Jim's Reviews > Doctor Who: World Game

Second Doctor. The Doctor has been convicted of temporal interference by the High Court of the Time Lords and sentenced to death. However, the Celestial Intervention Agency, the infamous intelligence arm of the Time Lords, has a deal for him: commutatation of sentence if he goes on a mission for them.

The Doctor is sent to Earth during the time of Napoleon. Shadowy figures are meddling in history, playing a game in which historical figures are the game pieces, making the Doctor's occasional forays into human affairs seem insignificant.

The Doctor's brief is to merely observe and report back to Gallifrey, but he soon finds himself embroiled in the game. He helps save the young Napoleon from execution during the aftermath of the Terror, after one side had the future emperor charged with treason. Then he must prevent the assassinations of Wellington and Nelson at the hands of other game players. The tangle of plots and counterplots continues until the climactic battle at Waterloo.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Like a lot of Doctor Who stories, it raised the issues, ethical and practical, of intervening in history and in other cultures (concerns that are not confined to fiction).

It also didn't hurt that the story was set in the Napoleonic era, which I find fascinating. The portrayal of historical figures and events was fairly well done. Studying history has spoiled a lot of historical fiction for me, but there weren't any big ahistorical clinkers to speak of in this book (Time Lords and killer robots excepted). I especially liked the portrayal of Wellington. Terrance Dicks captured his brusque, matter-of-fact arrogance and set the "Iron Duke's" disgust of war against Napoleon's egomanical pursuit of glory. As Wellington said, "Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained."

The challenge of setting the story in historical events is that it gives a big fat clue that the Doctor will prevail in the end, foiling the plans of those that seek to alter history for fun. (If you don't know who won at Waterloo by now, I pity you!) Yet, it's a testament to the storytelling that there is still an element of suspense. As Wellington said, "It was a damned close-run thing."