War Of The Daleks
Doctor Who War Of The Daleks - novelonlinefull.com. You’re read light novel Doctor Who War Of The Daleks Part 7 online at NovelOnlineFull.com. Please use the follow button to get notification about the latest chapter next time when you visit NovelOnlineFull.com. Use F11 button to read novel in full-screen(PC only). War of the Daleks, on the other hand, clearly genuinely believes itself to be a serious attempt at new Doctor Who. What this means, in other words, is that War of the Daleks marks the point where the idea of an official version of Doctor Who finally implodes.
Posted by:6 years, 5 months agoI’ll Explain LaterWe’ve skipped The Bodysnatchers and Genocide, which languish in the forties of the seventy-three Eighth Doctor Adventures unloved and unhated. We’ll be doing that a lot. War of the Daleks is the last of the books commissioned under Nuala Buffini (actually, this and Legacy of the Daleks apparently came in at the same time), and is absolutely loathed. It has um Daleks in it. And a very, very infamous retcon, which I talk about in enough detail below as to not be worth outlining here. It’s 66th out of 73.
Lars Pearson says that the retcon in question “will skewer you in pitchfork-like fashion,” while at the time Dave Owen calls it an “unambitious tribute rendered in hackneyed prose that should not have survived editing.” Ouch.——. It’s October of 1997. Elton John is at number one with “Something About The Way You Look/Candle in the Wind ’97.” This gets at one of the news stories we’ll talk about in a moment, and raises the question of what could possibly unseat a cathartic tribute to Princess Diana from the charts.
Answer: The Spice Girls, with “Spice Up Your Life.” The Backstreet Boys, Oasis, Will Smith, Janet Jackson, Aqua, and Chumbawumba also chart, the latter with an unabashed and straightforward execution of The Manual. In news, since we last checked in Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Princess Diana died, causing everyone in America to be inexplicably upset, Scotland voted to create its own parliament, as did Wales, and Mother Theresa died too. While during this month, the Grey Lady goes color, and the BBC gets a new logo.In books, meanwhile, War of the Daleks. That War of the Daleks is a mind-wrenchingly awful book at least mostly goes without saying.
Still, since this blog is written for a non-specialist audience, we may as well rehearse its flaws. First among them is the simple fact that Peel is not a great writer. He never has been. And so with a book in which he’s stuck with an ambiguously characterized Doctor and a new companion he makes a harder swing to Generic Doctor than any previous book.
Peel’s Generic Doctor is apparently Pertwee, with Sam defaulting smoothly to Jo Grant. But this masks the larger problem, which is that Peel is spectacularly uninterested in any of these newfangled ideas that have been cluttering Doctor Who up for the last ten years and just wants to do good old-fashioned adventure stories.As a result War of the Daleks is overtly and consciously an imitation of Terry Nation’s style. The Doctor gives generic moral lessons of the most banal sort, mostly about following orders and duty and various other things. Peel is fascinated by the divisions of Dalek society and by describing Dalek weaponry and various special Daleks in detail, and more or less uninterested in stitching together an actual plot.
On top of that, the plot he has is riddled with holes. To take only one example, in chapter seven Davros is informed that there are still Daleks loyal to him on Skaro, and treats this as good news. The next chapter he reacts with shock and horror at the idea that Skaro could still exist.All of this pales, however, in the face of the retcon. John Peel, apparently, was not a big fan of Remembrance of the Daleks. And so he decided to undo its destruction of Skaro. Fair enough, I suppose - I’d suggest that the sheer shock of Remembrance of the Daleks is worth the loss of Skaro, which isn’t in and of itself that useful a concept. One can easily just have the surviving Daleks found New Skaro and get on with it.
But sure, I can see why someone might want to rescue Skaro. Most people can understand that, I’d wager. What’s jaw-dropping about War of the Daleks is the way in which Peel attempts to sort this out. See, it turns out that the Daleks learned about the destruction of Skaro when they invaded in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Learning in Day of the Daleks that they can’t just change time they instead embarked on an epic project to ensure that the planet the Doctor and Davros destroy is not in fact Skaro but another planet.
So they grab Davros off of Skaro, move him onto another planet that they terraform to look just like Skaro, and fake the entire Dalek/Movellan war of Destiny of the Daleks in order to persuade Davros that they’ve woken him on Skaro. Then the Doctor, having arrived on fake-Skaro and mistaken it for Skaro, learned the wrong coordinates for Skaro and set the Hand of Omega to blow up the wrong star.All of this, which I have not embellished in any way, is established in one chapter in which the Dalek Prime just exposits recklessly. The best entertainment to be had in this book is in fact imagining most of this dialogue delivered by actual Daleks. My favorite line is “Sit down. You will be more comfortable,” although the use of non-dialogue phrases like “the Dalek Prime pointed out.” It’s at least as bad as it sounds, if not substantially worse.But what is perhaps most interesting is that it was essentially rejected. It is not the first bit of Doctor Who to be controversial. Plenty of people rejected the New Adventures, and Russell T Davies was still proclaiming that Paul McGann doesn’t count only a few years before taking the reins of the series.
The Wilderness Years were marked by widespread rejection of bits of Doctor Who. Plenty of people decided that the New Adventures weren’t canon, including, apparently, Terrance Dicks.
Russell T Davies was insisting Paul McGann didn’t count only a few years before he was running the show. It’s not surprising that people decided that War of the Daleks and its massive rewriting of the series was to be rejected.What’s surprising and relatively transformative, though, is that it was rejected almost completely.
Essentially nobody took it seriously. Sure, lots of people rejected previous bits of Doctor Who in the Wilderness Years, but this was basically the first time that a book had the unanimous response of “thanks but no thanks.” It wasn’t some active campaign or a conscious, authoritative decision or anything like that. It was just a moment where the breaking point of Doctor Who fandom became clear. This was a bridge too far. Official license and BBC logo on the book or not, this was clearly not canon. Arguably the total rejection of John Nathan-Turner’s declaration that Dimensions in Time was canon and should have a production code prefigured this, but the problem there was that Dimensions in Time, Nathan-Turner’s insistence aside, was clearly not trying to be serious Doctor Who.
War of the Daleks, on the other hand, clearly genuinely believes itself to be a serious attempt at new Doctor Who.What this means, in other words, is that War of the Daleks marks the point where the idea of an official version of Doctor Who finally implodes. Whatever dissent the Virgin line and the TV Movie generated, they at least had a clear bloc of people who would advocate for them as the official, “proper” Doctor Who.
So did the Eighth Doctor Adventures, and indeed, they still did after War of the Daleks. But War of the Daleks ensured that there would always be an asterisk next to that claim. The Virgin lines and the TV Movie were official because of the BBC’s assent. The Eighth Doctor Adventures, if they were official, were official because of fan assent, and that could be stripped away.Which is an important concept with relation to War of the Daleks as well. John Peel, after all, is the embodiment of an “official” writer.
