Take Doctor Who: World Game Constructed By Terrance Dicks Expressed As E-Text

would have made a brilliant episode of Doctor Who, I did like Serena's character, but I thought that she got relegated to the role of companion rather quickly and I would have like to see her do more.
Interesting premise, and it did make me think on the various roles of key figures in history.
I decided to finally get around to this, in between gaps in my workday paperwork hell, . . and I wasn't disappointed. Fun, boy'sown action/adventure, spun by the grand master himself, This is Terrance Dicks indulging in a love of history, a love of playing with continuity especially the mysterious seasonb, and stabs of excitement.
. . and THAT'S just the sequence with the sub torpedoes and the Raston Warrior Robot! It's easily the best Terrance Dicks "Doctor Who" novel from the BBC's original Past Doctor range.
The history in this book is quite strong, Beyond that it's an OK read, This is a fun historical based novel featuring thend Doctor, Was a lot of fun, What if instead of going straight to earth CIA get him to do a job a really twisted job without Jamie or Zoe but on his own.

This brilliant Troughton story that could have been made amp could explain the Five Doctors While an interesting epilogue to the Second Doctor's tenure, the ending of this novel falls a little flat, and doesn't really connect to the Third Doctor's beginning, which was an odd choice, considering the writer actually WORKED on the show and could have done a fine job tying it together.
It just . veered off, giving the ending a rather jarring finish, At this point good ol' Terrance is like comfort food, giving us a delightful alternative to anything resembling experimentation or outside the box thinking, a nice cut and dried "Who" adventure, the way they used to make it for Mum and Dad.


Only this time he's giving us a story that should only exist in the world of fanfiction.
What gives

For those who don't follow all the nuances and intricacies of the many sideroads of fandom, there's a branch centering on the end of the Second Doctor's tenure that suggests our views of him saying "No no no no no!" a million times at the end of "The War Games" was not the last time he graced the winds of time.
Instead, these theories suggests, the the Celestial Intervention Agency segment of the Time Lords decided to use him in the name of plausible deniability, sending him out to fix their messes and giving him just a little more time to be Patrick Troughton.
This is buffered by "The Two Doctors", a Sixth Doctor adventure that showed a clearly older Second Doctor and Jamie getting involved, which the Second Doctor cheekily suggested was the result of the Time Lords and not writer Robert Holmes simply not giving a crap about a thing like continuity he's also the reason we have the "twelve regenerations" rule that everyone treats like gospel now, something else he probably made up as a throwaway line and probably not figuring that a generation of fans would spend a lot of time dissecting it and coming up with stories for that mystical "SeasonB", as it's commonly called.


And then comes the BBC with their own story of how "SeasonB" got started, implying that it now has the stamp of canon, though one should remember that the none of the books were ever treated as set in stone otherwise we'd have to explain how the Doctor lives through the plot of "Human Nature" twice and they sort of dumped the story in a line of books that was about to be terminated anyway.
Besides they had their shiny new crew cutted Doctor at this point, whose every exchanged glance with Billie Piper would give the world of fanfiction new purpose again.
Who cares whether the black and white Doctor ofimmediately regenerated into a man with a flair for velvety clothes or stuck around to have adventures that no one will ever hear about

For me, personally, there's more poignancy in having his trial immediately end in the Second Doctor's figurative death.
Not only does it mark the end of an era in the show, as it went from black and white to color, but also a change in tone, as the previously mysterious Doctor suddenly gained a home planet and people and went from being everyone's favorite mad uncle to Technological Science Hero.
On some level the Second Doctor doesn't belong on Gallifrey, it's too structured for his cunning, But here we are, nonetheless, so let's see what we have,

A lot of the story is spent in simply explaining how we got to this point, which seems to undermine the very reasons for it in the first place.
The Time Lord CIA also called "The CIA" decides to get some usefulness out of their renegade and letting him enable them to have their noninterventional crumpets and eat them too, allowing them to gloriously intervene while proclaiming a desire not to intervene.
The Doctor, sentenced to become Jon Pertwee, agrees to it anyway,

