Book Review 2: Prisoner of the Daleks, by Trevor Baxendale (2009) – 10/10

Story Summary (SPOILERS!):

After the TARDIS skips a time-track, The Doctor finds himself in a period before the Time War on the planet Hurala. After escaping from a Dalek trap, The Doctor finds himself stranded with some Dalek-hunting mercenaries, amidst the Dalek-Earth wars. In the process of fleeing from the Daleks at Hurala, the group manage to immobilise a live Dalek that successfully penetrated into their ship. After being tortured by the crew, the Dalek later tricks The Doctor into going to the planet Arkheon, which features a Time-Rift that the Daleks themselves are intending to control. However, it is another trap. The Daleks have been there studying the Time-Rift all along, as well as set up a high security prison and slave base there, to help clear away the rock around the molten core of the planet in which the Time-Rift is situated. The Daleks hope to gain the power of Time travel, once they have access to the Time-Rift, and use The Doctor’s TARDIS to help stabilise the entry into the Time Vortex. The Doctor, after interrogation, tempts the Daleks into taking him and the remaining mercenaries back to Hurala to search for his TARDIS, but he in turn sets up his own trap – by setting alight the astronic fuel on the planet’s refuelling station. The resulting explosion destroys the superior and command Daleks that followed him to Hurala. The Doctor successfully escapes, along with two of the remaining mercenaries.

Story Placement

TV Episodes: Between The Next Doctor and Planet of the Dead.

Review:

My first full-length new series Doctor Who book and considering it was chosen at random, I can’t believe I struck gold first time. Until recently, I’d never really tried reading ‘new series’ Doctor Who, but if they’re all as good as this then I can see I’ll be having a great time catching up on these over the next few years.

Rather surprisingly, this is only the third original Dalek novel ever written, but it more than makes up for it. Although, fans of the Dalek Empire Big Finish audios will be used to the idea, this book feels like the first official Doctor Who adventure to be part of the great Dalek-Earth wars for some time, and feels very reminiscent of a cross between Frontier in Space and Resurrection of the Daleks, only on a far more epic scale. As to how this war fits into Dalek continuity is anyone’s guess. It’s before the Daleks have mastered Time travel, but clearly set after all the ‘Classic Series’ Dalek adventures as these are meant to be the bronze Daleks of the ‘New Series’. Perhaps the Daleks lost the secret of ‘Time corridor’ technology, or deemed it too inefficient. It’s clear that the Dalek Time Ships of The Chase and The Daleks’ Masterplan were only prototypes that were later abandoned or lost, and the Big Finish audio – The Time of the Daleks, seems to hint that like in that story, the Daleks’ Time travel capabilities in The Evil of the Daleks were purely experimental too.

Back to Prisoner of the Daleks though, I was very impressed with the characterisations, not just of the Daleks, but also the Tenth Doctor himself. All the wit and silliness, the wonder and the compassion, the excitement and unswerving authority – a flawless depiction of David Tennant’s much loved incarnation. And the other characters are interesting to read too, particularly the war-weary Bowman, the leader of the mercenaries, who at times appears to be a more aged and well-crafted homage to the Dalek Hunter, Abslom Daak from the comic strips of what is now Doctor Who Magazine. What is also interesting, is how Trevor Baxendale uses these supporting characters, and puts each through an emotional journey in the crews’ struggles against the Daleks. Furthermore, not all of them make it out alive by the end of the story. The Daleks here are also great to read. Completely true to character, the Daleks here are both exciting and fascinating in equal measure, like in all of their best adventures. Trevor Baxendale achieves this by revealing more depths to their malevolence, showing us that Daleks delight in torturing other life forms, by turning down the level of the death ray so that their victims die as slow and painful a death as possible. We even read about Daleks ‘scientifically’ determining this by experimenting on prisoners in laboratories, just so this sick aim can be achieved. Baxendale also creates a new Dalek – Dalek X, the Inquisitor General. Deliberately different from a Supreme Dalek, Baxendale successfully conveys a much more ruthless, but important addition to the Dalek hierarchy, just as Army of Ghosts did with the ‘Cult of Skaro’.