He was hand-picked by Terry Nation as the acceptable Dalek writer, and he made a career out of being an establishment type in writing tie-in novels for virtually everything. But this reveals a fundamental flaw in the notion of the official in Doctor Who. Indeed, it reveals a problem with the basic idea of official histories, which is that they instinctively reinforce structures of power, regardless of truth.
They are not necessarily useless, but they must be treated with considerable skepticism. And War of the Daleks illustrates the worst tendencies of them.The matter of Terry Nation is particularly significant in terms of the problem with official history. Terry Nation, of course, created the Daleks. But he created the Daleks in the same way that Bob Kane created Batman, which is to say, he had a vague initial concept that someone else turned into an outright work of genius. Nation created the most generic space monster imaginable and wrote a few lines description.
Raymond Cusick created the visual look of a Dalek - the thing that is actually responsible for their popularity. The problem is that Terry Nation, as a BBC freelancer, owned the copyright on whatever he created for the BBC, whereas Raymond Cusick, a member of the BBC’s staff, got his standard salary whether he created a multi-million pound creative juggernaut or the Slyther. So Terry Nation, with the aid of a very good agent, continued to extract solid money out of the BBC for every re-use of the Daleks, up to and including some solid brinksmanship with them in 2004 that nearly resulted in Doctor Who coming back without them. Raymond Cusick got a hundred quid bonus for creating them and that was it.Official histories, of course, focus entirely on Nation, who portrayed himself as the proper “chronicler” of the Daleks. This, in turn, meant marginalizing other people, most notably David Whitaker who, despite generating the overwhelming majority of early Dalek material as a ghost writer, was proclaimed by Nation to have not “gotten” the Daleks in Power of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks. Nation, while he was alive, forbid further use of Whitaker’s creation of the Emperor of the Daleks because he didn’t like the Daleks to have an emperor, preferring the Dalek Supreme or Dalek Prime or whatever. Despite it being an iconic and memorable character.
6 years, 5 months agoJudging by Peel's novelizations of Whitaker's Dalek stories, I'm not convinced he shared Nation's antipathy toward them. Infact I suspect the main motivation behind why John Peel resurrected Skaro was so that Evil of the Daleks would still stand as the Daleks' 'final end'.
So he was probably very faithful to the letter of Whitaker.I guess this book's too uncool to be associated with the 'timey-wimey' meme.The main problem with the book i think can be summed up as trying to force a square peg into a round hole, specifically a hole where the plot should be. There's no story here, it's just an excuse to stitch together fannish vignettes and gratuitous pluggings of continuity holes. I don't mind saying that it's fairly readable and occasionally thrilling, but it's ultimately hollow.The rectonning might have been manageable if it had stuck to its purpose of saving Skaro. Sure it'd still be a mean-spirited vandalism of someone else's work, but it wouldn't be a mess. The Daleks found out about Remembrance's events by raiding the Ministry of Defence records. The Doctor was using the randomizer in Destiny of the Daleks so he might not have actually been on Skaro that time?
Fortuitous enough.But then, needlessly, he retcons the entire Movellan war as a fabrication of the Daleks' own making, and it just becomes stupid and unwieldy. It falls apart if you think about it a moment. It would mean that the Daleks, in order to fool Davros, actually created the Movellan plague with the purpose of wiping out an entire taskforce of them, and letting the people of Earth have them. And so in its quest to restore the Daleks to their 1960's power and get back to how they were before Davros upstaged and divided them, the book actually has them shoot themselves in the foot and makes them more berzerk, and suicidally neurotic than ever.The whole problem with the book could be summed up as 'overkill'.I mean sure, I would have liked Destiny to include some explanation as to who the Movellans are and who created them and why. But this wasn't the answer any of us wanted.It's a shame you're not covering Terror Firma, as I think it's a brilliant critique of Peel, and an example of how to do this kind of convoluted retconning story right. Because it all comes down to the focus and framing device of Davros' personal revenge against the Doctor and determination to destroy his life and his spirit. It actually compliments the character, carries a personal stake, and is more than just a gratuitous insertion that has less to do with this story than some others the author doesn't like.
6 years, 5 months agoWell the other thing to say about this book, and sorry if this seems obvious or if the point is already clearly-enough made, but the writing really is Target-level childish. Genocide may be an enjoyable if unremarkable book, but it never reads like Terrance Dicks circa 1977. The plotting in War Of The Daleks is indeed horrible-to-non-existant, the characters are vague, generic and uninteresting, the fanwank ridiculous, and the retcon just ghastly but for me what sinks it more than anything else is the just-awful writing. Even the worst of the early EDAs are written better than this (yes, even The Eight Doctors!). 6 years, 5 months agoI think what's so totally wrong about story is it violates the one rule that modern Doctor Who fandom is built upon: there is no canon.There's really two major categories of retcons, which I'll label Positive and Negative.The Positive Retcon is all about taking stuff that doesn't work and providing an explanation to make it work.
The vast majority of fannish excess in the Virgin years is of this nature, it's explaining how the cricket ball in Four To Doomsday can break the laws of physics. The various attempts to fit the Cybermen stories into a coherent narrative is probably the single most massive retcon of this type Doctor Who fans have had to endure.The Negative Retcon is all about removing an offending story or idea from the Continuity.
And while I'm aware of a few examples of someone ignoring a cricket ball, I think War of the Daleks is really the first time in an official Doctor Who that someone got really ambitious about it. And we've still got the Bottle Universe and the destruction of Gallifrey ahead of us.In a previous reply here, I said a massive Fan Civil War had broken out (the opening salvo being Ace's death in Doctor Who Magazine), although in the spirit of retcon and meta-stories, I'd like to change that to a Time War. The fan-writers of Doctor Who are doing nothing less than battling over the official time-line of the Doctor Who Universe and this is the real Time War that the Eighth Doctor fought in the Wilderness Years. 6 years, 5 months agoInfact I suspect the main motivation behind why John Peel resurrected Skaro was so that Evil of the Daleks would still stand as the Daleks' 'final end'.
So he was probably very faithful to the letter of Whitaker.Though, ironically, our host argued rather compellingly that even at the time, no one seriously expected Evil of the Daleks to be the 'final end'.The idea that Evil of the Daleks is the Real True Final Once And For All End Despite All The Other Stories is something I don't think I've encountered much outside of 'The Official Doctor Who and the Daleks Book' by - hey look at that - John Peel. (Though the time I saw him at a convention in the early 90s, he claimed that no one had ever read that book)-Arguably the total rejection of John Nathan-Turner’s declaration that Dimensions in Time was canon and should have a production code prefigured thisWhat's the deal with production codes anyway? When the series was resurrected back in '05, one of the hottest topics of debate was 'But what are the production codes for the new stories???' For that matter, when the TVM happened, there was a big 'But what production code shall we use?'
