Drift

The Doctor takes Leela to America for her to meet the natives, but they arrive far too late and instead get lost in a terrible snow storm. Out in the snow, though, is something that spooks the local wildlife and is interfering with the Doctor's ability to locate the TARDIS after leaving it. An elite military force is out in the blizzard looking for the Stormcore, an experimental type of weapon that can control the weather. The Doctor uses his UNIT credentials to insinuate himself into the midst of the group and suspects that there is something else going on out in the blizzard, something that could be alive and intelligent. The storm effectively cuts off a small village from the rest of the area and creates ice monsters that are capable of killing, and will kill everyone unless the Doctor can solve the mystery of what is driving the Stormcore.

Or something like that. Again, it was a while ago that I read this book but it was in the dead of winter and it seemed to have a special resonance with me as I sat reading by the window with snow everywhere. It's actually been coming down off and on today as I was flipping through the book to jog my memory, and I found that it evoked a sense of isolation much like how I felt as a child at my grandmother's cottage at Lake St Peter when the snow would come down so heavy we couldn't see past the front verandah. Everyone likes a good ghost story, but this book is proof that they don't all have to take place in haunted houses.

The White Shadow military group are not exactly as harmonoius as the UNIT organization, but we can blame it on their upbringing (they are, after all, Americans). Leela is teamed up with the psychic native American Kristal, finding that she is the only person she can relate to. The Doctor does his best to keep control of the situation but I sometimes found myself wondering if this was the right material for this Doctor; a certain darkness works its way through the story and I often find that these types of tales are more along the lines of what the seventh Doctor evolved into when his character moved from the screen to page. Only minor though. The relationship between the Doctor and Leela does not receive the same amount of comment that is has in previous novels; perhaps author Simon A. Forward felt that Chris Boucher was the man to dig that deep; he would just get on with telling his story.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HORROR OF FANG ROCK