Hate the Game and the Players

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.

Pocket Full of Argonite

We have no limes!

The Space Pirates is another missing story. A six-parter and the penultimate TV story of Troughton's era on the show, only the second episode survives and the missing ones haven't been animated. Ergo I returned to my Target library for this one. It wasn't novelized until 1990, a few years after writer Robert Holmes had died, so Terrance Dicks had the honor of writing it up.

In order that interplanetary commerce remain free flowing and unhindered (or some such thing), beacons are placed in the blackness of space to help spaceship pilots navigate the space lanes. Or something like that. These beacons are made from a rare and precious mineral called argonite. They are also prefab and consist of 8 ready-made sections that are held together magnetically.

A group of space pirates, led by the lowdown, dirty, and mean Caven is going around and blowing up these beacons into their consituent sections and sending them back to their base to be processed and sold for a tidy profit. The Space Corp seeks to stop them. V-41, one of their flagships, patrols the space lanes and is commanded by General Nikolai Hermack.

Hermack learns that Beacon Alpha One had sent a distress call that suddenly stopped. Being a veteran of the Corps, his gut tells him that the beacon was a victim of piracy. So he stations small crews on some of the beacons in a bid to catch them in flagrante delicto.

The TARDIS lands on Beacon Alpha Four unbeknownst to the handful of Space Corp security officers stationed there. Caven and his men, including his right-hand one, Dervish (great name), enter the beacon and make short work of the Space Corp guys except for one named Lt. Sorba. They spare the Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie but seal them in a section of it. When the pirates blow the beacon into its parts, our heroes are left tumbling through space in one of them.

Fortunately, they are rescued by one Milo Clancey - what's with that name? - an old duffer (I think he's a sexagenarian) who still cruises around in a vintage ship from the days of his youth called the LIZ-79. The section of the beacon with the TARDIS continues on with the pirates.

I pictured Clancey as a combination of Monty Python's Mr. Neutron and Dastari from The Two Doctors with slicked back grey hair, though his personality was more like Zaphod Beeblebrox in that he was a bit full of himself but not evil.

Hermack suspects Clancey is behind all of the argonite piracy and pursues the LIZ-79 with the TARDIS crew still aboard. The veteran pilot decides to hide where the Space Corp would never think to look for him - a planet called Ta.

We learn that the pirates are in league with the CEO of the Issigri Mining Corporation, Madeleine Issigri, which is headquartered on Ta. Madeleine's father, Dom, was friends with Clancey but he has gone missing, presumed dead at the hands of his old pal by many.

Madeleine tells Caven to take a running jump when she discovers that her father is still alive, imprisoned in his old office. The pirate captain doesn't take this well and wires an atomic something or other to blow and take Ta with it. Now that it one ginormous chain reaction! Of course the Doctor saves the day by disarming the bomb mechanism. And Hermack is finally able to send Caven and company the missile he's been waiting to give them right up the jacksie.

The book is only 132 pages yet this was a six-parter. Did Dicks leave a lot out? Perhaps I am just miscalculating things.

While on Ta, Jamie shows some derring do and kills a few pirates allowing everyone else to flee. And he twists his ankle at one point but it mysteriously gets a lot better a bit too quickly. Zoe's math skills are put to good use when she calculates that the pieces of a broken beacon were on a trajectory for Ta. Beyond that, I don't recall her doing any other computing and, instead, she was relegated to running and pointing things out for the reader, in the main.

The Doctor here is basically what you'd expect. A little bumbling, some flashes of genius, handy with a sonic screwdriver. And he seems to really be able to hoof it when he needs to.

Clancey is like a space cowboy who seemed to be straight out of a comic book and I am looking forward to watching the lone extant episode to hear if he has an English accent or American. He'll say "laddie" and then turn around and utter "Tarnation, someone’s shooting at us!" Do Englishmen actually say "tarnation" or just Yosemite Sam?

Caven is a true scoundrel and a suitable pirate captain. Like any boss, he expects the impossible of his underlings and for them to accomplish it in record time. He's always threatening poor Dervish if he doesn't do something quicker than any human being has done before and, when Dervish protests, Caven threatens even more violence that's inherent in the system. Near the end, he moves to destroy Ta even if it means he dies too. If not for the Doctor, he'd have sent everyone to their doom.

I wonder what the pirates' outfits look like as I'm unsure if the guy on the cover is a pirate or an agent of the Space Corps. With that snarl, I assume he's a pirate but you never know with these things. It'd be cool if they had hi-tech peg legs or electric parrots or something fun and piratey.

All in all, I found The Space Pirates to be pretty bad. Granted, it's a fun little premise and the scene where our heroes find themselves trapped in a section of a beacon while the TARDIS is floating away in another was really neat. But there's so little dialogue of interest. Clancey chews the scenery well but, while Caven could do some fine mustache twirling, he mainly issues bland threats. The Space Corp folks, especially Hermack, sound so incredibly earnest that they come off almost as parody. It's as if the dialogue was ripped right from an English officer corp training film.

When people talk to one another, it feels like it's mostly threats and barking orders with some technobabble thrown in for good measure. Caven is too vile to engage in some badinage with Dervish whereas an older Holmes would have made them a fine double act. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are usually too busy running and evading to do anything fun. Plus, I feel that our heroes got precious little time on the page. You've got the Space Corp, the pirates, Madeleine Issigri, Clancey - a lot of characters to deal with besides the TARDIS crew. I wonder if it was the same on the screen.

The story, at least as Dicks told it, was just rather clinical and lacked warmth. Clancey was a funny character but he stands alone here.

OK, I am off to check out what Tony Whitt and friends have to say about this book on the Doctor Who Target Book Club Podcast.