes, Peri tries to jump the Doctor’s bones in this one — specifically because he’s become a ruthless warlord. I don’t remotely like what this says about Peri and I’m positively icked by what it says about Terry, who (despite his fanciful notion that she could become a guerrilla leader) also directs the infamously comely companion towards a barrage of leers and rape threats throughout the novel — and even, typically enough, some medical experimentation. (In case you were wondering, the Doctor turns her down in a typically eloquent fashion. “There’s a saying on Earth, Peri — try everything once except incest and folk-dancing.”)

The case for Warmonger, like much of Terry’s writing, is short. There are recognisable monsters in it. Fans of The Brain Of Morbius can tick a box. The novel has a decent pace. It’s written in a bright, uncomplicated style that ought to appeal to younger readers, or at least help them through it. And help may be required, because underneath all his cheery bon mots and his “isn’t this cool” repurposing of Doctor Who monsters is a quite nasty story of the Doctor giving up what he stands for just because the plot demands it, until the plot demands that we’ve hit 280 pages now so can he please stop behaving like that and go home.

For all that Terry can turn a page, much of what he actually fills them with is dross. “As nasty-looking a bunch a thugs as I’ve ever encountered” is followed on the next page by “As villainous-looking a group of hard men as you could find in the galaxy.” The book contains a “Hakon” and a “Hawken.” Morbius uses a bloody anagram for some reason. Dicks imagines a darker side for Peri that doesn’t fit into Doctor Who whatsoever, then drops it, and does the same thing for a character he helped define in the first place, then drops that as well like nothing happened. And it’s somehow dull as well, with this great galactic war existing mostly as reported events. The only thing to perk you up is the sheer what-the-[bleep]-ness of seeing the Doctor’s monster army frequently tell him he’s their best mate, he is, and they’d die for him, as he casually sends men to their deaths.

I don’t know if it’s truly the worst Doctor Who book ever written. On a technical level it has a baseline competence that you don’t get in some of Virgin’s slapdash efforts, and nobody gets violently anal-probed in this one, so it’s arguably not worse than The King Of Terror. But the line between Terrance Dicks, great understander of Doctor Who and Uncle Terry, man with very old fashioned view of war and violence is virtually gone now, and this dunderhead of a novel is all that’s left, cheerfully rubbishing the tenets of the series all to explain how a brain ended up in a jar. Behold: the absolutely no brain of Morbius.

2/10

*Since reading it I’ve heard competing theories about Warmonger as a deliberate work of satire. All readings are valid, so fair enough, but I’m happy with mine: Terrance Dicks didn’t do satire without smashing you over the head with it, he actively loves a bunch of the stuff in this (The Brain Of Morbius, any excuse to parrot Winston Churchill) so he’s unlikely to be taking the piss on a wider scale, and if you can’t collectively agree on what it is he’s satirising then — even if he is! — he’s not doing a very good job, is he? Sorry folks: sometimes it just is what it appears to be.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #81 – Endgame by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#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

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #45 – Players by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#21

Players

By Terrance Dicks

Hullo, what’s this? Short chapters? Callbacks? Escapes to danger? This can only mean we’re in Terry town once again. Whether you like it or not, as a certain someone said.

Despite his many successes as script editor, writer and noveliser, the bar for Terrance Dicks: Novelist remains low. He’s still got it when it comes to telling a story at a rollicking pace — try and stop him. The problem is the stories he chooses to tell. Time and again he returns to ideas and, more often, tropes that interest him. If they interest you too, hooray! But for the rest of us there is a feeling of going back to the same old well.

Players is reminiscent of a few Terry books — in fairness, often deliberately. The story, although definitely a novel, reads like two short stories and a novella. You can tick off Shakedown there in terms of structure. (Shakedown had an actual reason to do that at least, the middle bit being a novelisation.) The story concerns dangerous forces trying to change the course of history, manifesting mainly in the Second World War. Tick off Exodus for subject matter. (It’s literally referenced at one point — and quite subtly, I had to look it up.) Tom Dekker, a character from Blood Harvest (tick!) shows up and joins the main cast, and some of the wacky tone of that book — see also Mean Streets there, particularly Garshak the trench coat-wearing Private Eye — bleeds into this one. And then there are the great sweaty slabs of continuity, ostensibly there to move the story along but, let’s face it, mainly because Terry likes to remind us of things he enjoyed or wrote. (Or both.) The book’s DNA must therefore include a bit of The Eight Doctors as well.

