Hulke’s final novelisation loops at its end right back to the very first pages of the Target range which he and Terrance Dicks together opened in 1974, but the Doctor’s trial is not quite as it was in the prologue to Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion. One big difference is the Time Lords’ wording of the Doctor’s crimes – Dicks had them refer to ‘interference in the affairs of other planets’ (3) where Hulke prefers ‘interference into other people’s affairs’ (4). This could be a sign of Dicks’s stronger adhesion to the scripts from which he works (5), or, considering Hulke and Dicks wrote ‘The War Games’ together back in 1969, it could just be a sign that the line had its origins more firmly in Dicks than Hulke in the first place. It could even be taken as an indication that the Doctor’s interferences have become less cosmic and more personal between 1969/1974 and 1979 – though, frankly, following the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era of battling-evils-from-the-dawn-of-time and Williams’s Key to Time season, the opposite feels the case.

    Most convincing is that Hulke’s choice is a doubling-down on theme, that the focus on people benefits ‘The War Games’. In subsuming the introduction of the Time Lords to the ideas that run through the whole story, he’s addressing, many decades early, Wood and Miles’s criticism of how the tenth episode has, in fans’ eyes, been ripped from its context and allowed to eclipse the preceding nine (6) – no doubt helped by its appearance in isolation at the very start of the Target range. By changing planets to people, Hulke’s asserting El Sandifer’s reading of the story, that this ‘coherent ten-parter’ has the coherent purpose (7) of taking the Doctor’s lust for ‘fighting monsters’ and critiquing his failure to stick around ‘into the aftermath’ (8) and fix ‘the horrible abuses [the monsters] put the humans through’ (9). The Doctor needs ‘to engage with people instead of just monsters’ (10) and having him declare his aim has been ‘to help people’ (11)  draws attention to just how much he’s failed.

    Actually, he’s worse than just failed. El Sandifer has the idea that the middle of ‘The War Games’ consists of ‘a base under siege story in which the TARDIS crew are the monsters and the villains are the base’ (12), a scenario that highlights how the Doctor, in his crusade against evil, has become interchangeable with his opponents – it doesn’t matter who’s inside the base and who’s sieging it, things’ll pan out pretty much the same regardless. And if the Doctor has become interchangeable with a Doctor Who villain, in this case the War Lords (13), then the Time Lords serve a purpose beyond just returning the humans home and passing judgement on the Doctor’s lifestyle – they provide a marker for how well the Doctor’s life of adventures has been going and whether he’s doing any better than if he’d never left them.

    Just to be clear, Hulke isn’t doing a hatchet job on the Doctor – the Time Lords’ willingness to condone his future interference on Earth and their reflection, with regret, that he ‘would have brightened the place up no end’ (14) were he to have remained on Gallifrey ensure that. However, unlike on TV, the Doctor acknowledges that the Time Lords are ‘just’ (15), effectively condoning their sentence, and, more importantly, that they’re ‘good people’ (16), surrendering the implication in the broadcast episodes that they are at fault for doing too little (17). Instead, his desire to escape them was because he found their methods ‘downright dull’ (18), which might be fair but doesn’t exactly constitute a moral imperative.

    So, taking El Sandifer’s idea that the challenge laid down by ‘The War Games’ was that the Doctor should ‘connect with humanity better’ (19) and Wood and Miles’s insistence that the ‘real point of “The War Games” is the War Games’, how do the actual war games, rather than all the stuff with the Time Lords and the Doctor’s trial, demonstrate the flaws in the Doctor’s behaviour? Well, the basic set-up takes conflicts from across human history, spanning at least from the Roman empire to the First World War (20), and reveals all the commanders to be aliens, directing great masses of people to fight and die for their own clandestine reasons which have nothing to do with those soldiers’ lives. This is, in a strangely uncommented upon core detail of the story, a literal representation of a pretty standard anti-war argument – that those most involved in its pursuit have no investment in its aims and those in whose interests it is executed are most detached from its pursuit (21) – applied to all sides – Smythe and von Weich are shown in collusion (22) – and all eras – von Weich reappears as a Confederate officer in the US Civil War.

    Accordingly, where on TV Smythe, the first War Lord the story presents, is barely introduced before he’s shown using an anachronistic videophone, referring to the ‘1917 zone’ and heavy-handedly concealing something from his men by barking them out of his room (23), the novelisation, as well as ditching this scene, takes more time to establish the general as a stereotypical First World War commander, detached from the carnage he’s directing, unlike his captain (24), and relaxed with viewing the war in terms of who is able to sacrifice the most lives (25). Only then is he unceremoniously shown using a videophone (26), referring to ‘the 1917 zone’ (27) and walking into a cupboard (28). In a novelisation that struggles with a pagecount far less generous than the TV story’s ten episodes, expansions on the broadcast episodes such as this can only feel very deliberate – Hulke is ensuring the revelation that military commanders are all aliens doesn’t accidentally read as an explanation for their behaviour.

    That they are called the War Lords serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, as Wood and Miles point out, it’s a simple riff on the term warlord (29), insisting there is little difference between would-be galactic conquerors, commanders in a national army and leaders of personal militia; on the other, it emphasises their aristocratic backgrounds. It’s telling that Smythe’s painting of George V on TV becomes a ‘photograph of the British royal family’ for the book (30), suggesting a more intimate and personal allegiance. Similarly, Hulke affords the chateau in which Smythe is based a bit of extra attention, making clear that, though stripped nearly bare, ‘it remained the most comfortable accommodation’ in the vicinity, detailing that it was the once-home of ‘a rich French family’ and specifying how it is ‘over thirty kilometres behind the front line’ (31). And it’s that distance, physical and as people, from the people actually doing the fighting that allows the commanders, whether human or War Lord, to engage in a war that effectively boils down to who has more soldiers to sacrifice (32).

    As a Time Lord, the Doctor’s aristocratic background is also emphasised (33). One detail Hulke adds to the closing pages makes this especially clear – just as on TV, the Doctor complains about being condemned ‘to exile on one primitive planet’ (34) but now his words echo the War Lord’s defence that the lost lives of humans hardly matter as ‘They are primitive, always fighting among themselves’ (35). Similarly, his prizing of humanity for its vulnerability (36) echoes the War Lords’ admiration for their ‘war-like’ qualities (37) in its focus on the ‘Earth’ rather than actual people. The Doctor may have turned his back on his ‘destiny to rule’ (38), but he hasn’t escaped the lordly perspective of his origins, insistent, for example, that his new appearance must still confer on him the automatic ‘respect’ of others (39).

    None of this, just to be clear, means that the Doctor is wrong to get involved in the conflicts he encounters – the Time Lords effectively condone his stance, even if they think he must work on his methods. They also give him a new body that seems to more readily draw authority his way (40), suggesting they don’t suddenly expect his aristocratic outlook to melt away. Here then we must assume Hulke diverges from El Sandifer in the motives behind the Doctor’s sentence. The Time Lords verdict is simply that the Doctor must stop acting as an authority unto himself, having, in this story, reached the limits of this approach, what with having to call on the Time Lords to actually sort out the mess he’s encountered. As well as seeing him trapped in one time on one planet and so with one group of people who he can’t merrily leave behind, the Doctor’s exile sees him end up effectively as a UNIT employee. This might, thanks to UNIT being a bunch of soldiers, seem a bit of an uncomfortable fit for Doctor Who, but, following a story where the Doctor has looked uncomfortably comparable with a bunch of aliens who’ve chosen to take charge of various groups of human soldiers, it does work very well as a way of turning him from the path towards the War Lords.