What impresses most though is Trevor Baxendale’s glorious descriptive prose. The dark and slightly graphic descriptions help paint the Daleks’ powerful menace onto the page, and give a sense of scale to their machinations. However, the scale of Baxendale’s imagery is also a joy to behold. The presentation of the battle-scarred planet of Arkheon is a testament to the power of Baxendale’s imagination – an Earth-like planet split open by a powerful Dalek weapon many years ago. Only half of Arkheon still survives, but only as desolate remains, with the molten core burning out into space, and the remaining surface full of devolved primal and cannibalistic humanoids. It almost feels like a combination of Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings, such is the epic majesty and bleakness that Baxendale conveys beautifully.

However, the only thing that spoilt Prisoner of the Daleks for me a bit was the somewhat disjointed and simplistic plotting. Although I don’t mind the TARDIS breaking the Time War time lock (or jumping a Time Track as the Doctor glibly puts it), the trap the Doctor falls into at the start seems awfully contrived. After all, who is supposed to have made it in the first place? It doesn’t make sense for the Daleks to make it, as the book seems to suggest, because it seems to be so far away from any of their operations. Furthermore, Hurula is supposedly a long abandoned refuelling station, only seldom visited by humans, so it would seem very unlikely that a trap would have any real positive impact on the Daleks’ war effort against the human race. The Trap makes more sense as a device to catch out Space Pirates, looting the station, but even then it still doesn’t explain how and why the Daleks seemed to conveniently turn up at Hurula at just the right dramatic moment. It just seems an easy way of getting the Doctor mixed up with the Waylander mercenaries, and attacked by Daleks early on. Although, it does result in an exciting escape sequence from the planet Hurula, so it didn’t take long for me to be sucked back into the story again. The impressive use and setting up of Hurula for the story’s conclusion, also partly make up for this oversight.

In addition to this plot device, it was also jarring how tacked on the Arkheon subplot was. After seeing a Dalek ambush and very vague last words from a dying captive Dalek mutant, the Doctor seems to clock on from nowhere that the Daleks’ plan is really to acquire the powers of Time travel, through manipulating a Time Rift in the core of the planet Arkheon. Of course he is right, but there seems to be a sizeable lack of genuine deduction and progression in the story for the reader to work out for themselves. Quite a few developments seem to arise without any hints or explanation, and are just spoon fed to the reader. Although, because of how solid a plot the Arkheon storyline is when connected to the adventure’s conclusion, perhaps it is the earlier subplots that are tacked on for dramatic effect and convenience. The subplot about the Auros Dalek ambush, for instance, could easily have disappeared without having any adverse effect on the main plots, but it adds a further tragic layer to both the loss of one of the mercenaries, but also helps to emphasise the humans’ sense of helplessness when trying to fight the Dalek menace. The Doctor helps the mercenaries to eventually overcome this helplessness, even if he fails to save many of them by the end.

So despite these small (but not insignificant) conceptual flaws, Prisoner of the Daleks is still a complete revelation to me. It throws a brilliantly realised 10th Doctor back into the infamous Dalek-Human wars, of which Trevor Baxendale paints a vivid and fascinating portrait that captivates throughout. In some ways, it’s so good, I almost wish it had been made for television as it’s certainly more preferable to parts of the corny Journey’s End or the light-weight Planet of the Dead.

Score: 10/10

Audio Review 1: The Sirens of Time, by Nicholas Briggs (1999) – 8/10

Story Summary (Spoilers!):

Gallifrey is under siege by a powerful force known as ‘The Knights of Velyshaa’. This cataclysm has been made possible by the mysterious ‘Sirens of Time’ – temporal beings who thrive on energies released when the course of history and web of time is altered. To sustain themselves, they have manipulated the 5th, 6th and 7th Doctors at various points in time to

unwittingly do precisely that. However, the three Doctors are aided and enlightened to this by another trans-temporal species – the Temperon. Once they know the truth, the Doctors set the Temperon free to contain the Sirens at the beginning of Time, saving both Gallifrey, and preventing the destruction of history.

