TITLE

Endgame

AUTHOR

Terrance Dicks

PREVIOUS FORM

Oh come on, this is Terrance Dicks we're talking about. He has written as many classics (The Auton Invasion, The Day of the Daleks, Timewyrm: Exodus, Blood Harvest) as he has turkeys (Image of the Fendahl, The Androids of Tara, The Eight Doctors) but at the end of the day he is a genuine bona fide Doctor Who icon.

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT ALFIE?

It's the 1950s, and the Doctor gets involved in the Cold War. He helps Burgess & Maclean to defect and for an encore he ensures that neither Harry Truman of the USA nor Joseph Stalin of the USSR presses the button. What do you mean which button?

THE 100 WORD REVIEW

Nothing ground-breaking or revolutionary (this is Terrance Dicks after all) this is nevertheless a highly-enjoyable romp (this is Terrance Dicks after all) with enough incident and excitement to keep you turning page after page. It's engagingly-written without a surfeit of character angst but nevertheless starts off very convincingly, showing us a Doctor who is so sick of being stuck without a memory on the Earth that he has slipped into apathy and inaction. The story is actually fairly basic, but the continual parade of historical figures and the whole 'Doctor as Intelligence Agent' idea keeps it well afloat.

THE C WORD

Again minimal. While fighting, he has a half-memory of being trained to fight by a six-legged creature. This is a reference to the (mainly third) Doctor's Venusian Aikido, with the description of the Venusian matching that of the aliens as they appear in Venusian Lullaby. Graham Greene is mentioned, in respect of his encounter with the Doctor in the previous book.

I - AM - THE - DOCTOR!

Well let's not beat about the bush, Terrance Dicks' take on the Doctor is that the Doctor is the Doctor is the Doctor. So amnesia and vlack of TARDIS aside, the Doctor here is fair, noble, philanthropic, and a champion for truth and justice. He does a bit of self-defence as well here, on more than one occasion. Hai!!

MONEY IN THE BANK ZILDA!

This Book: I got a mint, untouched by human hand, edition for a mere 88p, from Amazon. Even allowing for their dimensionally transcendental postage costs, I still saved £2.36 on the cover price.

Running Score: £13.03 saved against RRP