Customer Reviews

The Murder Game (Doctor Who (BBC Paperback))

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Another story featuring the underutilised TARDIS crew of the second Doctor, Ben and Polly.

The TARDIS arrives on a space station in 2146. Originally a luxury hotel, it has fallen on hard times and is being used to host a murder mystery hotel. However, someone is taking the "murder" aspect of the game far too seriously...

Waiting in the wings are the Selachians, an alien race with a serious axe to grind after years of persecution, who are after something in the hotel which will help them revenge their mistreatment. They are quite complex, rather than being simple killing machines that many alien races are depicted as in Doctor Who.

The novel features good portrayals of Ben and Polly, who show stronger feelings for each other than have otherwise been portrayed. This doesn't surprise me, as they more-or-less flirted with each other at various points.

While the story is not as complex as many Doctor Who novels, however this suits the period of the show in which this story is set. It doesn't require familiarity with the show to be enjoyed.

This was a great cross-over book, mystery to science fiction. Doctor Who, Ben and Polly, receive a distress call and materialize on a mostly abandoned hotel ship, where a mystery weekend is being sponsored with a handful of guests. The presence of the Doctor and his companions make just enough people on the ship for the participants to play the game. Until real dead bodies begin to turn up! The only part about this book I didn't like were the baddies, the Selachians; shark-like aliens who stomp around the hotel ship in their own version of astronaut suits which provide the Selachians with the watery atmosphere they need to survive. I thought this was a bit _too_ wierd, but they did their job as bad guys well enough!

The Murder Game (Dr. Who Series) by Steve Lyons is yet another great Doctor adventure. The Doctor follows a distress call to the year 2146 and the run down Hotel Galaxian. Here he finds a role-playing murder mystery game about to get underway. Soon however the game becomes all too real. There are twist and turns in the story in true Doctor fashion and the introduction of the Selachians an alien aquatic warrior race.

The second Doctor travels with two companions in this novel, Ben and Polly. I have never seen an episode with this Doctor but it simply doesn't matter. Even without being able to picture the second Doctor in my head, just knowing the Doctor and his personality was enough to quickly get me into this story.

Typically Troughton is probably the hardest Doctor to write in the original novels because his portrayal was often based on his pretending to be the fool, when in reality he was often the only one who did know what was going on, but didn't want to let on that he knew. As a lot of his episodes were erased, most people haven't really seen his stories and thus tend to think of him as the silly Charlie Chaplin slapstick Doctor from the more widely distributed color stories, plus a lot of his serials only survive in audio form, which gives you part of the story but not the whole deal. Strangely, his charactization is one of the aspects this book gets right, when a number of other things just don't work as well. The TARDIS crew (Ben and Polly here) land in a modified "base under siege" (a common story type in Troughton serials) scenario, winding up at a space hotel that is playing host to a murder mystery game. The crew is actually there because they got a distress signal, but quickly they insinuate themselves into the game, just as the game becomes real and people start actually dying. The basic premise is sound but the author doesn't actually pull it off with any real flair, just sort of going through the motions. The mystery of who the killer is gets dealt with early on without any real tension, especially as none of the characters are really that compelling to begin with, so once people start getting bumped off, you find that you don't really care all that much. It then devolves into people running from one end of the hotel to the other in different groups, either getting attacked or trying to figure out who's doing the attacking, while the plot sort of churns away in the background, not doing much of anything. It doesn't really twist or startle and when the shark aliens finally show up, way earlier than you'd expect, it seems more like they just got tired of the murder plot and wanted to do something else. The aliens aren't especially scary either, their menace comes from the fact that they want to kill everyone but for the most part they stand around insulting humans and shooting people every so often. They're an interesting concept but I think they were handled better in other novels. So you're left with a plot that basically chugs along until you run out of pages, it's not bad but it's not especially memorable either. The story does a little bit with the "Do Ben and Polly fancy each other?" subplot, but really doesn't go anywhere with it, although it is funny to see Ben attempting to flirt. So it evokes the era, but maybe not in the best way, as I said, Troughton's a hard one to capture properly, but with a few more twists or turns, this could have been a lot more exciting than it actually was.