I suppose it’s really only important to consider what the book is and not what it’s like, since the reader might not have read any of that and so might not feel any marathon-y fatigue. So: in Players the Sixth Doctor and Peri aim for London in 1899 (Peri wants to go somewhere nice — this is long overdue, poor duck) and they hit South Africa instead. It’s the Boer War — oops — and a young war correspondent needs their help. This war correspondent drops numerous plucky bon mots as he inspires all the men around him, and with a little help from the Doctor the war correspondent eventually wins out against some armed Boers and a mysterious assassin keen on killing the war correspondent — and if you’re sick of hearing “the war correspondent” as a very conspicuous placeholder when everyone else just gets referred to by their name, fear not, for he is revealed to be Winston Churchill! After which the novel interchangeably calls him “Churchill” or “Winston Churchill.” (In the second case sounding as excited as Ant-Man saying “I believe this is yours, Captain America.”)

There’s absolutely no escaping the fact that Terrance Dicks thought Winston Churchill was the bee’s knees, and possibly the rest of the bee as well. Players drips with hero worship. “[The Doctor] noticed Winston Churchill’s unscrupulous streak … Just do whatever had to be done to achieve your aims. He smiled faintly. Perhaps it was a characteristic of all great men.” / “‘I wish you were leading the troops instead of writing for some rotten paper,’ said the General.” / “Ever since Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Churchill, and Churchill alone, had raised his voice in repeated warning about the Nazi menace.” / “The old boy didn’t miss much, thought the Doctor. Winston Churchill was a hard man to deceive.” / “Not many people can arrive unexpectedly at 10 Downing Street, demand an immediate meeting with the Prime Minister, and be shown inside — but Winston Churchill was one of them.” Enough subtlety, Terry, tell us what you really think.

There are at least indications of the man’s flaws, or that he could conceivably have had some. Mainly there’s his unscrupulousness, and we are (very) often reminded of how many times he failed in politics along his storied career. However, his lack of scruples ends up feeling like a compliment in disguise (just look at all his achievements!) and his political frustrations become a sort of mantra. Surely the universe was wrong to keep Winston Churchill from his destiny, when his magic oratory was all that the country needed to succeed? Surely his setbacks were everyone else’s fault? It’s like the bit in most biopics where the famous subject hints at a thing they will do later and someone whom we all should laugh at says “As if! That’ll never catch on!”

Hey ho: Churchill is here and Terry loves him. Now let’s return to that mysterious assassin in the Boer War. He is joined by a fellow anachronistic co-conspirator seeking to release Churchill from prison, then capture or kill him again. What’s all that about? Escaping with their and Churchill’s lives, the Doctor and Peri don’t worry too much about this — the first “short story” having neatly concluded — until Peri starts asking questions, which is largely her all-too-traditional purpose in the book. (Hey, at least someone got around to asking what the Boer War was all about. I’m not much the wiser now though.) The Doctor thinks he remembers something pertinent, so he quickly fishes out the thought scanner from the end of The Wheel In Space, then mentally unspools an entire 50-page sequel to The War Games starring the Second Doctor, here conscripted to work for the Time Lords before his regeneration takes effect and thus canonising the Season 6B fan theory. Fanwank? Where?

Stepping back in awe at the sheer indulgence of this, it is rather strange to detour your Sixth Doctor novel into a Second Doctor one for a bit. (And here we come to the second “short story.”) In it, the Doctor reunites with Carstairs and Lady Jennifer, who of course don’t remember him post-War Games, and they are all inveigled in an attack on a young officer. Who could the officer be but Churchill again, now a decade older! And wouldn’t you know it, the same nefarious people are still out to get him, this time hoping to more subtly detour his destiny by delivering him alive to Germany. Again they are foiled, and (as Carstairs and Lady Jennifer seal their affections — presumably some fans cheered) the Second Doctor whips back to Gallifrey. Our Doctor, in the present, decides to visit Churchill a third time, reasoning that whatever random date he picks will miraculously be the next time these malefactors pick on him, and they won’t have troubled him or anyone else in between. I would have no further questions if I were Dirk Gently and believed in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, but of course the Doctor is right and when they arrive in 1936 the shadowy forces are at work again, so what do I know?

This is the bulk of the novel at last, and Terry is clearly enjoying himself no less than in the other segments. Those mysterious people are colluding with Nazis and (unknowingly) Wallis Simpson and the King to enable a German victory before the war even starts. Churchill, the Doctor (usually in that order), Peri, Dekker and an older Carstairs foil various Nazis and blackshirts and eventually even the King. It all tumbles along in as frenzied and rollicking a fashion as you’ve come to expect from Terrance Dicks, and the denouement is neat, but it’s pulpy (not especially Doctor Who-ey) nonsense — fun in the moment, gone the next. I only started it two days ago and I’ve already forgotten half of it. Still, that quick turnaround says something positive.

Buried under all the (strangely sectional) shenanigans are the “Players” of the title, and they’re a good idea. Here we have some time travelling figures (not human, I think?) who want to divert history purely for their own amusement. They have strict rules (which they often ignore) and they don’t know who the Doctor is, although they’ve now met two of him. This introduces an interesting wrinkle into the Doctor’s travels: how much of the time are they secretly there, changing events? How much of actual history is their doing? Who, while we’re on the subject, actually are they?