Story Placement:

5th Doctor: Between The Five Doctors and Ringpullworld (TV Episodes: Between The Five Doctors and Warriors of the Deep)

6th Doctor: Between The Spectre of Lanyon Moor and The Apocalypse Element (in Instruments of Darkness, it is implied that Evelyn was trapped in the TARDIS while The Doctor visited the Kurgon Wonder) (TV Episodes: Between The Trial of a Time Lord and Time and the Rani)

7th Doctor: Between Return of the Daleks and Master (TV Episodes: Between Survival and The TV Movie)

Review:

As far as Doctor Who on audio is concerned, The Sirens of Time is as good a place to start as any other. Although it wasn’t the first official Doctor Who audio adventure I heard, I still have strong memories of going into the Forbidden Planet London Sci-fi shop for the very first time, and seeing brand new Doctor Who to buy for the first time in ages, albeit in CD form. The date was September 1999, and it was The Sirens of Time that had entranced me. Of course for fans who have only known Doctor Who as it is today, with regular new episodes both on TV and audio CD, it may not seem as big a deal. For me however, I first became a fan in 1995, and grew up with Doctor Who in what is now termed as ‘The Wilderness Years’. The 1996 TV Movie, and The Ghosts of N-Space were the first brand new Doctor Who I had ever experienced on transmission, so before The Sirens of Time was released, it seemed like Doctor Who would never come back. Of course there were multiple fiction books too – the New Adventures, Missing Adventures, and the BBC’s own book ranges, but it just wasn’t the same as experiencing an actual production of Doctor Who. So when the newly-formed BIG Finish Productions announced The Sirens of Time back in July 1999, there was a justifiable amount of hype amongst the Doctor Who community, not least because of the returning Doctors – Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, who was my favourite Doctor at the time.

Looking back in retrospect, it’s surprising quite how much strong criticism The Sirens of Time has come under since its initial release, and I for one can’t quite see why. While it may be true that The Sirens of Time is a very simplistic story that helps Nicholas Briggs and the BIG Finish team to find their feet in producing new Doctor Who adventures, as it is also true that they would all write and produce numerous magnificent and superior audios in the future, I believe it stands reasonably well on its own as a good work in its own right.

Firstly, the story itself is, for the most part, quite imaginative and captures the attention from the very beginning. As well as that, the story is also intelligently and well-structured, with each of the three Doctors having an episode to themselves, before they all join up to share the limelight in the final part.

Sadly, the first episode greatly lacks the promise of the later ones, with a seemingly irrelevant assassination of an old Velyshaan war criminal - Sancroff, which The Doctor just happens to be stuck in the middle of, with which what seems to be at first, a promising new companion – Elenya. This could have worked if it had been a character piece around Sancroff, exploring what had brought him to his imminent terminal fate. Instead, we’re treated to the usual clichéd Doctor-assistant antics (damsel in distress, running away from crashing spacecraft/advancing robot assassins, etc), and paper-thin, one-dimensional characters that nearly verge into pantomime. Still, it’s entertaining, and the 7th Doctor is thankfully not as zany as some of his early TV appearances.

The second episode focuses on the 5th Doctor, who finds himself stranded on a German Submarine in the First World War, and urged by the desperate besieged Time Lords of the future to return to the TARDIS as fast as possible. Here at last the story starts to engage with more substantial plotting, as The Doctor has to at first dupe, and then force the crew the Submarine to take him back to the TARDIS. In between attempts though, he suffers mysterious assassination attempts by the Time Lords. The introduction of a little action and mystery into the continuing storyline certainly makes this episode more interesting than the last, but it never really takes off beyond showing how well the production can recreate the period, and the 5th Doctor on audio.

