Deadly Reunion
Before his fateful meeting with the Doctor in what was called "The London Event" where the Yeti roamed the tunnels of the Underground, Alistair Lethbridge Stewart was a lowly second-lieutenant tasked with the mapping of roadways in and around Greece after the end of World War II. During his time with the regular army he witnessed many things on the battelfield, but also had his own encounter with an alien race who had been on Earth for so long they were reverred as gods. One of them was named Hades, the lord of the Underworld. And the other was Sephie, short for Persephone, and Alastair fell in love with her. Such was the power of his love that he mounted a rescue attempt and freed her from Hades' lair, but to protect him from those memories, Sephie blocked a portion of his mind and sent him back to normal life. Later in years, now running UNIT and with the Doctor as his scientific advisor, Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge Stewart is confounded with a series of unexplained events that seem to lead back to a small village where a wealthy family preside, and a massive outdoor pop concert is being staged. And, where Hades is making a new bid for world domination.
Fist note is I think I got the timing wrong for this book; several references are made to events somewhere between Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil, so that is probably where I should have put this one. But no biggie; the emphasis here is on the story of the Brigadier, not necessarily on the continuity of the Doctor's UNIT years. The Brig's military past is never really talked about in the series, and as the years go on it's more about his future and his post-UNIT days, so who better than to pen this story than the team of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks; the men who made the Brigadier and directed the course of Doctor Who through the Jon Pertwee era. Such is the focus of their task that the Doctor doesn't even figure into the story until page 125 of the novel, at which point it becomes his story again, the Brigadier's Greek exploits sidelined for a while.
I'm about to tread on some holy ground for some when I say this: but I don't like Terrance Dicks' prose style. He's contributed some fantastic scripts to the show, and the odd novelization of the television episodes for the Target line do get it right from time to time, but overall I find he never gets the sense that writing a novel is going to require a bit more is the line of description than what he offers as narrative. Scenes are described vaguely, action comes across more as stage directions, and dialogue is presented in a very "said the Doctor" and "said Jo" sort of way. The first chunck of the book seems to have been written differently and I can only surmise that Letts wrote that part and left Dicks the rest, the two offering insight to each other from time to time where the story was concerned, but not commenting on each others actual writing. Just compare the more vivid descriptions of Lethbridge-Stewart's experiences in Greece, the adventures on board the HMML 951, and the officer camaraderie therein to the later bits with the faceless mob of briefly described drug addicts, and even the less intense characters of Sephie and her family and you will spot the difference.
Barry Letts should have written the whole thing. I can sense the cult of Terrance massing outside with their pitchforks and flaming torches already.
NEXT EPISODE : THE THREE DOCTORS
Fist note is I think I got the timing wrong for this book; several references are made to events somewhere between Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil, so that is probably where I should have put this one. But no biggie; the emphasis here is on the story of the Brigadier, not necessarily on the continuity of the Doctor's UNIT years. The Brig's military past is never really talked about in the series, and as the years go on it's more about his future and his post-UNIT days, so who better than to pen this story than the team of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks; the men who made the Brigadier and directed the course of Doctor Who through the Jon Pertwee era. Such is the focus of their task that the Doctor doesn't even figure into the story until page 125 of the novel, at which point it becomes his story again, the Brigadier's Greek exploits sidelined for a while.
I'm about to tread on some holy ground for some when I say this: but I don't like Terrance Dicks' prose style. He's contributed some fantastic scripts to the show, and the odd novelization of the television episodes for the Target line do get it right from time to time, but overall I find he never gets the sense that writing a novel is going to require a bit more is the line of description than what he offers as narrative. Scenes are described vaguely, action comes across more as stage directions, and dialogue is presented in a very "said the Doctor" and "said Jo" sort of way. The first chunck of the book seems to have been written differently and I can only surmise that Letts wrote that part and left Dicks the rest, the two offering insight to each other from time to time where the story was concerned, but not commenting on each others actual writing. Just compare the more vivid descriptions of Lethbridge-Stewart's experiences in Greece, the adventures on board the HMML 951, and the officer camaraderie therein to the later bits with the faceless mob of briefly described drug addicts, and even the less intense characters of Sephie and her family and you will spot the difference.
Barry Letts should have written the whole thing. I can sense the cult of Terrance massing outside with their pitchforks and flaming torches already.
NEXT EPISODE : THE THREE DOCTORS
Labels: Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, Jo Grant, The 3rd Doctor, UNIT
posted by Sean Hoover @ 6:29 AM
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