Shakedown by: Terrance Dicks: You Sunk My Battleship!

It’s hard to really come to grips with how bad of a time for Doctor Who fans the Wilderness Years actually were.  They had the novels of course, but other than that they really had nothing else especially if you were a fan in North America.  In the UK and in Europe however, independent companies BBV and Reeltime Pictures produced Direct to Video films based on Doctor Who monsters.  Now two of these are especially legitimate in canon as they have been novelized in the Virgin New Adventures and Virgin Missing Adventures.  The first of these was done by the king of novelizations.  I am of course talking about Terrance Dicks who in writing the novelization of Shakedown: The Return of the Sontarans, shortened to simply Shakedown and extended from your standard one hundred page book to a three hundred page Virgin New Adventure.  Now it shouldn’t be a surprise that this is a good novel even if Dicks had to piece together two plotlines, the one of the original video and an original plot connected to it featuring the Doctor and company.  You would think that would make the pacing of the story feel off which really it doesn’t.  The novelization portion is the second part of the novel and what Dicks manages to do is create an engaging lead in to a portion without any real tonal whiplash.

 

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