World Game is the last Second Doctor novel, chronologically speaking, and the first & only full-length literary foray dedicated to Season 6b. Terrance Dicks kills two birds with one stone here as this tale stands as a sequel to two of his other works, the TV story "The War Games" and Players, a Sixth Doctor PDA.
When the story begins, the Doctor is seemingly before the same Time Lord tribunal we saw in "The War Games" where he is being tried for stealing a TARDIS, using it to interfere in the course of time, and giving TV viewers something fun to watch. He pleads guilty as charged with the extenuating circumstance that he does good in the universe, unlike his prosecutors. On TV he was sentenced to exile on Earth and forced regeneration, but here the sentence is death. I guess the lesson is that antagonizing the judge, jury, and executioners is perhaps not the best way to begin your defense.
However, he is offered a deal. If he helps out the Time Lords, his sentence will be commuted to exile on Earth. He agrees on the condition that he is allowed to return to Earth in 1917 to see that the friends he made in "The War Games" are safe and sound. While he is checking up on Lady Jennifer and Lt. Carstairs, the Time Lords or, rather the Celestial Intervention Agency, are recruiting a Time Lady to be his assistant on the mission, the Romanadvoratrelundar-like named Serenadellatrovella, a.k.a. - Serena.
Serena's handler, Sardon, kind of like a Gallifreyan M, is giving her the spiel and introduces her to the Doctor by showing what he's up to on Earth in 1917. In the book's only moment of real humor that I can recall, they find that he is before a firing squad and Sardon quickly retrieves our hero just in the nick of time.
The Doctor and Serena are sent to investigate and halt some temporal interference on Earth involving Napoleon, Sir Arthur Wellesley (a.k.a. - Duke of Wellington), and Lord Nelson. We learn that it is the enigmatic Players from the book of the same name who are sticking their fingers into the pie that is the course of the Napoleonic Wars.
We met the Countess, who goes by Madame Lefarge here, in Players. She and her cohorts are these immortal, ethereal beings from another plane of existence who are so bored that they come here to the prime material plane and mess with people just for the fun of it. The games they play with we mere mortals make The Great Game look like peanuts in comparison. I don't know that these Players are ever really, truly explained but they are quite reminiscent of the Eternals that the Fifth Doctor met in "Enlightenment".
The story here is a big cat-and-mouse game where the Doctor and Serena bounce around various locations in France and England making sure that the Players' attempts to alter history are foiled. At first, one going by the name Latour tries to kill Napoleon but he is himself killed by the Countess who is being aided and abetted by her pal Valmont.
When in human form, the Players become mortal and so the Countess' shooting of Latour is deemed outside the boundaries of their Game and she is brought before her fellow Players to account for her misdeed. We learn that she has a man on the inside on Gallifrey and that she has come up with a so-called "Grand Design", which is really her meddling rendered a bit more interesting for her with the inclusion of the Doctor and Serena trying to foil her plans.
And so the Countess and Valmont devise various stratagems to aide Napoleon and to get Wellesley and Nelson killed before their time, ensuring that the Battle of Waterloo does not become Napoleon's, er, Waterloo and thusly deprive ABBA of a Eurovision-winning song and UK #1 hit.
For instance, we meet Robert Fulton who has constructed a submarine for Napoleon to use against Nelson's fleet. His boat's major flaw is the propulsion method but the Countess steps in and brings him an atomic engine of some kind to jury rig into the submarine. The Doctor foils this attempt to supercharge the early underwater vessel, of course.
As the Doctor and Serena foil more of her plans, she attempts to have them killed. In one instance, they are escorted from a cotillion and left in the woods where they are confronted by a vampire, the mortal enemies of the Time Lords as we learned in Dicks' Fourth Doctor TV story "State of Decay" and his Seventh Doctor New Adventure Blood Harvest. Thankfully the Doctor ate every chicken canape on offer at the soiree which were laced with plenty of garlic and his breath repels the vampire just enough for him to improvise a stake from the handle of a carriage driver's whip. Later our heroes are confronted by a Raston Warrior Robot which beheads French soldiers instead of Cybermen in a rather grisly scene.
The presence of the vampire and the RWR leads the Doctor to conclude that they were brought to Earth from Gallifrey using a Timescoop, a la "The Five Doctors". This bit of intrigue is all but forgotten until the end and really adds nothing to the plot except a chance for Dicks to refer to some of his previous stories.
Serena does a whole lot of nothing for most of the book until towards the end when she jumps in front of the Duke of Wellington after noticing that one of the pipers (perhaps an ode to Jamie?) sent to play a tune is really Valmont armed with a rifle. She leapt at just the right angle as the bullet pierces both of her hearts and kills her outright.
At the end, the Doctor returns to Gallifrey victorious with the threat to Earth's history having been eliminated. There the traitor is uncovered and the Doctor is given a new mission: to go to Space Station Camera and convince his old pal Dastari to delay his time travel experiments until the Time Lords can evaluate them. To accompany him will be his beloved Scots companion, Jamie. Thusly "The Two Doctors" has been nicely retrofitted for us.
For me, World Game is a thoroughly mediocre book. I did like how Dicks arranged the story. There are 37 chapters here and I was reminded of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters in that the most of chapters end with a cliffhanger and would make great fodder for serializing in a periodical. Dicks' writing style is clear and concise and he doles out detail well, giving you a good feel for the setting. And, although it's not really played up (ahem), there is an interesting parallel between Napoleon and the Doctor as they both know the pain of exile.
The main problem for me is the rinse and repeat nature of the plot here. Countess does X and Doctor & Serena foil X. Well, maybe not the main problem. This repetitive plotting style might not have been so bad had the characters not been so thinly drawn. The Doctor could have been the one from The Infinity Doctors, he is just that generic. It's weird that Dicks would write our hero so blandly. In a similar vein, Serena was simply a boring companion. We know she is a real beauty with a face that could launch 1,000 Battle TARDISes but she does next to nothing and bemoans this fact out loud.
The name "Valmont" brought the movie Dangerous Liaisons to mind and I pictured the Countess' sidekick as John Malkovich. Natürlich, with Serena's great pulchritude, I envisioned her as Uma Thurman. I've had a crush on Uma Thurman for decades so that was nice.
The Countess is not a bad villain, by any means, but she is a rather pedestrian one. Rather than being an immortal who loves to play a good game of chess, it's more like she's a little girl figuring out Tic-Tac-Toe. If you want to see the Doctor not interfere, how hard was it really to kill him? Why would you have him help? Serena is taken hostage to force the Doctor to help Fulton out with his submarine. About 4 paragraphs later she has escaped. I grant you, this was Valmont's fault, but it ties in with this notion that the bad guys here lack some basic villain skills. They just come across as being cartoonishly incompetent.
At one point, the Doctor and Serena need to attend a party/ball but lack an invitation. Psychic paper to the rescue! I looked it up and World Game was released in October 2005 so it was lovingly stolen from the new series, although I don't recall when it debuted exactly.
I am hoping to bid the Second Doctor farewell in better style with the remaining short stories.
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