Strangely Players — a book named after them — doesn’t get into it. The antagonists barely feature; due to the nature of their machinations (or the ones more subtle than “get a gun and shoot Winston Churchill”, anyway) they often appear to be more sub-plot than plot. Which seems like an odd choice? This is, of course, just setup for future books. But considering how one-note these characters are — I’m not saying they’re poorly written, more that they’re barely written at all — it ends up a pretty weak teaser for things to come. What a shame. The premise has potential. Why not toss in a few personalities as well? Hell, names would do. (“The Consortium” is the best we’re getting.)

Players mostly serves as an excuse to write a figure whom the author really likes, or otherwise a creation he fancied digging up again. As a Sixth Doctor and Peri book it hits some of the right notes, but I got the sense Dicks mostly likes about them what he likes about Doctors and companions generally: he is an awful name-dropper (who will happily swap his colourful coat for something more era-appropriate — as if!); she is quite capable thank-you-very-much but will nonetheless need to flirt with guards and eventually get kidnapped. (“In the good old days, the heroine screamed and waited to be rescued.” No comment.) There’s a real possibility that it’s only Sixie because his “truculence” was the best fit for Churchill — to whom he is, of course favourably, compared.

One good idea. Three goes at it. Not much luck. Players is harmless and it’s Terry at his Terriest, but not coincidentally it’s also Terry at his most aggressively forgettable. Want to see World War 2 gone awry? Stick with Exodus.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #23 – Catastrophea by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#11
Catastrophea
By Terrance Dicks

Or: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Colonialism.

On their way home after Planet Of The Daleks, the Doctor suddenly gets a psychic jolt from the planet Catastrophea and rushes off to investigate. There he finds a world of subjugated natives, uneasy peacekeepers, an opportunistic company waiting to take over and subjugate the natives even more, activists who want to help the natives, drug smugglers and drug users. The general feeling is of a powder keg.

Pretty soon we get the most interesting thing about the book: the fact that, on the face of it, the Doctor can’t help. “This wasn’t one simple evil like the Daleks; it was a complicated and tragic mixture of extraterrestrial and human interaction that he had seen repeated on many worlds. Perhaps he would just have to let this planet play out its own sad history.”

But wouldn’t you know it, he gets dragged in anyway. When Jo intercedes to stop a Company man beating a native they’re both put on the authorities’ watch list. When the activists get wind of this they wrongly assume that the Doctor is their promised revolutionary hero, El Llama. Then the authorities hear about this, and now they think he’s El Llama too. All the Doctor wants to do is leave (because the planet’s problems are too systemic) but all these wrong assumptions prevent him doing so.

It’s a frustrating setup, because almost everyone involved is stubbornly wrong about something in a way that reinforces everyone else’s wrongness, but at the same time it’s sort of interesting that the Doctor gets involved in a crisis genuinely without even trying, in fact despite conscious effort not to get involved. I clung to that while reading Catastrophea because not a great deal else about it is interesting.

The planet, for example, which is actually named Kastopheria but was nicknamed after a catastrophe — something we are told within the prose rather than in dialogue, which seems clunky, and then we’re told a few more times later for good measure. For all the effort though, I still don’t know how to pronounce it. Is it Ca-TASS-trophe-uh, or Cata-STROFF-ee-uh? Either way it feels like one of Ken Campbell’s “jokoids”: something with the shape of a joke that is not inherently funny.

Most of the planet’s troubles are recognisably human, which helps the reader identify with them, but also takes away any particularly exotic alien quality that you might otherwise have expected what with setting it on an alien planet. We’re familiar enough with the plight of natives under the British Empire, for example, to recognise that being replicated here. But it is just replicated, with awful land owners beating their gardeners and calling them “boy”, and customers thrashing their rickshaw drivers for no reason. Emotive, yes, but there’s not much imagination being applied here. Dicks doesn’t even need to break a sweat writing the actual natives — literally, aliens — apart from making them very big and golden skinned, because it’s plot relevant that they are passive and mute. The Doctor and Jo, of course, despair at the way society ignores them and works around them, but the book steadfastly does it too. They’re even referred to as “The People” — an unfortunate bit of New Adventures overlap there — a name they chose themselves that only makes them more anonymous.

There is something to be said for the simple allegory here, literally being so generic that it can represent any subjugation and thus make the point, if you like, that this happens much the same everywhere. But I suspect this is a charitable view, since it’s (British) humans doing the subjugating — so it’s the actual same thing, then — and just generally, knowing his books, I’m not convinced Dicks was thinking along those lines. More likely it’s: here is a thing you will recognise. (Which, to be fair, is a popular strategy.)