Thankfully, that changes greatly with the next episode, in which the adventure raises its game significantly. The 6th Doctor, also mysteriously stranded from his TARDIS, finds himself caught up in a disaster, as a space delegation investigating the “Kurgon Wonder” is suddenly swept up in massive waves of Time distortion, and The Doctor has to solve the mystery of the Legend of the Temperon, before the Time distortion finishes them off. Furthermore, not everybody is who they appear. This is a delightful little short adventure that feels very traditional for Doctor Who, and has a touch of ‘base-under-siege’ about it.

Of course, the solutions and truths behind these mini-adventures are only revealed in the final episode, and it is here where The Sirens of Time reaches its stride. In many ways this is due to the coming together of the 5th, 6th and 7th Doctors, who liven up the production enormously, and between them create the most engaging multi-Doctor ensemble since the days when Patrick Troughton verbally-sparred with Jon Pertwee in The Three Doctors. This successful ensemble would be reunited again in Zagreus, and prove how brilliantly they go together once more. Uniquely for a multi-Doctor adventure, the three Doctors all share the lead in the story, but the 6th Doctor ultimately shines through best. I suppose you could argue that would be because of how badly the character was treated in his respective TV Episodes, but I would suggest it’s more complicated than that. However, I will leave that discussion for a future 6th Doctor audio. In short, the 6th Doctor will prove himself a much better Doctor than many have given him credit for.

Despite all the interesting ideas and entertaining episodes however, The Sirens of Time still partly suffers from being the first, and perhaps most inexperienced production of the Doctor Who range produced by BIG Finish. The script is as simplistic as the story itself, and many of the supporting characters feel as one-dimensional as they are clichéd. The dialogue also seems rather basic too. Although to Nicholas Briggs’ credit, the script is very well structured, despite the padding in the first episode, and all the Doctors feel just right. However, this script is/was also a massive positive step for Nicholas Briggs, and he should be congratulated for coming a long way from his other earlier written work for both BBV Productions, and his own Audio Visuals Doctor Who fan audio productions, all of which didn’t come close to the good standard written here. Of course, since The Sirens of Time, Nicholas Briggs has developed and written much better and greater scripts for Doctor Who on audio, but for both his and BIG Finish’s official debut Doctor Who adventure, you couldn’t ask for a more assured entrance.

What helps glaze over some of the script’s faults though, is firstly the professional sound design, which makes the whole production have such an interesting and believable aural landscape, but as BIG Finish fans know, the sound design would only get better, and even more amazing in future releases. Secondly, and most importantly though, the whole production is greatly strengthened by the wonderful performances of the cast. Although it proves to be Colin Baker’s show overall, and Sylvester McCoy is still feeling his way back into the 7th Doctor, there isn’t any bad or average performance among them. Even Maggie Stables as the witch-like Ruthley excels. And in a way it’s this magnificent team effort that makes The Sirens of Time such a joy to dip into. Sure, it’s not perfect, but with such enthusiasm and hard work behind it, The Sirens of Time set the foundations (that today we very much take for granted) for what good Doctor Who should be like on audio.

Although the first episode with the 7th Doctor is rather basic and dull, each successive episode is a big improvement on the last, with the final episode being the highlight of the entire story. So if you do have the patience to stick it out, The Sirens of Time is really quite a satisfying, and greatly entertaining listen. I just wish more people felt that way.