Unfortunately this is an excuse for the author to bring back his Players, the reappearance of whom actually elicited a groan of dismay from me.
I don't know why he finds these people interesting, with their silly motto that sounds like the third rejected draft of a selfhelp group, their interchangeability, their weird desire to only play their games in the parts of Earth's history that the author has researched and their inability to play by their own rules, cheating on each other the first time things don't seem to go their way.
Frankly, it's impossible to figure out why the Time Lords just don't put a stop to this nonsense right away and instead engage in a bunch of handwringing about intervening.
On the other hand, anything that happens really only stays local to Earth, so it's also difficult to see why they even care.
The Doctor, yes, but the Time Lords could probably let Earth go hang for all they care.
It's just one planet.

So the premise isn't exactly gangbusters, However, this one I have to say won me over just a little bit, Maybe it's because I like the Second Doctor, maybe it's because it's aims are ultimately so charmingly oldschool or maybe it's because there's enough history in here you could learn something and since I read "War and Peace" four months ago I have a basic working knowledge of this period of history.
Essentially the Players are attempting to ensure that Napoleon wins, which means taking out all his obstacles like Wellington and Nelson's fleet at Trafalgar the battle of Trafalgar kind of takes out Admiral Nelson but if you're a marksman aiming for a onearmed, oneeyed guy in a captain's outfit probably wasn't difficult, though I do give that person credit since everyone presumably was on boats.
But instead of manipulating the circumstances of history so that Napoleon can capitalize on missed opportunities and thus be much harder for the Doctor to stop, instead they go for more conventional means like assassination with bombs and guns which, again, considering how they aren't supposed to be involved in their own games, shows you how much they care about rules.


This means the Doctor and his Time Lady companion filling in the usual role of the inexperienced young lady the Doctor has to keep explaining things to have to shuffle from crisis to crisis with stops at cafes in between, figuring out which next weird convoluted scheme will be enacted next the Players helpfully dropping hints, like a cosmic Riddler and getting to hang out with the originator of the Napoleon complex, along with other famous figures in history.
The stakes are rather high and we get a glimpse of the possible risk

of failure but in all fairness the Player don't and never have made memorable villains.
As the Doctor even points out, with their only goal to play a game, they don't have even the poorly constructed plans of the War Lords.
They simply make trouble for the sake of making trouble, without any real endgame or point to it.
According to their own motto, they don't even care if they win or lose, so why not just buy them all copies of "Age of Empires" and be done with it

A story like this does the Second Doctor a disservice.
He operates best when he plays the infiltrator, the scruffy guy you underestimate and whose bumbling about covers the fact that he's got you cornered six ways until Sunday and has ensured you don't realize it until it's too late.
All the jumping around to put out fires is entertaining but there's no long game here, they simply plugging away at stopping things until the Players are tired of playing, or the book is over.
Yet I can't dismiss it entirely, The local historical color is fun and after spending my youth reading almost every Target novelization, Terrance's prose style is like that old song on the radio you let keep playing even though you've heard it a million times.
It goes down easy and is over before you know it, with nothing challenging to get in the way.
But it's so breezy and the period detail is well placed that even with the lack of depth or point it reads like a history lesson you don't quite mind, unless you hate history.
It means and aims are so modest that it can hardly even muster up the energy to offend and when it's all done, you think "That was a right pleasant adventure" and put this novel aside to reach for something meatier.
It's a nice way to pass a couple hours and if you go into it with that mindset, you'll do just fine.


Interestingly, it also marks the end of an era in a different way: the last novel from Terrance featuring any of the Past Doctors.
He's done a couple novels since, mostly in the BBC's Quick Reads line, but those all feature the Tenth Doctor and chances are we won't see an old style story like this from him again.
Which in itself is sad in a way, He may not be flashy but he's dependable in a manner that few things are and while I may never rank any of this books as my favorites, at least I knew what I was getting when I read them.
And I'm not ashamed to say, that hasn't changed here, .