Argument.Is it just 'We need something to be the primary key in our databases'?-One of the things I remember most reading War of the Daleks near its original publication was being bothered when the Doctor repeatedly takes unambiguous responsibility for the destruction of Skaro. Like, I think when they reveal that Skaro still exists, the Doctor's actual line of dialogue is 'But that's impossible! I destroyed Skaro!'
Given how big a part of the Seventh Doctor's character it was that he went out of his way to not be responsible for the destruction he had a hand in, that seemed like one of the most retconny things about the book.(From the vantage point I've got now, I have the option of viewing this as an element of the eighth doctor's character - that while the 7th doctor could manipulate and be content to say that it wasn't his fault because it was Davros's finger that pushed the button, the 8th doctor knows better. But I'm not prepared to credit Peel for that, given that he's not actually going for having any sort of specific characterization for the doctor).
6 years, 5 months agoThe idea that Evil of the Daleks is the Real True Final Once And For All End Despite All The Other Stories is something I don't think I've encountered much outside of 'The Official Doctor Who and the Daleks Book' by - hey look at that - John Peel.It also turns up in Jean Marc L'Officier's The Terrestrial Index, which was the companion volume to his Programme Guide. The bulk of the book was a chronology of the Doctor Who Universe based only on the TV Series (up to Survival).
This chronology uses the New Skaro theory (that Evil of the Daleks takes place not on the original Skaro, but on a replacement Dalek home planet)On an entirely different note, the basic plot outline (sans retcon) made for a very good read when it was recycled (this time using actual characters) for the Tenth Doctor novel Prisoner of the Daleks. 6 years, 5 months agoSo, I read War of the Daleks in preparation for this article,.
I didn't hate it?In fact I thought it was. I mean, not good, but. The way it was talked about, I expected some horrifying mashup of Timewyrm: Genesis and The Eight Doctors.
Instead, it was a reasonably well-paced runaround, with some good character moments (I don't really get why the main Thals aren't considered 'real characters') and some nice funny moments. Indeed, its main problems were the huge buildup to a very 'meh' revelation, and the fact that the main conflict at the end just kinda disintegrates to Daleks vs. Daleks with no real impact outside of that.But I've read far worse books. I'd call it better than Blood Heat, for instance, because it doesn't stop every few paragraphs to lecture the audience that you should make peace with your horrifying invasive overlords. That said, I don't think I've seen any worse Dalek stories; even Daleks in Manhattan wins out just for having original ideas. 6 years, 5 months agoThis is one of the two Doctor Who books I've attempted while reading this blog that I was unable to finish.
The other being, of course, Timewyrm: Genesys. So that's 0/2 for finishing John Peel books. It actually wasn't totally badly written, and now that we're several Dalek stories removed from the retcon I didn't hate it. It was competently written most of the way through, which is more than can be said for a great many books. I might even have been able to finish it if I hadn't made the 'mistake' of watching Asylum of the Daleks after I'd started. Generic Military SF of the Daleks couldn't help but feel dull and hidebound after that. It does have its uses though-I read from some of the book in order to put myself to sleep when I got too excited after watching Asylum.Peel seems particularly keen to disavow the idea of the Daleks having any subjectivity and interiority: ‘Daleks have no interest in anything but conquest and war.
Art, decoration, poetry, music – it’s all irrelevant to them.’' This was a swipe against the recurring concept of Dalek poetry, which was first suggested by Ben Aaronovich in the Remembrance novelization, IIRC, and developed in The Also People. Asylum, by contrast, establishes the Daleks have their own form of aesthetics (they won't wipe out the 'broken' Daleks because they consider hatred to be beautiful). The episode humanizes them, but in a way that brings their alien-ness into sharp relief.I wouldn't say that John Peel acted like 'the worst possible version of what people feared he might be,' though, since there didn't seem to be any rape in this book.
War of the Daleks, while pretty wretched by comparison to Parkin and Orman/Blum, or even the gloriously thorough ridiculousness of the Eight Doctors, which was at least never dull, at least had some vague moral compass since it was imitating classic Dalek stories instead of shitty sword and sorcery, and was therefore a better book than Genesys. That said, it seems like the fandom of the time didn't worry much about such things, if the DWRG reviews of Genesys and such are anything to go. It didn't get anywhere near the hatred War of the Daleks did even though it more than deserved it. Say what you like about social justice fandom, but I'm glad at least some of us now consider trivializing rape to be a more serious sin than poorly thought out retcons. 6 years, 5 months agoI do think the shift to a more auteur-centric version of Doctor Who has had a negative effect on the discourse surrounding the show. It means that far too often, discussions of Moffat's or RTD's Doctor Who turn into ad hominem arguments about the good or bad qualities of these showrunners-for instance, whether Moffat is sexist (or rather, the same scripted argument over and over again)-instead of examinations of the stories on their own terms. I'm certainly guilty of letting my personal annoyance of RTD towards the end get in the way of understanding how that version of the Doctor Who works, when it does work.
6 years, 5 months agoI liked this book. I found it really enjoyable.
It's easy to read and full of action. I imagine younger fans who love Daleks would really enjoy all be Star Wars-inspired combat in it.Yes, the big retcon about the destruction of Skaro seems pointless. What was the big deal about Evil of the Daleks being the final end of the Daleks. Yet I can't help admiring the cheek of John Peel in doing it. And it is done in a really clever way.It's not the Daleks change history; rather they cheat and fool history. It's a level of 'timey-wimeyness' that is probably cleverer than a lot of the stuff Moffat does.What is more, War of the Daleks makes the Daleks impressive again.
They are so cunning in this book! After all those stories in which Davros dominates and overshadows the Daleks, they finally outwit Davros.
He is made to look like a complete idiot in this story, instead of the mundane evil scientist mastermind. 6 years, 5 months ago'It's not the Daleks change history; rather they cheat and fool history. It's a level of 'timey-wimeyness' that is probably cleverer than a lot of the stuff Moffat does.' Or - put another way - it's Series 6(albeit less interesting as it's lacking the meta-textuality of Moffat's work)As a side note, I have no issue with the retcon: Peel clearly got his facts wrong. This story is clearly set during the offscreen Trial of Davros between Revelation and Remembrance (after all, how many times can the same person be put on trail for incoherent reasons. Besides the Doctor, I mean) and the destruction of Skaro's sun is an eschatological event taking place far in the Dalek's future; The Emperor is bluffing when he claims to have fixed it.As for 'The Final End' - that was indeed the final end. Until those silly Time Lords intervened - evidently to make a retcon on Dalek History and attempt to bring some semblance of order to it so it make canonical sense.That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
6 years, 5 months ago'War of the Daleks' was the worst Doctor Who book I ever read, one of the least enjoyable books I've ever finished, and the last straw that convinced me that I didn't.really. need to keep up with DW and fandom after Virgin lost its license. I still picked up books sporadically when I heard something especially good was coming along-at least until 'The Ancestor Cell' killed even that for me-but the magic was gone. Sloppy, pointless, and generic, that sums up most of the initial run of the EDAs to a T.I still can't get over how riddled with continuity errors WotD is, in a book so obsessed with continuity fetishism. And I don't mean it clashes with other stories: I mean internal contradictions within the book itself, like the Davros thing Phil noticed.