There’s a fair bit of that in Catastrophea, with policemen speaking the apparently “immortal words of policemen everywhere” saying “All right, all right, what’s going on here then?” (“Immortal” circa 1970s telly?) Jo sees a military base and comments that it looks just like Fort Apache, “‘Like it’s a Western.’ The Doctor [nods]. ‘Very similar situation.’” There’s even a café where the various parties can all mix on neutral ground which — groan — is actually called “Rik’s” and — groannn — when we meet the proprietor his first line is, “Of all the cafés in all the planets in the galaxy, you had to throw him into mine!” That’s not wearing your influences on your sleeve, it’s painting them on your face.

Dicks has a habit of writing in allusions to stuff he likes, and more generally just transposing settings and tropes wholesale. Look at Megacity (aka 1920s Chicago) in Shakedown and Mean Streets, which comes with old-timey anachronisms galore even though it’s, y’know, on another planet. Catastrophea follows a similar pattern, with drug dealers being just as awful as they were in Mean Streets and The Eight Doctors, and drugs/drug culture being on much the same basic “this is bad” level as they were there. It’s not a bad style, per se, but I find it all just a bit pedestrian. When everything’s an archetype, none of it pops.

Dicks (and the Doctor) at least finds the activists interesting — which is to say, he generally disapproves of their “do-gooding” as it’s not really helping, and he suspects their motives overall. (This contributes to a perhaps unintentional theme of anti-activism in the BBC Books run so far — see also Kursaal and Dreamstone Moon. I’m not sure where all that’s coming from, especially with pro-activist Sam as our representative.) As for the occupying military, they seem benign enough, apart from being an occupying military, and apart from things like General Walton regularly threatening to have the Doctor and Jo shot — before folding every time because they seem like good eggs after all. What a guy!

It’s hard to know where the book really stands on this stuff. The Doctor is confident that everyone should leave the People alone, of course, but he also seems disconcertingly sure that they’ve brought this on themselves, what with them years ago mentally calming their rages in a way that allowed their occupation, and then not fighting back against it. (The Doctor here smacks a little of his anti-pacifist stance in the first Dalek story, an aspect Terry Nation apparently later regretted.) Combined with a general “it’s bad that they’re here but oh well they’re mostly not that bad” attitude to the military, I think it’s best just to avoid looking under the hood here. At least the plot lands on the side of right, eventually giving the planet back to the People. (What it thinks of the People at that point is a little… hazy.)

There is at least, and at last, a sci-fi idea here, with the People having a history of psychic powers and a need to change who they are to avert catastrophe (ahem), only to find themselves mistreated by humanity afterwards. (If you think that sounds awfully like Colony In Space, well done: so does Dicks, who promptly lampshades that fact.) With their source of mental control fading, the People are on the verge of a mass breakdown — think, Vulcans losing their logic — and a violent uprising seems inevitable. They want the Doctor to help them transition to a less controlled way of life, but not a bloodthirsty one.

Continuing the idea of “he doesn’t think he can help,” the Doctor is critically indecisive about all this, and it ends up being a third party that triggers the change for selfish reasons. The People do, indeed, get a bit bloodthirsty before securing the planet for themselves, with the Doctor frantically asking everyone else not to fight back or they’ll make things worse. (There is something quite neat about forcing pacifism back onto the oppressors, but I’m not sure the book really registered it.)

The question of “was it right to interfere” is raised by Jo. (She dwells comfortably at the “charming nitwit” end of Jo Grant writing throughout, showing absolutely no evidence of the desire to leave that the Doctor somehow clocks at the start of this. Ah well, we’ll always have Dancing The Code.) I don’t think Catastrophea ever really grapples with that, since the Doctor’s involvement is entirely involuntary and, at every crunch point, he’s at best asking people to be nice to each other. You could argue these events would generally have happened without him. The psychic business at least allows a revolution to come, and explains why one hasn’t come already (as well as helpfully breaking us away from the “nothing we can do about it” line), but the real answer here is that the People got their planet back because they put up a fight for it. No one really has to make any hard choices, which is a slightly disappointing end to that promising starting point. All told, I’m not sure the story says anything about occupations that isn’t readily apparent.

It all trundles along with the usual easy reading pace of Terrance Dicks. It’s nice to see the Draconians again, although I think it’s a stretch to put one on the front cover. (Based on that I thought we might get a story that really delves into their culture for once, but alas.) Pertwee’s Doctor is very well captured — we should expect nothing less from his script editor — although I sometimes wondered at his outlook in this. What Catastrophea generally aims for is laudable enough, and it’s as nicely digestible as anything else by Dicks, apart from an awkward contrast between its general children’s adventure tone and some blunt swearing. As a story it takes a few too many shortcuts to really achieve anything, but I suppose it’s no catastrophe. Uh.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #1 — The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#1
The Eight Doctors
By Terrance Dicks

He’s back! And it’s about… nothing.

