I’m a bit down on Doctor Who and the Power of Kroll on the main page, but there’s some really lovely stuff in there that I didn’t have space to squeeze in. Most of it actually gets covered by Jason Miller on his Doctor Who Novels blog tribute to Terrance Dicks, drwhonovels.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/terrance-dicks, but there are a few more points I wanted to give a little more space than the miscellania allow.
First up, the Doctor gets some nice little moments. It turns out that one of the ways he infiltrates places he should be is listening ‘with flattering attention’, here encouraging the refinery staff to tell all about their operation but that combination of enthusiasm and scientific insight disarming others is something that can be read onto incidents in many many stories. I also like the fact that, not only does he automatically assume that the Swampie is part of the refinery crew but that, once it becomes clear how little regard the humans have for even the Swampie in their midsts, he immediately deduces Mensch must be a spy rather than a stooge: ‘Since by all accounts the Swampies were a fierce, war-like people, why should one of them come to act as a servant at the hated Refinery? Surely only in order to spy upon the enemy’.
Rohm Dutt gets some nice moments beyond his well-crafted death. Chief among them is his premonition of that death – ‘Rohm Dutt awoke from a nightmare in which he was being chased by hordes of green warriors, straight into the tentacles of a giant squid’ – but also the extra background given to his sense of doom. He acknowledges that his behaviour appears to be that of ‘a coward’, but this is rebutted with some details of his past – ‘Rohm Dutt had been in a score of pitched battles up and down the entire star system. Fights with rival gun-runners and smugglers, battles with Government Police craft. In the normal way he didn’t mind a fight, enjoyed it even’ – and his fear comes from his knowledge that the guns he’s brought are duds and that, if he’s still present for the battle that will make this apparent ‘he had very little chance of coming out of it alive’.
My favourite touches though are Dicks’s characterisation of Thawn. Magna Three is presently starkly as ‘no place for men’, where ‘Even when it wasn’t raining, water seemed to hang in the air in an ever-present haze’ and the ‘Warm, moisture-laden’ air carries ‘the perpetual hint of rotting vegetation’. Thawn’s reaction to such an inhospitable place: ‘He smiled. It was good to be back’.
With that all out of the way, let's get on with dissing Doctor Who and the Power of Kroll...
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