Or Antalin being the fake blown-up Skaro here, and Antalin being an un-blown-up waterworld at the same time over there. The only way to make sense of the plot is to assume everything the Dalek Prime says is a lie, and that the whole thing is a practical joke.And given a whole novel as a canvas upon which to paint the glory of the Daleks unshackled by budgets or any constraint but imagination, John Peel gives us.really large Daleks with legs. And Spider-Daleks like from that crap movie proposal.
Mr Peel, truly you spoil us with your creative bounty.At least 'The Pit' was shooting for cosmic when it landed face-first in the dung. And at least 'The Pit' had prose bad enough to be often hilarious, instead of prose merely so bad it was bad. When you've made 'The Pit' start to look good in comparison, something has gone dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. It makes one pine for Eric Saward.I'm sure Peel managed to work in a reference to mercury somewhere in the book, which I suppose is ironic considering it's the least mercurial story ever.
6 years, 5 months agoOf course, it's not just that War of the Daleks is a mediocre to terrible book. That's the review blog conclusion, which wouldn't advance on any of the reviews of the book since it first came out.
What matters is that this is where the fragmentation of Doctor Who really steps into high gear. War of the Daleks is a story that attempts to erase everything interesting and strange that had been developed for one of the pillars of Doctor Who. It reduces the Daleks to their original concept of evil aliens that think only of hate.All the aspects of the Daleks that had been developed through Whitaker's and Aaronovitch's stories were being retconned away to return to the generic space monster, as if the origin was a more fertile or productive place than the full articulation of its history. War of the Daleks is a cracking solid adventure, but the best Dalek stories operate as more than this. The novel tried to reduce them back to cracking solid adventure villains and nothing more.
If this book had been at all influential in shutting down the narrative possibilities it wanted to, Shearman's, Davies', Raynor's and Moffat's Dalek stories would have been impossible. We should be glad the retcon was so convoluted and ridiculous that fans outright rejected it.Phil is right that this is a powerful precedent. It's not that Doctor Who was literally taken out of the hands of its creators — the BBC still holds the copyright, after all. But the fragmentation the fallout of War of the Daleks started made the creators of Doctor Who lose the power to define Doctor Who. In essence, a master narrative defines exhaustively its subject: Doctor Who is delimited in the following terms, x, y, z, etc. It's another iteration of Whoniverse thinking, as we understood it through the analyses of the Saward era.Even though the production of the show rests under the dominion of a single Svengali figure (and I don't know how much of this model will survive after the already-decentralizing Moffat era), these creators don't have the power to define Doctor Who itself in the exhaustive manner that a master narrative requires. The contemporary showrunner can define their version or overall aesthetic of Doctor Who.
But once they clock out, a new vision takes off with no necessary reference to old ideas, storylines, or possibilities. 6 years, 5 months agoI never actually got as far as the dire continuity mess. I found the prose suspiciously readable (if rather lame) at first, which threw me given the story's reputation, but after about a chaper the whole tone became too cloying. The way in which all of the female characters were falling over the doctor, etc.clearly a holdover of the 'classic adventure yarn' model being aimed for, but written with a tedious childishness, and just bizarrely simplistic and jarring in tone next to Paul Leonard's Genocide (which may have it's flaws, but was an infinitly more textured book). 6 years, 5 months agoI don't see it as dark, as much as an unfortunate risk. The Bidmead year is one of my favourites of the classic series, and while it's sad that few people took up the stranger, more abstract elements of his run, at least it exists and we have it.
The same goes for Miles — he may not have any philosophical successors in Doctor Who today, but he still had space to express his ideas. The genuine control of a single master narrative would never have permitted that space. A John Peel would have retconned it away, if it had ever been allowed to exist at all.The fact that there is space for these experiments means that we can revisit them, enjoy them for what they are, and let them inspire us. So it isn't that Lawrence Miles' (and Chris Bidmead's) ideas are abandoned; it's more that no one has followed up on his directions.
6 years, 5 months ago'It's somewhat like a continuity equivalent of the Law of Prescriptive Retaliation in linguistics: any story designed to mainly fix continuity will make it vastly more confusing and broken and/or have glaring continuity errors itself.' - ArkadinI read super-hero comics for decades, then one day I realized that the only people who find the Continuity Errors 'confusing' are the hardcore fans.When I was wee one, I read a Huntress back-up feature in Wonder Woman which mentioned that Batman was dead (and had been for quite some years).
My seven year old brain had absolutely no idea how to process that information, because Batman's comic was sitting right there on the stands where he's most certainly not dead. My young self figured there must be some explanation and dedicated his brain power to something more important. Like how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.As an adult, I saw the need to 'fix' the Continuity of Donna Troy utterly destroy the character. In the wake of Crisis On Infinite Earth, her origin became impossible. The original fix was to re-tell her origin minus the Wonder Woman connection and she thrived over the next decade or so, even managing to jump to the Green Lantern franchise after The Titans got cancelled.Then along came a creator who decided to shove back into the character a bit of history ret-conned out of the character long before Crisis (that being Wonder Girl was meant to be Wonder Woman as a girl). And Donna Troy became radioactive.Same thing happened to Hawkman, who walked into a pretty major Continuity Error in the mid-90s, shrugged it off for several years before they 'fixed' it by making him so confusing that no one wanted to use him as a character.
6 years, 5 months agoI think that a very significant point that factored into fandom rejecting the retcon so thoroughly was the story it was retconning away. If there is a single, emblematic turning point that marked the beginning of the new, more mature and complex Doctor Who that started with the Cartmel era on TV and continued into the Virgin books, it's the destruction of Skaro. That was the moment when Doctor Who more or less said, 'School's out, children.' And when the BBC took back the book line, it was with the more-or-less explicitly stated goal of making it less mature, less complex, and more 'safe'. Peel's novel, at the time, wasn't simply a pathetic exercise in poor writing.
It wasn't even a bad book retconning a good TV episode. It wasn't even a sad piece of fanwankery. It seemed, at the time, like an attempt to consign truly good Doctor Who made for grown-ups to the memory hole. Given that at that point, the entire audience of Doctor Who was those grown-ups who had spend the last six or so years reveling in Doctor Who that was Made For Us, it's not surprising that it was held in such universal contempt.
