The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection. Eleven Classic Adventures. Eleven Brilliant Writers. One Incredible Doctor. It would be a terrible shame were Terrance Dicks not represented in the 50th year of Doctor Who. Dicks is the granddaddy of Doctor Who novels, having scripted over a hundred of the Target novelisations. What is a shame, however, is that he was represented by the novel
Players. This book is incredibly similar to Dicks co-scripted
The War Games, which saw the second Doctor depart from our screens. This is a novel unlike any of the sixth Doctors visual adventures, with little alien or sci-fi features reaching the front of the story apart from the Doctor and companion Peri. The main threat behind the story is alien and yet it feels unexplored, meaning this book leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied. The titular Players barely get a mention and the Doctor doesnt even seem to be worried who or what they are until the final ten pages when they become forced upon him in the same way the henchman in a Bond movie disappears until the end. Even then the Doctor doesnt seem to ask who they are out of curiosity, more out of necessity for the plot. What is clever about this novel is the use of its historical locations and figures, fulfilling the original task of the programme by teaching the reader about wars and historical people. In this case we get Winston Spencer Churchill (were given his middle name numerous times in the narrative) and, luckily, the story fits with the personification we got in 2010 from Ian McNeice and the storyline given from Gatiss about Churchill having had many meetings with previous incarnations. In this novel he gets to meet Doctors six and two, who is shoehorned into the novel to try and take some of the limelight away from Colins Old Sixy. Dicks also tries to shoehorn in Carstairs and Lady Jennifer from The War Games who add nothing to the story except maybe some more royalties. I absolutely adore Terrance Dicks and his insanely respectable contribution to the world of Who, but this novel does fall flat. I learnt more about the Players from his introduction than from the novel, where he admits he went on to use them in other novels. Whilst they do have that potential, this does make me think he created them purely to be long running and their appearance here is useless beyond set-up to a set of novels that either dont exist or will never get reprinted for us to find out more. In a series of reprints that are phenomenally brilliant thus far, this one really is a miss rather than a hit. Muddling Doctor Who with James Bond and Agatha Christies Tommy & Tuppence mysteries, this, at times, feels like a political thriller, which Doctor Who has proved it can do successfully, just not here. A bad rehash of earlier stories mixed with the wrong elements and occasional grammatical errors. The Doctor returns in...Remembrance Of The Daleks by Ben Aaronvitch