Doctor Who and the War Games

Another of the old Target Books Doctor Who novelizations, this one for the Second Doctor's final story. And a very significant story it is, too, full of important firsts. It's also a really good one, and it's honestly amazing to me, given the 1960s sense of pacing and its frankly rather ridiculous length, just how utterly watchable and engaging it is all the way through. It's not, of course, anywhere near the same experience in print, where we're deprived of Patrick Troughton's inimitable performance. But while this isn't exactly winning any literary awards, it reads much less like someone did a light editing pass over an episode transcript than most of Terrance Dicks' efforts do, and Malcolm Hulke does a reasonable job of capturing show more some of the feel of the original, especially its very unglamorous depiction of war. show less

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe end up on Earth, 1917, in the middle of the Great War. But then they end up in Ancient Rome. And then the American South during the Civil War. This can’t be right. But it is: it is merely war games, with actual humans playing for stakes of which they have no knowledge. The Doctor needs to sort this out, even resorting to calling in the Time Lords…

This is Patrick Troughton’s last story as the Second Doctor (in terms of the TV series), and for that reason alone it is an interesting read. Both Jamie and Zoe get a lot to do—I particularly liked that Zoe beat someone over the head with a teapot, although I did wonder whether the teapot broke or any tea was spilled. The book moves along briskly and makes a show more fun afternoon’s reading for a Doctor Who fan. It was especially interesting to read after reading the Sixth Doctor story Players, by Terrance Dicks, which intersects this story. (It may make more sense if you read Doctor Who and the War Games first, though.) show less

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I seem to be against received fannish wisdom in finding this rather good, if taken on its own merits. The original story is one of the great Who stories; the novelisation, constrained to less than fifteen pages for each of the ten episodes, is not quite of the same quality, but none the less tells a good story well, with decent foreshadowing of the Doctor's fate and sensible meditations on the nature of war. This is the first Hulke novelisation I have read in this run, and sadly was the last he wrote before his death, so I am looking forward to the others.

Ooof, people told me that this story was rough, but kidnapping people and making them fight World War I over and over, world without end? I didn't think fiction could make WWI worse, but I was wrong. The book is perfectly standard for these novelizations: a little dull, hits all the main plot points, useful and interesting if you can't get your hands on the episode but otherwise forgettable.