6 years, 5 months agoDefinitely, a really good retcon is one that opens up the narrative. Alan Moore's 'The Anatomy Lesson' is a classic in that regard, which allowed the character to move on past his quest to regain his humanity (and thus end the book) and fully explore the concept of a plant-based super-hero.But I think the true test is whether or not you can slip it into a story naturally. And most retcons should be smothered at birth for failing this very simple test. If some talking head has to show up and explain three or four stories from decades ago, you have failed to write an interesting retcon.One of the best retcons I've read recently is a pre-Unearthly Child tale that effectively explains why Susan claimed to have named the TARDIS. Simply put, the Doctor and Susan had their memories tampered with and both have sizable gaps about who they are and where they come from.It's simple, it works, and it removes not one ounce of mystery from their origins.
6 years, 5 months agoTo go completely off topic, I have to disagree somewhat about Donna Troy. Linking her back up to Wonder Woman as part of a proper Wonder Woman superhero dynasty was a good idea, since it removed the awkwardness of having Donna as a Wonder Woman-like character who preceded Wonder Woman, and also gave her more to do since she was-for the first time-part of Wonder Woman's supporting cast as well as a Titan.
It was just handled in a deeply weird and confusing way, like a lot of what Byrne does. (Same with the idea of Hippolyta being a hero in the Golden Age.)I also liked the later retcon that made Donna the sum of all her pre-Crisis selves, effectively the embodiment and caretaker of DC history.
The right writer could do something really interesting with that. 6 years, 5 months agoIt is from Queer as Fokk, though I think treating Vince as 'a closeted, timid, stereotypically blinkered fan character' does him a disservice. To suggest that any scene of Queer as Folk depends on a high level understanding of Doctor Who is silly. The overall tone of the 'Paul McGann doesn't count' scene is triumphant - Stuart is trying to persuade Vince that Vince's boyfriend doesn't really care about him or share any of his interests, and scoffs that he probably can't even name all the Doctors before calmly rattling off the list. Vince, bemused and slightly wary, asks 'what about Paul McGann,' to which Stuart replies that 'Paul McGann doesn't count,' with Vince joining in, their connection, and, yes, love clearly affirmed for the audience.First of all, for the scene to work there has to be a reasonable cultural understanding that saying 'Paul McGann doesn't count' would make sense - that is, it had to tap into a pre-existing social sense of McGann's illegitimacy.
Nothing about Queer as Folk's engagement with Doctor Who is so complex as to use the subtleties of Vince's opinions as character traits, and rightly so, because that would be unintelligible to most of the viewers. But more to the point, the scene doesn't leave room for viewing Vince and Stuart's shared understanding as negative. There are other scenes that do that, or at least gesture at the possibility of that (the series does, after all, end up firmly on the Vince/Stuart side), but this just isn't one of them.Now, do I agree, as Tat Wood argues in About Time, that Davies was tacitly ordered to count McGann? I think it's more likely that Davies, when approaching the series as a professional, decided that there's a slippery slope in excising bits of Doctor Who's history that he doesn't like.The situation seems to me analogous to Moffat's various dismissals of eras of Doctor Who. Do I think he was lying when he railed against the Hartnell era? Not for a moment.
Do I think he's still seen pretty much all of it, buys the DVDs, and quite enjoys it? Indeed, I think Moffat's description of loving Doctor Who while recognizing that his love does not magically make it any good is a fairly normal state of affairs for a lot of fans.
6 years, 5 months agoI suppose discussion of whether the auteur model is good or bad for the quality of the series itself is best left until we get to the 2005 episodes, but this brilliant discussion of 'official histories' has got me thinking about why I feel quite alienated from much discourse surrounding the new series.I always used to love reading histories of the old series because it was so lacking in totalising authorship explanations, the series instead being the product of creative and industrial tensions often as interesting as what was on-screen. Even now, the DVD documentaries are usually fun because of their irreverant tone, and the general impression that everyone is being heard out and no agendas are being pushed.By contrast, I find Doctor Who Confidential to be unwatchably vaccuous PR, and new series production accounts in DWM little better. The auteurist model causes everything to be written in a 'Davies decided to do this, then Davies decreed that, then Davies thought it would interesting to do the other' which I personally find eye-wateringly boring to read. Is it bad that sometimes I want to hear from a writer who.didn't. enjoy seeing their scripts rewritten, or Christopher Eccleston express an opinion that isn't incredibly guarded? Yet in the manner that Phil suggests, any journalist persuing such an angle would probably find it near-impossible to get any future set access.And yet, on the other hand, I'm often quite uncomfortable with the character-assassinating gossip that often creeps into analyses of 80s Who, which as Ununnilium points out was the peak of auteurist presentation in the old series. This is perhaps the problem; when auteurism is pushed so forcefully as the key way to understand the series, criticism is too easily forced onto the same terrain, something that is now prevalent with new series cricitism.
6 years, 5 months ago'Look at how people systematically failed to follow up on or even notice most of Lawrence Miles's best ideas.' - ArkadinIn reading interviews with Lawrence Miles, I always feel he had a very unrealistic idea of what would happen after his novels were published. You've got a whole bunch of writers, each following their own muse, and he's introducing all these complex and inter-related concepts. I just don't see people grabbing ideas and running with them.When Neil Gaiman was writing Sandman, people really weren't picking up on his plot threads and expanding on them in other books.
Mostly this was limited to The Demon which had to address any changes made to Hell's mythology since it was a regular setting. Generally people sat back and let Gaiman tell his story and only when the story was reaching its conclusion did people start jumping on and picking up loose plot threads.And I think this is the most natural reaction. Alien Bodies is a great book and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but had I been writing Doctor Who back then (not that I have the talent to do so), I would have given Miles' mythology a very wide berth as to avoid stepping on his toes, assuming that anything I thought was pregnant with possibilities was deliberately so and Miles had plans to do something far more interesting with it.And this was Doctor Who. Most stories are random adventures connected to nothing. Even at the height of Continuity in the 80s, he still only visited Gallifrey once every year or two. I haven't read Interference yet, but it's clear from these interviews that Miles was trying to provoke a very un-Who-like reaction from his fellow writers by doing stuff like giving the Doctor an insanely powerful companion who rendered the old capture-and-escape trope impossible.
To which they responded in a very Who-like way by forcing said companion into those traditional formulas anyway.I just wish he was the sort of writer who didn't need the validation of his fellows. He had definitely made a splash with Alien Bodies and it was going to take a few more books for his reputation to solidify.