Score: 8/10

Book Review 1: Revenge of the Judoon by Terrance Dicks (2008) – 5/10

Story Summary (Spoilers!):

The 10th Doctor and Martha arrive at Balmoral in 1902, only to discover that both the Castle and the recently crowned Edward VII have disappeared, by means of Judoon technology. With the aid of Carruthers, a friend of the missing King, The Doctor and Martha uncover a plot by an alien-lizard cult known as the Cosmic Peacemakers to conquer the World by wiping out its main cities with Temporal Reversal devices. Led by a Professor Challoner, the Peacemakers have tricked the Judoon via a faked legal document, in order to avoid galactic opposition, and use the Judoon as a form of military support. The King is also being held to ransom by the Peacemakers, via a Temporal Reversal device in London, so he can give their attack a public face in the form of the British Empire to hide behind. After The Doctor reveals the forged document, the Judoon turn against the Pacemakers, and The Doctor disables the Temporal Reversal Generator.

Review:

It’s easy to see why Terrance Dicks was chosen for the ‘easy reads’ book range, as his simplistic and visually poetic style of writing is famous amongst WHO fandom. However, it’s a shame that on this occasion, Dicks’ instinct and imagination for telling great stories seems to be running dry.

The story presented here is even more contrived and blasé than one usually expects to find even in the revived Television incarnation of Doctor Who. The Cosmic Peacemakers seem to be an intriguing group at first, but Challoner is just another dull megalomaniac wanting to take over the World. Even the Temporal Reversal Devices, which sound powerful and important to start off with, are easily and casually deactivated by a quick flick with the Sonic Screwdriver. The worst contrivance though, is the inclusion of the Judoon in the adventure - not because they are, but how and why.

Although the Judoon presence allows Dicks an interesting opportunity to delve a bit deeper into the monsters’ character, it is merely a gimmick to get children to pick up the book. For the Judoon to be involved on the basis of a forged document by a generic galactic authority is just so deplorable, I imagine even younger readers would be disappointed at not having a more direct encounter with such a fun character. So in fact, any lesser monsters could have played in their role as apparent henchmen. Other characters get the short straw too.

The 10th Doctor is actually surprisingly well-written by Terrance Dicks considering he’s far from part of the new Doctor Who team, either on books or TV. Martha, on the other-hand is as paper-thin a character as you could get, being portrayed as the stereotypical gutsy sidekick; but then as this was also a partial problem for her character on the TV Series, it’s easy to see how Dicks maybe couldn’t pin her down. Famous names like Arthur Conan Doyle, and Baden-Powell are also given somewhat feature-less cameos (also maybe to wow the kids), although this also could maybe be forgiven due to the short word count available to such a release. Carruthers however, thankfully bucks the trend with a modest and likeable Edwardian gentleman, who seems to be more interesting than Martha. Above all though, Dicks continues to excel in his trademark writing style of prose.

Fortunately, Terrance Dicks’ beautiful descriptions are equally present in this book, as they are in most of his others. His realisation of Balmoral in particular, is by far the best written part of the book; and Dicks always gives us a clear and believable portrayal of what Edwardian times felt like, even if it was more of a snapshot than a portrait.

As much as I understand that this range needs to have simpler and more accessible stories for young readers, I’m sure that a much better class of story than what we have could have been achieved. Instead of an interesting idea that sparks the imagination; we have a basic and dull story with very little life and imagination, written to spec, and squanders an opportunity to use the Judoon more effectively. Although Terrance Dicks dresses up the tale well in prose, and the occasional interesting characterisation; Revenge of the Judoon is a forgettable adventure just to pass the time.

Score: 5/10

Introduction to the New Blog

Welcome to my new Doctor Who Review Blog. I've decided to separate it from my usual blog (http://craiggreenslade.blogspot.com/) so I've got room to go into more detail in my reviews here.

Although, it may be more neat to review things chronologically, I've decided to be more haphazard in my selections. Why? well it allows me to cover new releases as well as very old ones, without taking years to get from one Doctor to the next. Also, realistically, most people, even fans, don't start or approach the Doctor Who book series chronologically either. They pick and chose random selections from either the local bookshop or Library.

Also for that reason, I've decided to start with a book from the 'easy reads' range, so I don't have to start in the deep end.

My first review is the 'easy read' book - Revenge of the Judoon, featuring the 10th Doctor.