So, you’ve got the Doctor Who license. (Not you, Virgin Publishing. Sorry.) What do you do with it? Well, you could do worse than copy the previous guy’s homework. Timewyrm: Genesys was given to a well respected/well liked/well established/well-in Who author (delete where appropriate) and it opens with one of our characters getting amnesia. This is a handy device for explaining the basic tenets of Doctor Who to any uninitiated readers. (It’s nonetheless a rather odd choice, because the vast majority of readers picking up Timewrym: Genesys were already fans who knew this stuff back to front. But I understand the impulse.)

Fast forward six years and enter The Eight Doctors, which also comes from a familiar-named author and does amnesia for what appears to be the same reason – except this time it’s the entire book. And this time it’s an odd choice for a couple of reasons.

The Eighth Doctor’s only previous adventure on screen made heavy use of amnesia, so it seems silly to do that again right away. (We can perhaps infer that Terrance Dicks wasn’t enamoured with the TV Movie or its ownership of plot beats based on the Doctor’s subtle interpretation of it here: “It had been a weird, fantastic adventure, full of improbable, illogical events.” I mean, he’s not wrong.)

Still, “amnesia” doesn’t dictate how you actually write the character or the memory loss – that’s up to you. Dicks in this instance opts to have the Doctor more or less loaded up with his memories already (right away he has his name, ability to pilot the TARDIS and Venusia aikido), he’s just unfamiliar with, or unable to get at them. This is at least a bit different to the TV Movie, but it puts The Eight Doctors in a weird middle ground where the Doctor Who-ey elements are sort of new to it (and to us, the hypothetical new readers), but they are also presented as if you should already know what they are. This gives us weird stop-start prose like “This, although he didn’t realise it, was the old, traditional TARDIS control room” followed later that page by “What was this place? Clearly it was some kind of control room. But what was it supposed to control?” Is it an unknown or isn’t it? It doesn’t quite work if you tell us what it is and then have the Doctor go, “Huh?” All of which begs the same question as the Timewyrm: Genesys opening: who is The Eight Doctors for?

I’m getting ahead of myself, so to recap: directly after the events of the TV Movie (which doesn’t strictly rule out The Dying Days, every cloud eh) the Doctor finds a backup trap from the Master which triggers memory loss all over again. Along comes the helpful booming voice of Rassilon, whose Five Doctors visage lovingly graces the back cover, to tell him to cheer up and “trust the TARDIS”, which then deposits him in Totters Yard for reasons we’ll get to. It’s here we take a slight detour and introduce what will become the new companion.

This is new stuff, bread and butter for those hypothetical new readers. Hooray. How does it fare? Well, in record time we learn that Sam Jones is of school age, a vegetarian, a runner and a gymnast. (If she had time to breathe she’d probably list her favourite bands as well.) We find her running away from a local drug gang, angry at her for informing to the cops, which also tells us she has strong morals. But we still need her to be a companion, so she needs rescuing, which is where a suddenly-appearing police box (and some quickly recalled aikido) comes in. The police turn up, everyone except the Doctor scarpers and the wrong idea is had about his involvement in local drug deals. Cue a bit of silliness in a police station, while Sam is gently interrogated by her teachers.

It’s not great stuff, honestly, but I do appreciate the expediency of Sam’s introduction and the information it gets across. We’ve had similar and/or worse companion intros on television since 2005. Everything about the criminals (“You remember why they call him Machete Charlie?”) and the cops (“I DON’T GIVE A BRASS MONKEY’S”) is, to put it charitably, more your Terrance Dicks of Mean Streets than of Exodus, but if you bear in mind that some people have this idea about Doctor Who being intended for children then it reads harmlessly enough. (I’m less fond of Sam’s teachers: the male one is good enough at his job to figure Sam needs to talk to someone, but he nevertheless palms her off onto a female colleague with “Maybe you can get her to talk about it, Vicky – you know, girly talk.” Just as night follows day, Vicky calls him a “chauvinistic oaf”, like this is some blazing piece of feminism and not just Who’s On First for pipe-smoking sexists. The whole exchange is reheated from the 70s and it clunks like anything.) But anywho, that’s enough about Sam. The Doctor escapes from police custody and retreats in the TARDIS (sans Sam), which sets a course for the multi-Doctor shenanigans of the title.

And, sorry, this is where the wheels really come off.

The TARDIS/Rassilon/the Doctor’s subconscious or whatever has a plan to beat the amnesia: go and visit his past selves, do a bit of telepathy and absorb their memories. If you think about this for more than a second it falls apart. Why not just visit his most recent incarnation and get the memories all in one go? But hey, it’s an excuse to go on a jolly Time Lord’s outing. Again though, it’s how you do it, and as with the amnesia the choices are rather muddled.