But he seems to have wanted instant recognition that he was the best thing ever, grumbling over Mark Gatiss getting the same review score as he did for a traditional Who story. 6 years, 5 months agoEven now, the DVD documentaries are usually fun because of their irreverant tone, and the general impression that everyone is being heard out and no agendas are being pushed.By contrast, I find Doctor Who Confidential to be unwatchably vaccuous PR, and new series production accounts in DWM little better.But these are very different contexts. The DVD commentaries are looking back over many, many years, decades even, and often by people who are no longer in the industry. It's easy to speak your mind when there are no repercussions to worry about.Confidential, on the other hand, is talking about the here and now.
It's not going to get into squabbling, or anything controversial. You'll have to wait until 2037, when the remastered 3D versions are released, to get an unguarded opinion!. 6 years, 5 months ago'Most stories are random adventures connected to nothing.'
See, I disagree. Sandifer has shown us, there are generally thematic threads connecting everything. Every era has its own feel, and most of them have their own overarching ideas.Miles's ideas could have provided that in an era that flailed around more than Hartnell - but you're right, you can't just throw the ideas out there and expect everyone to straightforwardly pick them up. If it was me, I'd talk to my fellow authors a lot, try and get them in on it - but from what I've heard, that seems to have been Miles's downfall. 6 years, 5 months agoBut I get what sorrywehurtyourfield is getting at. Confidential became an exercise for the production team just to 'slap them selves on the back.'
6 years, 5 months agoOf course, it may be simply that that's how Davies saw Doctor Who fans seeing it, and not how he saw it himself.In the end, tho, it doesn't matter, because the important part is, there's a major difference between being a fan on the outside and being a creative force on the inside, and part of that is, when you're on the inside, you can change things - so why rail against stuff you don't like when you can just make stuff you do like instead? Why exclude bits of your audience if you've got the opportunity to genuinely make everyone happy? (Well, not everyone, but.). 6 years, 5 months agoThe idea of an actual story arc and overarching plots in Doctor Who is still pretty new at this point-as opposed to overarching character and thematic threads, which writers started playing with more consciously in season 27.
The convoluted and messy psi powers 'arc' was the first prolonged storyline of the kind the New Series is built around. Even if Lawrence Miles wasn't so determined to alienate absolutely everyone else involved with Doctor Who, I'm not sure the writers and editors of the time could have pulled it off effectively.Acutally, I still have very mixed feelings about the story arcs in New Who.
The big storylines were generally my least favorite part of RTD!Who. We didn't get an arc where the ending was as interesting as the foreshadowing or the opening until Moffat's first season. 6 years, 5 months agoI wonder whether Moffat had the dalek redesign foisted on him.
If you're a competent story teller or a competent marketer you don't do a big redesign and then announce that you're resting the thing you've just redesigned. If Moffat had been doing his best to kill off the redesign I'm not sure what he'd have done differently.There were some podcasts on the BBC website over Christmas in which Moffat was reviewing classic dalek stories. And one of the things he says is that the daleks in the first story are small; he noticed when doing Asylum they've been made bigger everytime we've redesigned them but small daleks are scarier. If that's not a notice of intent to redesign the redesign I'm not sure what is. 6 years, 5 months agoOh, I agree the DVD commentaries are more interesting, and the Confidential is essentially PR - but I'd never expect anything different, considering the contexts. The current production team, in the midst of production, is invested in sounding positive; they're also missing any critical feedback. I mean, of course they're patting themselves on the back for the latest Dalek design - they wouldn't be redesigning them unless they thought it was a good idea!The retrospective commentaries are also self-deceiving though, because they're an opportunity to latch on critical response and say, 'Yeah, I thought that was a dumb idea, too,' a way of distancing themselves from the work.But in general, I'm rather distrustful of.any.
insider commentary. There's always an agenda to advance, infelicities to gloss, and secrets to keep. Imagine being an author who believes in 'the death of the author,' from a critical perspective, yet being in the position of have to promote and comment as a matter of professional duty. You'd practically have to lie just to maintain some integrity!. 6 years, 5 months agoThere's no need at all: the Doctor and the Daleks are time travellers. If you need to do a story involving Skaro, say it takes place before 'Remembrance' from the Daleks' perspective. There's no need to retcon anything unless you have your heart set on (1) following the Davros storyline post-'Remembrance' while simultaneously (2) using a non-explodey Skaro as a vital setting.And that's not even mentioning that if you.did.
need to retcon it for some ungodly reason, the.proper. way to do it is 'Blah blah, Time War'.
6 years, 5 months ago'Acutally, I still have very mixed feelings about the story arcs in New Who. The big storylines were generally my least favorite part of RTD!Who. We didn't get an arc where the ending was as interesting as the foreshadowing or the opening until Moffat's first season.' The irony of the RTD years is that for all their stated intent to make the show accessible to a new audience, it gradually reached a point where the show was just internalizing itself too much, becoming insular, and where the overall season arcs began to neuter stories of the ability to stand alone. Even Doomsday and Turn Left seemingly had to have a cliffhanger for the next story tacked onto them right after what should have been the story's emotional denouement.In old series terms, arcs such as the Black Guardian Trilogy and the Trial season prove to be risky ventures because essentially the season is relying on the arc to carry it and to give it overall direction and substance. The problem is even in that the arc approach can limit and reduce the directions and possibilities of where the show is going, and the season in question can be just as easily sunk as lifted by the arc. 6 years, 5 months ago'Even if Lawrence Miles wasn't so determined to alienate absolutely everyone else involved with Doctor Who, I'm not sure the writers and editors of the time could have pulled it off effectively.'
They could have, but it would have involved someone coming in on the editorial side who was both a.) quite smart and good and b.) had an mindset that took more from other forms of media than TV shows. If you'd gotten in someone from comics, maybe.'
It gradually reached a point where the show was just internalizing itself too much, becoming insular, and where the overall season arcs began to neuter stories of the ability to stand alone.' Y'know, it's true - the arc-ish parts of RTD-era stories often feel kind of forced. (That said, the 'there's something on your back' in Season 4 was generally nice and creepy.) Moffat's big innovation was spreading the arc-ish episodes out throughout the season - something that's definitely inherited from the best of good arc-based TV.
Novelonlinefull.comYou’re Doctor Who War Of The Daleks Part 7 online at NovelOnlineFull.com. Please use the follow button to get notification about the latest chapter next time when you visit NovelOnlineFull.com. Use F11 button to read novel in full-screen(PC only). Drop by anytime you want to read free – fast – latest novel. It’s great if you could leave a comment, share your opinion about the new chapters, new novel with others on the internet. We’ll do our best to bring you the finest, latest novel everyday.
'Yes, you do,' Sam answered. 'Yes, you do.' 'Anyway,' the Doctor said, heaving a sigh.
'To get back to your question, Sam. The Thals no longer live on Skaro, and neither do the Daleks now. I helped to destroy it.' 'Destroy it?' She looked confused. 'Doctor ' She broke off when a chime sounded from her helmet. Reaching back, she tapped a b.u.t.ton.
