The Doctor and Jo, along with some of the UNIT regulars, a terrorist, and an annoying journalist (is there any other kind?) are drawn into the clutches of a civil war in a north African hellhole, but this is no ordinary war, kids! Instead of standard munitions, chemical warfare, or playing Nickelback records on full-blast until their enemy's ears bleed, one side has decided to utilize GIANT ALIEN BUGS long burrowed into the planet. Is this Doctor Who meets Starship Troopers, or is this a more Lovecraftian take on 'be careful what the hell you wake up from deep slumbers'? Only YOU can decide! Reverse the polarity!
Long before the wankery and wokery of the revived skinwalker series of Doctor Who starting in 2005, there were the "wilderness years" - the now-halcyon period of time after the series had gone into semi-permanent hiatus starting in 1989. From this quasi-cancellation sprung a number of creative outlets in which to give fans new Who adventures: comics, audio dramas, direct-to-VHS atrocities, PC games, and of course, original novels. The first several years of novels were published by Virgin Books, which gave us both 'The New Adventures', which starred the then-current seventh incarnation of the Doctor, and 'The Missing Adventures', which featured stories about past Doctors wedged into any convenient gap the author could find between television episodes.
As great as it was for a young fan such as myself to receive new content based on the series while it was off-the-air, one of the recurring bugbears of the Virgin era of Who novels was their insistence on cramming in edgelord content that seemed woefully out of step with the spirit of Doctor Who. There's been many a treatise on why this happened across all corners of Who fandom over the years, so I won't tread old ground in this individual review, suffice it to say when I was a kid entering that brooding age of adolescence I found some of the edgy Doctor Who novels to be wicked fun, but as a more mature adult with a deeper appreciation and understanding of the classic series I find the novels that take forays into the grimdark to be misguided at best, tedious at worst.
But this is already a very long introduction to get us to tonight's feature presentation: Dancing the Code by Paul Leonard, one from the Missing Adventures series featuring the Third Doctor and his assistant Jo Grant. It's a novel that I want to love because it has a genuinely interesting and different take on the usual alien invasion plots that were quite commonplace during the Third Doctor's reign. The story also gives us a vastly different setting in the north African desert than we could ever hope to see in the same heavily budgeted television series as it was in the early 1970's, in addition to action set pieces that I'm sure any fan of the Third Doctor would love to see. (The Doctor piloting a jet? Sign me up.) The author also provides characters from UNIT, such as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Captain Mike Yates, some actual soldiering to do instead of relegating them to third wheel butt-monkeys as is so often the case in later-era UNIT stories.
Unfortunately, Dancing the Code is dragged down by the aforementioned creep of edginess that blighted so much of Who's Virgin years. This novel is, in a word, gory. Not that I have a problem with the bloody or grotesque crossing over into science-fiction, but it was always handled delicately in Doctor Who, primarily because it was still considered a family show. There were frightening things shown on the screen from time to time, but there was always a line and the producers, directors, and designers of classic Who never crossed it. Dancing the Code on the other hand has bucketloads of random NPC's getting brutally murdered at every turn. Paul Leonard seems to gleefully flaunt the Virgin-era trope of attempting to shock the reader by introducing a completely superfluous character to us and giving the reader just a tiny bit of insight into their life before something suddenly jumps out at them and rips them apart a page or two later, complete with the hackneyed "the last thought through his head was..." line that never seems to hit home because we simply don't care about these characters. But then there's also really gnarly and joyless things like Jo having to watch a little girl in a desert camp die after a bombing because part of a bicycle lodged through her chest, or doomed characters essentially melting into stinking goo in front of others.
Again, there's a time and place for mature, boundary pushing, revolting R-rated stuff, but I don't believe Doctor Who is the proper venue for it at all.
There was definitely some good that came out of the Virgin Missing Adventures, but Dancing the Code is one you can safely skip.
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