We find the First Doctor during his first on-screen adventure. Again, the amnesia prose can’t keep straight what our Doctor remembers: “The old man was angry. The old man was him” is followed by “He could understand [the old man’s passions] as if they were his own. And then he realised – they were his own.” He marches up to the First Doctor, bold as brass, during the near-miss with the wounded caveman and the rock. As well as regaining memories up to this point, he uses the opportunity to wag a finger at his predecessor for contemplating murder.

I hate this, because the scene as televised doesn’t leave room for an intervention. There already is one, with Ian stepping in to stop him. So, why add this talking-to on top? It might be there to give the new Doctor a grounding in his own morals, but those already seemed fully developed when he met Sam, and castigated her enemies for selling drugs to kids. You can argue it’s adding fuel to the First Doctor’s fire, but then that takes away from Ian and the role of the companion in general – however there’s no actual sign that the First Doctor has changed his mind afterwards. The new Doctor yells at him and then the Ian thing plays out just the same anyway! So what’s it for? It’s a towering redundancy, a sort of have-your-cake-and-throw-it-away. Odd, odd choice.

And that’s not even the worst bit. Here’s how the First Doctor reacts to the new arrival: “Good grief! Seven regenerations… I am the First Doctor, and you are the Eighth! … You must find your other selves, all six of them. They’ll restore the gaps in your memory, just as I have — though only up to the time in their lives that you meet them, of course.” Even apart from how agonisingly clumsy it is to offer up the book’s entire plot like this, how incongruous does this Doctor, the one least encumbered by continuity (because most of it didn’t exist yet) sound as he casually refers to himself as The First Doctor, and tosses away his own future regenerations like he’s swapping notes with a fellow trainspotter? It doesn’t speak to the character or do anything to show why we should be interested in seeing him again. And there’s nothing momentous about this meeting, despite how bananas it would have been in that moment and how much of an occasion it ought to be for us – indeed, it’s the premise of the book. The whole encounter is over in two pages. If a random fan had submitted a first pass at this scene, it might have read the same way.

Anyway. One down, six to go. Hope you’re comfy.

The Second Doctor fares much the same: found during The War Games, surrounded by soldiers displaced in time, our Doctor regains some memories, gains a few Doctor Who trivia points and wags his finger/offers encouragement about contacting the Time Lords for help, which will get his younger self exiled. As a section there’s a bit more to it at least – The War Games has more going on generally than An Unearthly Child did, plus Terry co-wrote this one so he’s probably more engaged – but again it’s an intervention that doesn’t really contribute to the outcome; again, if it does contribute then some agency is removed from the original story; and again, it’s all so blandly functional that he could be asking an old colleague for train times.

Around this point it becomes more of a short story collection, but Terrance at least starts putting some action into it. We find the next few Doctors in the moments after a TV story: The Sea Devils, State Of Decay and (aptly/confusingly) The Five Doctors. The Doctor helps the Third Doctor find, lose, find, then lose the Master again, at one point revisiting Devil’s End. It’s all a bit redundant, but quite jolly apart from the Third Doctor trying to steal his successor’s TARDIS at gunpoint. You can generally tell Dicks is more engaged here as it was “his” era, but I’m not sure I give that a pass. Similarly he wrote State Of Decay, and this isn’t even his first prose sequel to it, so the next bit is fairly generous as well: the Fourth Doctor runs afoul of vampires, but luckily the new Doctor a) murders a bunch of them and b) provides a life saving blood transfusion, which is a Bill & Ted paradox but no one seems to mind. Then, following up another story he wrote, the Fifth Doctor’s attempt at relaxation is interrupted by the Raston Warrior Robot and some Sontarans. A clever multi-Doctor ruse helps confuse and defeat the robot, and then the new Doctor engineers the deaths of all the Sontarans as an escape plan. It’s around here that I can’t help looking at this blood-spattered new incarnation and wonder if he has lost his memory since earlier in this book, when he told the First Doctor that the ends didn’t justify the means. (It’s also worth noting that the Eye Of Orion is now once and for all ruined as a relaxation spot, what with the robot being left on guard there. Whoops.)

As we meet number 6, still in the throes of The Trial Of A Time Lord, the action shifts to put the Eighth Doctor more at the centre. This makes sense – he ought to draw the focus at some point, it’s his book series – but you could be forgiven for wishing it was executed differently. Initially working with and passionately defending the Sixth Doctor, he is soon exposing corruption on Gallifrey and organising a revolution, all while repeating the plot points of Trial. It’s worth noting that all of this is our second version of Gallifrey in this novel – the other one came to a head in the Fifth Doctor’s segment, as a seditious Time Lord tried to kill two Doctors using the Time Scoop – and the book does threaten to snap under the weight of Time Lord continuity. (You can’t even say it’s worth it for finally getting to the meaty bit of the book, because although the Eighth Doctor draws the focus for a while, this still isn’t really the main plot of the novel. Because there isn’t one.) For good measure, needling the Sixth Doctor for being a bit of a fatty isn’t very nice, but then again there’s a reference earlier on to the Fourth Doctor secretly wishing Romana was more subservient like his old companions, and there’s the Third Doctor’s whole attempted hijacking bit. For a book supposedly delighting in the company of eight Doctors, few of them come out of it well.