'Are the crew confined?' Came Delani's voice.' All but one,' she reported. 'The bridge is secure, and the other crew are being guarded in the dining area. I have two men out looking for the final person.' 'Acceptable,' Delani decided. 'We will now head down to the storage bay and claim our prize.
Have one of the crew escort you down there.' Ayaka turned to Chayn. 'You will show me the way,' she ordered.
Sam noticed that her weapon hung straight down. She'd obviously decided that the crew was not a threat. 'Doctor, you may accompany me if you wish.' 'And I'm coming,' Sam said firmly. 'I'm not being left out this time.'
A faint furrow appeared in Ayaka's brow. 'This is not a family outing,' she said.
'This is war.' 'I'm with the Doctor,' Sam insisted.
'And I'm coming. The only way you'll stop me is to tie me up or shoot me.' 'Shall we go?' Beamed the Doctor.Ayaka sighed.
But stay quiet. Delani will not be pleased.' She gestured, and Chayn led the way from the overcrowded bridge.Sam felt both excitement and trepidation. She was going to get to see what this was all about at last. 'Will this be safe?'
She asked the Doctor.' I shouldn't think so for a minute,' he answered cheerfully. 'Rethinking your desire to accompany us?' 'No,' Sam said with determination. 'Just confirming that I made the right choice.
You'll need me around if there's trouble.' 'That's my Sam,' he said approvingly.This sent a shiver through her. It meant so much to her that he was fond of her in his own, alien way.They walked in silence the rest of the way through the underlit, musty, oily corridors. Sam could see that the Quetzel Quetzel really was a patched-together junk ship. Most of the systems seemed to have been repaired a dozen times, using non-matching parts each time.
But she was starting to get used to it. Sort of like a house that's been lived in for a couple of centuries, she decided. It has character, and something undefinable about it that makes you feel at home. It may be a mess, but with all this recycling going on it had to be the greenest ship in the galaxy. Really was a patched-together junk ship. Most of the systems seemed to have been repaired a dozen times, using non-matching parts each time.
But she was starting to get used to it. Sort of like a house that's been lived in for a couple of centuries, she decided. It has character, and something undefinable about it that makes you feel at home. It may be a mess, but with all this recycling going on it had to be the greenest ship in the galaxy.There were two Thal guards outside the storage-bay door, both stiff at attention, their weapons at the ready. They were both beautiful blonde women. Weren't there any ugly Thals?
Sam wondered. Or even non-blond ones? Ayaka nodded to them and then entered the doorway. The rest of them followed her. There was a small area inside to stand, and then a ladder leading down.
Ayaka slung her rifle over one shoulder and started down. They followed her.This bay was pretty much like the one the TARDIS had landed in. It was large, cavernous, and filled with junk.
There were a bunch of Thals over by a couple of broken bulkheads, and one of the crew. Harmon, Sam realised. The one who had called in the Thals.Delani looked up and scowled as they approached. 'Why have you brought all of these civilians?' Close-up, Sam could see that he was slightly older than the other Thals. He didn't look like a cold-blooded killer more like a refugee from Baywatch Baywatch.' This is the Doctor,' Ayaka said proudly.'
Delani looked surprised, and then pleased. 'Is it really you?' Yes, I'm afraid it is,' the Doctor answered sheepishly. Delani was clearly sceptical. I brought with me Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, and Susan!' The names meant nothing to Sam, but Delani was clearly becoming more impressed.'
Come to join us in your TARDIS for the moment of our triumph!' Delani exclaimed. 'You've always managed to turn up when we've most needed you, haven't you?' He laughed, apparently very happy.' You seem to be very popular around here,' Sam said.' I'm a bit of a legend to these people,' the Doctor informed her quietly.
'It's a little embarra.s.sing, really. I may be able to prevent further bloodshed.'
He smiled at Delani. 'And what is it you're after?' He asked politely.' This, Doctor,' the soldier replied, gesturing to something out of sight behind the closest shattered wall.Sam, the Doctor, and Chayn all moved to see what it was.
Ayaka followed. It was just a large, egg-shaped metal object, pitted and scarred, with burn marks on the outside. 'So what is it?' She asked the Doctor.' Dalek design,' he replied briefly. 'Some sort of a life pod, which is odd.' 'Daleks don't need life pods,' Chayn pointed out.'
The Doctor ran a hand over it. 'Still powered, too. It must have been floating around out there for a good number of years.'
'About thirty, we believe,' Delani said.' What's inside it?' 'You know, don't you?'
'Yes,' Delani answered. He turned to one of his men. 'Cathbad, open it up.'
The younger Thal nodded and moved forward. He had a small instrument in his hand some six inches around and four thick. He clamped it to the side of the egg, where it stuck, obviously magnetically. There were several controls on the upper surface of the device, and coded lights. He tapped away for a moment or two, and paused.' The computer's overriding the locking mechanism,' he reported.
'It should be open soon.' The Doctor moved back a couple of paces, frowning. 'I have a very bad feeling about this,' he said softly.That bothered Sam. If he was worried, she knew that she should definitely be worried too. She stared at the pod, trying to figure out what it could be.
There were b.u.t.terflies in her stomach flying 747 jets.The pod gave a sigh, and then began to come apart. Fissure lines opened in several places, and then began to fold back with electronic sighs. Air hissed slightly.' Life supports are engaged,' Cathbad reported.
'The subject has survived and is waking.' The panels opened downward, acting like legs, balancing the half-egg firmly on the ground now. The metal was several inches thick, obviously serious protection for whatever was inside.
A bank of machines was now exposed, all of them lit and functioning. There was still no sign of the occupant. The machines began to fold back out of the way. Some obviously contained nutrients, others mechanisms Sam couldn't even begin to identify. Cryogenics, she supposed, to keep someone or something alive until it could be rescued.The occupant was revealed as the apparatus peeled away.
Sam gasped as she saw the ugly creature exposed. It was barely more than a wizened head and shoulders, embedded in electronic equipment. The skin was yellow-green and wrinkled, eye sockets sunken and blank. The nose was a beak, the mouth a short, dark gash. There was wiring over the skull, a small microphone attached next to the mouth, and what appeared to be some sort of a sensor embedded in its forehead.The Doctor shook his head.
He breathed.INTERLUDE.HUMAN s.p.a.cE.s.p.a.ce Special Security Agent Dryn Faber stood in the airlock, breathing gently as he began to equalise the pressure. Water cascaded in, flooding the chamber, and then he released the outer door. Light flooded in, diffused through the ocean, as he pushed his way out of his scout ship.
