Doctor Who : Players

Written by Terrance Dicks

A Sixth Doctor story.

The book is set around the life of one of Britain's most beloved men, Winston Churchill. The Doctor keeps stumbling upon him and it seems that someone is out to change his past.

***SPOILER***

So the story starts off with Sixie and Peri running away on Rigel Seven. Covered in muck and Peri is tired, later after their escape Peri asks for sophistication so the Doctor takes her to London 1899...

He was close, they end up in the middle of an ambush in the Boer war. A war correspondant is trying to clear the train tracks and as he works some mysterious man with a riffle and a deer stalker tries to assassinate him. The Doctor stops the attempt on his life and goes down to warn the gentleman. It turns out the man they had saved was a young Winston Churchill.

After helping with the train the Doctor and Peri and Winston go their separate ways only to be caught by the Boers and taken to a makeshift prison. The first thing on both minds is escape! Winston finds a mystery friend that helps him out and the Doctor and Peri leave in the TARDIS (I won't go into too much detail as it is a good fun read this one!)

Back in the TARDIS and the Doctor shows Peri a memory he has of another strange encounter with Churchill.

We flash to a story centered on the Second Doctor just after the War Games. The Time Lords let him pick any time period he wants to and he goes to WWI. He is picked up by Carstairs and Lady Jennifer and they find Churchill in the middle of another ambush. After fighting their way (passively) out of the ambush they find themselves in a Chatuex with a Count and Countess that wants to ship them back to Berlin. After another daring escape Churchill survives once more and history continues on its path.

Now Sixie is decided that he has to investigate so off to London just before the start of the war (during the Kings Abdication) the pair go and once again they are in the middle of random events.

As I said unlike my anime, TV and manga reviews I am not going to go into too much detail, the book is a wonderful read and you should just go out and buy it!

I loved this story, if not just because it was another story about my favorite Doctor then because it mixes up so many of the things I like. History (especially that of war time Europe) with famous faces (I squeed when Sir Oswald Mosley was mentioned as only a F1 fan can when they find stupid small links to the sport) and to be fair a multi-Doctor story of some kind.

All the characters were brilliantly written, I could hear all their voices just dropping into place, it could easily be something we see on the TV. Fun story all around as well.

I loved how we got to have a look at history, of course we had the Players messing some bits up but with the Doctor and Peri they easily sorted it all back out. It was a wonderful story for Sixie as well as he was written so much better then he sometimes was written on screen. You could see how he intelligently worked little things out and even if he isn't a Jon Pertwee type Doctor who keeps his flock safe by being a fatherly figure to them, he does worry in his way. Just most of the time he's got his mind occupied on something else.

The way all the characters interact is so fun and gives the story a brilliant feel to it. The story didn't stand still the only constant was Churchill but that didn't detract at all. Dicks didn't spend a lot of time with opening statements about the characters or anything like that, he got right into the story and made the characters important through their actions and their speech.

The story is told in three segments. The Boer War, the First World War and the Second World War. Though to be fair the last one is just a bit before the war during Hitlers rise to power. All three segments as I said are held together by being a narrative on Churchill and all three have a natural beginning, middle and end. It really felt like three different stories in one all connected in the end. The reason it really did feel like three stories was that Churchill never really (well kind of) latched on to the fact that the Doctor Smith in the Boer War and the one from just before the Second World War were in fact the same (the excuse was that he was his son) never mind noticing that he was the same Doctor Smith from WWI (seeing as he'd have changed his face!)

This book is a must read for Sixie fans as it really is a wonderful book. There is no more praise I could possibly give it, one of the best stories I've read in my life. So enjoyable.