It helps that the plot is
simply Chris and Roz on the trail of a murderous Rutan while the Doctor is in
jail setting up his master plan for this adventure and Benny is off on a
university trying to figure out what the Rutans have discovered. The best parts of this plotline is Chris and
Roz being cops in basically space Vegas mixed with space Detroit. Basically it’s a hellhole where everyone is
completely corrupted. Of course they
cannot succeed in finding the Rutan as it ends with the actual story of Shakedown: The Return of the Sontarans
which isn’t the weakest link in the story.
It follows the crew of the space yacht “Tiger Moth” in your traditional
base under siege storyline where the Sontarans invade while a Rutan is killing
off the crew one by one. While the
crewmembers are the weakest characters and are only there for the Rutan to
impersonate and kill off, Lisa and Kurt both get ample time to develop. Lisa is the take no nonsense captain of the
yacht while Kurt is the thief with his own motivations. They have simple characterizations, they are
effective in what they need to do while feeling like actual people. The weakest link of this story is the
conclusion as Dicks stuffs it into a really short amount of time which has the
Doctor, Chris and Roz meet up with Kurt and Lisa, get to Sentarion where Benny
is, discover that the Rutan weapon is a wormhole and stop both Rutans and the
Sontarans. This is all done in a matter
of fifty pages when the story, especially beating the Sontarans should have
been done in about seventy.
As this is written by
Terrance Dicks the characterization of the main cast is spot on. The Doctor, while being in the background for
quite a bit of the novel, really feels implemented into the story as he has
everything set up. This team really
works well together as although Chris gets on his nerves at times, the Doctor
knows just what to have his companions do without making it feel like they’re
being manipulated. Roz is the brains,
Chris is the brawn and Benny is the researcher, at least in this scenario. The Doctor really doesn’t have to do much to
save the day except explain the Sontarans and Rutans to his companions. Chris and Roz actually work best here in
their pair of good cop and bad cop. It
is a cliché, but they do feel like separate characters especially through their
different thought processes. Chris is
the very rough around the edges lovable idiot who accidentally gives up the
solution to the problems while Roz is the calm and rational thinker that
usually has to save Chris from danger.
Roz is still the more interesting of the two characters as she has a lot
more dramatic baggage stemming from her history as an Adjudicator while Chris
is still the novice for the novels. There
is one large flaw in the novel and that is what Dicks does with Benny. Much like in Blood Harvest he has Benny separated from the Doctor until the last
third and while when the TARDIS team meets up at the end, separately Benny has
very little to do. A simple rework of
the material would suffice to fix a lot of the pacing problems. Just do what Andy Lane did in All-Consuming Fire and have Benny appear
in the third part and focus on her time at the university planet as it is a
good plot, but it isn’t worth interrupting the other plot.
To summarize, Shakedown proves once again how great
Terrance Dicks actually is as a writer and how versatile he is working with
different characters. The biggest flaw
in the mess is what he does with Benny, but not because of bad pacing as the
pacing with three different plotlines going on is actually done really
well. The problem is having her story
interrupt the main story when it really shouldn’t. 90/100
No comments:
Post a Comment