Finally we arrive at the Doctor he might as well have visited in the first place: we find the Seventh one so depressed he’s considering medical intervention. (This is certainly a take, and maybe it’s a comment on the often gloomy New Adventures – although a reference to the Doctor’s parents sort of de-canonises those, eek – but I hope not as he mellowed towards the end of the series.) A death-defying trip to Metebelis III cures his ennui, with a little help from the new Doctor who shrinks a giant spider to death and my dude, would you give the killing a rest? Snuck in here as well is some bonus continuity for the Master – the third-and-a-bit version included in The Eight Doctors, god help you if you don’t know his entire timeline – as we helpfully explain how he pulled off the whole “death snake” thing in the TV Movie. It doesn’t really fit, but I guess Terry figured hey, since I’m here.

And at last we pick up with Sam and send her and the Eighth Doctor on their own adventures. An attempt is made for this to seem like a fresh take on “companion enters the TARDIS,” with Sam assessing more or less all the weird stuff happening around her on the spot and taking it in her stride because she’s from a more savvy age: the 90s. I’m not that charitable, however. In the context of this book, where monumental events are rendered as bullet points, it just reads like we’re getting it done faster. It’s also a bit flat having the companion shrug it off like this. The companion is the reader. There should be some amazement.

So, what does The Eight Doctors try to achieve? As an adventure featuring that titular gaggle of Theta-Sigmas it’s rather lacking, bumping them into each other with no greater ceremony (or critically, banter) than whatever old Doctor it is going “Not you again!” As a celebration of those events, well it really isn’t one, more just acknowledging that those events occurred, often in an exhausting list. At best, it advertises that there are different Doctor Who continuities, which is genuinely very canny when you’re launching two book ranges to explore them. Business concerns aside though, it’s a rough restart for printed Doctor Who fiction, jumping from the depth of the New Adventures into essentially Dimensions In Time without the soap opera.

As a first adventure for a new Doctor, forget it. Although he eventually takes the lead, the closest he has to a distinct personality here is an ease with killing. (This isn’t entirely the author’s fault – there isn’t room to make a definitive statement about a new Doctor – but I did find the violence a bit off.) The best you can do is write it off as a rough sketch written to order and look forward to people actually writing this stuff for real. But in order for that to make sense, you do need to forget that this was the launch title, intended to hook readers.

Who, then, is The Eight Doctors for? Well, here’s a twist ending: me. Aged 12, when this was first published, I loved The Eight Doctors. In the Wilderness Years Doctor Who mostly existed as non-fiction books and videos released in a random sequence, almost as haphazard and intangible as the TARDIS itself. A book that devotes swathes of time to reciting canon was an all-I-could-eat treat for younger me, who couldn’t claim to have watched any of this when it aired and knew it only as second hand legends. (I hadn’t read that many books either, which probably helped rose-tint this particular opus.) I can only assume that other fans in that exact situation also had a good time with it, and for that at least, well done Terry — there is an audience for this. But that still leaves everyone else with a shopping list that can barely claim to have come to life where a novel should be.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #110 – Mean Streets by Terrance Dicks

The New Adventures
#8
Mean Streets
By Terrance Dicks

Well, I wanted Bernice to get up to something different for a change, and here we are. There is no archeological dig in Mean Streets. After wittily griping about it in Ghost Devices, Bernice is now actually committing to her work on Dellah: she’s reasonably important and living on book royalties, in no mood for adventures, thank you very much. It takes a visit from Chris Cwej – which unwittingly triggers a Hitchocockian murder plot – to coax her into visiting an old haunt to solve a mystery. No trowel required.

Honestly, I’m not sure if this is a legit character choice for her eight books in or if Terrance just didn’t look at what she had already been doing (pretty consistently) up to now, vis-à-vis quite happily going on adventures, thank you very much. Like how Chris turns up entirely motivated by the death of Roz and determined to honour his friend. Okay, but why now? Has he been trapped in amber since So Vile A Sin? (We know he hasn’t: he’s been in five New Adventures since then.)

The reason for the (arguable) reset is probably the subject matter. You’ll have noticed a theme in some of Terry’s NAs, with the Al Capone era being visited in Blood Harvest and the futuristic crime haven of Megacity appearing in Shakedown. He loves noir and he’s not afraid to sprinkle some cheese on it. Well, it makes sense to dust off Megacity if he wants another go. The prologue is set during Shakedown and Mean Streets is a sequel to that book’s B-plot (which we’re only hearing about now). It’s a tenuous setup, and a fair amount of contrivance is needed so that Chris only has to mention a “Project” and “Megacity” in earshot to get Bernice involved, but it brings us back to prose like “The place was so corrupt that everyone had something to hide.” Ahhh: you can hear that boozy jazz already.

