Endgame by: Terrance Dicks

 

The last Eighth Doctor novel to be written by Terrance Dicks was The Eight Doctors, the inaugural novel in the range and a book that was a total mess with no real direction.  Since then, the book range has evolved in response to different authors taking the Eighth Doctor into new places.  Dicks contributed a second novel, Endgame, smack bang in the middle of the time where an amnesiac Eighth Doctor is stuck on Earth with no TARDIS and lives throughout the 20^th century.  This book brings the audience to what would be part of Dicks’ own childhood, the early Cold War of the 1950s and especially the Red Scare in the United States of America.  The Doctor is attempting to stay out of it, but behind the scenes are the Players, the alien, time travelling interferers who like to use human beings as pieces in their intergalactic game.  Endgame increases the callousness that Dicks introduced in Players by portraying the Players themselves as completely alien, just viewing humanity as pieces and the game as something that must be done.  They are entering their Endgame which involves getting President Harry S. Truman to investigate psychic phenomenon and play against the fear of Russian and communist agents in the United States.

 

This is a book which is a reflection of The Turing Test with the Doctor still not quite recovering from the way things ended with Alan Turing, and that novel is intertwined with this one, despite the moving forward in years.  Dicks takes a very interesting position, far from the standard view of Britain and the United States during the 1950s, that they were just as at fault if not more at fault than the Soviet Union would be, despite Stalin’s crimes against humanity.  The Red Scare is examined as a source of paranoia where people were going against their neighbors and friends, and Dicks also brings in ideas of the Lavender Scare, a similar situation with LGBT people, with a few characters defecting because of their sexualities where it was technically better.  The Doctor is portrayed as almost an impartial observer, being portrayed almost like a politician on his own, going across the globe and only really getting involved when its clear there is something alien going on throughout the story.  He is written as almost in a deep depression, sad due to being unable to save Turing and knowing just how the Cold War is going to go, so there is this sense that he is interfering because he has to.  What’s interesting is that he doesn’t remember the events of Players but understands just why they must be stopped.  It’s deaths that spur the Doctor into action and outside of the Players there are the intelligence agencies who once becoming aware of the Doctor begin to put together just what might be off.

 

The Endgame itself is one involves attempting to make the Cold War hot with burst of aggression from people you wouldn’t be expecting.  This is an interesting analysis from Dicks about the anger and it is taken to its complete endpoint where if President Truman was infected with this aggression to make the world end in a nuclear holocaust.  There is something very human with the double agents not being treated as evil, but as people just trying to see the war to a peaceful and cold end.  There is this beautiful scene where the Doctor shares a moment building a model train with the child of a member of the CIA which is very short, but it’s something that is in isolation.  Dicks does fall apart with some of the pacing, this being a fairly short book that at points it feel like Justin Richards’ editing might have made some of the original work feel padded instead of a natural length which is a shame as Dicks’ prose is genuinely great.  Overall, Endgame continues the great trend of the Eighth Doctor on Earth arc doing the obvious continuation of The Turing Test that only falls apart due to the editorial state of the story, something that Dicks acknowledges at the end, but is something that still works and provides a tense Cold War thriller.  8/10.