The Murder Game

With the events of Vulcan behind them, the Doctor, Polly and Ben are travelling together again, although Ben is still edgy about the Doctor's recent regeneration. The TARDIS receives a distress signal and takes the team to the Hotel Galaxian, which was once posh but is now a run-down space station/hotel orbiting Earth (and I'll say right now I wrote Offworld Vegas before this came out) to find a murder mystery game being played out, very much the game of "Clue" set in space. Rather than rock the boat, the Doctor and company willingly take part in the game when they are mistaken for late-arriving participants, but when someone is found murdered in the corridors of the hotel, it appears that there are other forces at work than a bunch of space tourists playing a game. It gets worse, though, when the savage Selachians arrive at the station looking for a hidden weapon, and threatening to kill anyone who does not help them.

Selachians. Hm. A guy I chat with online once had the the tag line "sharks with friggin lasers" on his bio and for a while I thought he either meant the Selachians or the Sharkticons. Turns out it was neither. But that's beside the point. The Selachians are nasty aquatic predators who have designed life support and travel mechanisms that resemble walking robotic sharks. With friggin lasers. One of the supporting cast tells Ben that the Selachians are mean, but not up to the same league as the Daleks or the Cybermen, and that pretty much sums them up. They are driven by the simple desire to kill, very much like sharks, although they have a more reasoning intelligence and a bit of a temper (and a glib line in threats which includes referring to humans as "miserable human plankton"). I found that Steve Lyons played them mostly for laughs; I never got a real sense of a threat, just fish-faced bullies that even he undercuts with chapter titles such as "Attack of the Killer Sharks". Still, when it comes to novels, it is not uncommon to have cheesy chapter headings, and to this day there is always some joker calling one chapter "Escape to Danger" or "Explosion!".

All told though The Murder Game is a good addition to the adventures of the Doctor, Ben, and Polly. Anyone who knows the series knows that they will soon be joined by another companion to bring the crew up to four, which will see some characters left out of the action from time to time. Peter Davison, the fifth Doctor, would comment in the 2005 documentary series Doctor Who Confidential that he felt that three companions was just far too much for the Doctor to deal with, and rather than have meaningful bonds between the Doctor and his companions one would get the sense that the Doctor was leading a school outing. Books such as The Murder Game and the next few to follow allow a bit of expansion into the relationship of the current crew; Ben and Polly would no doubt feel completely alienated by the Doctor's recent regeneration for starters, but when the next crew member joins up the Doctor will form a much closer bond with him, pushing Polly and Ben further away and adding a bit more justification to their joint decision to leave eventually.

But on with the current group. Meow.

NEXT EPISODE : INVASION OF THE CAT PEOPLE