All of which is fair enough if you love that sort of thing. Unfortunately I have a pretty low tolerance for it. (Half of two novels was plenty, thanks.) More significantly, it’s not as if Mean Streets adds anything to the realm of cheesy noir that Terrance Dicks – not to mention the stuff he’s riffing on – hasn’t already done. (Literally, when it comes to sending our heroes undercover as criminals. See Blood Harvest.) He even makes efforts to rein in the futuristic elements that would otherwise make this different from yer average Raymond Chandler pisstake. Sure, there are aliens everywhere and there’s a sci-fi plot, but then Bernice goes shopping (in Megacity, on another planet, in the future) at a still thriving branch of Nieman-Marcus. One of the many crime syndicates in Megacity is noted for having “clung to the old Mafia terminology.” (Of course it has.) A resident of Megacity still refers to drugging people as a “Mickey Finn.” It’s all just a bit too comfortably Earth-like. We get it, Megacity is like old Earth Chicago. It doesn’t have to be old Earth Chicago, albeit with hovercars.

Take Garshak. He was an interesting character in Shakedown: an Ogron who thanks to genetic modification is not only not a brute but a genius. That’s basically Rocket Raccoon! Loads you could do with that! Last time he was an amusingly high cultured police captain in a lawless town; this time, long since out of the job, he’s a private eye. Okay, fair enough. But he’s only a private eye because he came across some old Earth pop culture and thought, why not. Really? He can’t arrive at that idea without some nudge-wink connection to the materials Terry based this on? It makes him consciously part of the pastiche; worse, now he’s like an idea in search of a personality. Still, it gets us to chapters written in first person as Garshak investigates, but they’re not really elevated by the fact that he’s an Ogron with a high IQ and not Humphrey Bogart. The only really notable thing about him is that he tends to win all his fights. I’m not sure that’s more interesting, especially after a while.

It’s not as if I spent the book rolling my eyes and soldiering on. After all, it’s Terrance Dicks, so the prose clicks along like a metronome. But this is not his sparkling best. Terry’s famously concise powers of description are a little lacking here: Chris is “big”; Bernice is “medium-sized” (!); Roz, who only appears in the prologue but is mentioned a lot, is “dark” – several times on a page at one point. I know he’s just being expedient but after a while that last one starts to feel a bit, really? That’s her defining feature, if you had to pick one out of a hat, on an alien planet full of random animal-shaped whatevers? (And about them: there is a crime boss called Lucifer who happens to be a tall, horned chap with wings and a tail. His species is “Demoniac”; apparently the name came from lazy Earth people and it stuck. Lampshading the obviousness of an idea doesn’t elevate it above obviousness.)

Bernice doesn’t come out of this brilliantly. I’ve got my issues with the setup – I think you could have her snap back to academia after those earlier books but this feels more like introducing a fake norm – but through the rest of the book, she doesn’t quite click like she usually does. She’s often a step behind Chris, such as not being able to guess how criminals at large could get to you in prison; worse, when they’re both posing as crime lords and a guy arrives who previously met Chris as an Adjudicator, Bernice says “Why does it matter if he knows who you are?” Gee, maybe because it would blow his cover? She normally has more imagination than that.

She at least enjoys herself posing as the “Dragon Lady,” complete with killer laser-lipstick, but plot-wise the whole “blend in” schtick is a bit of a dead end, and only serves to delay the meaning of the “Project” until the last fifth of the book – which does little to keep up the stakes earlier on. In terms of usefulness, she does get to storm into the proverbial accusing parlour at the end, but not because she has a particular stake in this: it’s because “as an academic, she was used to lecturing people.” Oh. (You would think Chris would want that job since it’s his quest, but I should probably just shut up and be grateful when Bernice has something to do.)

Her dialogue seems a little muted as well, which is a pity as it’s often the best thing about her, but that’s a common malaise in Mean Streets. Funny lines are all too often punctuated with exclamation marks, making characters sound like they’re in the Famous Five. It seems rather gauche for Bernice my-middle-name-might-as-well-be-Sarcasm Summerfield. It’s positively bizarre when Garshak does it.

I’ve done almost nothing but complain about Mean Streets, but I didn’t hate it. It’s as cheerily readable as anything by Terry, and the whole pastiche bit will be some folks’ bread and butter. I just found the story itself so thunderingly uninteresting and irrelevant to Benny that all I’m left with for a review is the ways in which it didn’t take advantage of this range of books so much as force them into a comfortable shape that the author likes.

5/10

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