Doctor Who and the War Games by: Malcolm Hulke

 

Doctor Who and the War Games was written by Malcolm Hulke, based on his and Terrance Dicks’ story The War Games.  It was the 50^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

If anyone was going to novelize The War Games and make it work it’d be Malcolm Hulke, of the serial’s cowriters Hulke is the one with the more interesting style and understanding of how to get a long story down to the length of the Target novel.  Doctor Who and the War Games is a novelization that by design had to continually be moving from point to point less it be unable to reach the story’s end.  The compression in this circumstance is particularly necessary less the story not work, so Hulke tackles it from the perspective of the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe.  They are the main characters and they should be the ones that move the plot forward, but it does mean that there’s a lot of the smaller character moments and cutaway scenes necessary in a recorded as live television production from 1969 that get cut.  There are a handful of minor characters cut completely, or perhaps better say combined to actually keep the story flowing.  It does lessen what made The War Games as a story actually work because it is truly a massive ten part epic.  The compression does mean that the focus on the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe adds to their characterization, especially Jamie and Zoe’s general leadership in bringing the resistance together.  Zoe’s eidetic memory is put to particularly good use which while in the original television serial is emphasized here, same with how young she is making her eventual fate all the sadder (even sadder than Jamie’s despite having the same fate).

 

That isn’t to say Malcolm Hulke is cutting with abandon; he is picking what he keeps and to a lesser extent what he adds particularly carefully.  If The War Games was relatively subtle in how anti-war it is, Doctor Who and the War Games adds a paragraph of dialogue near the end to make it explicit that nobody actually wins in war.  The idea that the War Lords are kidnapping people for a galaxy spanning war is presented as a warped view of wanting galactic peace.  It’s an intentionally satirical idea that humanity actually wants to end war because they don’t.  Hulke does additions to the portrayal of the Time Lords in essentially the same way.  At the Doctor’s trial there is a Great Voice of the Time Lords, something implied to be bigger than all of them and a bit of cosmic horror, while being just as hypocritical as they would be completely known to be.  The fact that after being exiled to Earth there is this glib comment from one of the Time Lords secretly rooting for the Doctor is also telling for how the hypocrisy works.  Hulke knows exactly what he is doing here.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the War Games was never going to be nearly as good as the relevision serial with the constraints of a Target novel.  Malcolm Hulke still delivers on an actual novel in terms of storytelling meaning that it does manage to stand on its own and be a good novel.  The characters are there, there is extra worldbuilding, and an understanding of prose as a format.  8/10