As far as it it was concerned, it made very little difference whether it was in s.p.a.ce or underwater. He had programmed it to maintain its position a hundred and fifty feet below the surface of Antalin's ocean world. Was concerned, it made very little difference whether it was in s.p.a.ce or underwater. He had programmed it to maintain its position a hundred and fifty feet below the surface of Antalin's ocean world.An entire planet wreathed in water seemed incredible to him, but it was the case here. No islands or continents broke the unending waters. All life here dwelt in the ocean; there was nowhere else for it to go.His files on this planet weren't exactly extensive. Antalin had been discovered fifty years earlier and hastily surveyed.
With no land ma.s.ses, it had been considered a poor place for colonization. There didn't seem to be any native civilisations no way for them to invent fire, for one thing, to get them started on the road to technology but anything was possible in the depths, Faber imagined. And that had been it, until SSS had detected the shadow of a Dalek contact in the area. It was standard practice to send in teams to investigate, and Faber had been a.s.signed to check out Antalin, even though it had seemed highly unlikely.And on the way down, his stealth ship had definitely picked up signs of activity below. He'd released a coded satellite that would fly to the edges of the system before it began transmitting. He didn't want to alert the Daleks to his presence.
Now he had to take a look at what they were up to, and then disrupt it if possible.His s.p.a.ce suit worked just as well under water as above. The drive unit propelled him at low speed through the ocean. If the Daleks were monitoring and they most likely were he wanted them to view him as just another big fish. And there were plenty of those about.
A school of silvery shapes flickered past him, each fish the size of his forearm, and bulky.A larger, darker shape slipped past the school. Some sort of predator? Hard to tell.
The fish didn't seem disturbed, however, so it was probably safe. And there wasn't much chance he'd be attacked here. He was extremely unfamiliar life, after all.Faber broke the surface gently, no more than his eyes exposed. His visor clicked in automatically, binocular vision targeting the Dalek structure ahead. It looked like some kind of drilling rig splayed floats, a nacelle and several upper decks, topped with a large laser-like drill. That made sense. The Daleks continually needed new supplies of metals and chemicals for their never-ceasing war efforts.
And Antalin was completely unmined. The chances of good supplies here had to be high.
This single base seemed to be their entire contingency here, though. Well, they were actually in human s.p.a.ce here, albeit close to their own border. This had been a test project, most likely, to see whether it was worth exploiting Antalin in full. If these Daleks reported back favourably, then a full-scale invasion might well follow.It was up to Faber to be certain that this didn't happen.He'd sent for backup automatically, of course. But in this business, you didn't wait for the cavalry to arrive. He was trained, as all SSS agents were, to act as an army of one.
War Of The Daleks Board Game
It never occurred to him to scout out the situation and wait for other agents.He ducked below the surface again, sinking to about fifty feet, and then headed across towards the mining platform. He began to inventory his supplies. He was carrying a couple of magnetic mines, and he had more stored in his ship. His pulse rifle was strapped to his back, and he had grenades in a leg pouch. After a few seconds deliberation, he decided to head back to his ship and get further supplies. He'd get the chance for only one attack on the platform, so he'd have to destroy it the first time out.Towing a small underwater raft behind him with several more mines and a small deuterium device, he started back towards the platform. He had the advantage of surprise here, but he knew better than to underestimate the Daleks.
They were paranoid and obsessively cautious. They'd have some way to monitor beneath the platform, just in case. For all Faber knew, there could be whale equivalents here that might attack a floating station, and the Daleks could be watching for them.Which meant he'd have to be very careful in his approach. He was helped in one way, in that light didn't penetrate too far underwater. He'd be no more than a vague shape until he was quite close to the platform. But sonar was another matter, and he set his suit's sensors scanning for any such signal and detected it almost immediately.That could be a problem.
His suit wouldn't register as technology, thanks to its construction, but the raft behind him would. He'd have to disable the sonar somehow before he could set to work planting his mines.
And the Daleks were bound to get suspicious as soon as the sonar went out. Unless, of course, he could supply them with a plausible, natural explanation as to what had happened to it.Another one of the large, dark creatures started to glide past. It was almost twice the length of Faber, and was perfect for what he needed. He released the raft, and, as programmed, it maintained position, waiting to be recovered. Drawing his survival knife from his suit, Faber jetted towards the underwater creature.It looked like a very large eel of some kind, its body long and sinuous. It had a crest along its back, and swam using several sets of paired fins that ran down the length of its belly. As he drew closer, the eel thing turned to stare at him.
It had two eyes, and a large, tooth-filled jaw. It squirmed about in the water, heading towards him.It was a predator, then, and would attack almost anything. Faber waited, unworried, as it closed in on him. The ma.s.sive jaws opened wide enough to swallow his legs, and several rows of sharp teeth were exposed. There wasn't much chance those teeth could puncture his armour, but there was no point in taking chances. Faber increased the power to his jets, and angled downward slightly, pa.s.sing below the mouth of the surprised eel.
As he did so, he swung over onto his back, and struck out with the knife. It penetrated the creature's skin easily, and he ripped it open several feet.Dark liquid sprayed out, inking and clouding in the water. Portions of the eel's innards fell free, and he ripped around some more with the knife just to be certain he'd killed the creature.It shuddered, and then relaxed in death, its fins ceasing to beat.
War Of The Daleks John Peel
Faber slipped his blade away and grabbed the carca.s.s before it could fall into the depths. He tore at the incision he'd made, widening the gap, and then started cutting out the internal organs, creating a s.p.a.ce in there large enough to disguise his own bulk. It was messy work, and the seas started to fill with scavenger creatures, all nipping at whatever he cut free. Well, at least that tidied things up a little. Thankfully, they didn't start tearing at the main bulk of the eel yet. They were probably not quite that brave.In a few moments, he had what he needed, and slipped into the gap he'd carved.
Then he started his jets going again at low power, back towards the drilling platform. He discovered that kicking out with his legs made the tail of the eel wiggle almost realistically.With luck, the Daleks would see nothing suspicious in an eel approaching the station, and be caught off their guard. Faber grinned happily to himself. The platform grew larger, and it moved from being a dark shape into crystal clarity.There were three main pontoons holding it up, which were joined by a framework.
The work areas were built on this frame, and the laser drill was held suspended below. It wasn't working at the moment, which was one worry fewer for Faber. Dodging a laser beam wasn't high on his list of leisure activities.Then he spotted the sonar detector, suspended a foot or so below one of the pontoons. A simple device, joined by wires and an armature.
Nothing much to it. He cruised up to it, making it seem as if the eel were after food, and then used his knife to sever the cable connectors. His helmet informed him that the signals had ceased.
There was a video monitor unit on the next pontoon, and he fixed this in a similar fashion.The Daleks were now blind below the waterline, so he threw off his disguise, watching it sink towards the sea bed. The scavenger fish pounced as it fell, and set to work on it. Faber doubted it would ever reach the bottom. Time to recover his raft and plant the bombs.There was another shadow in the water, and he glanced at it. Another eel?He realised he was wrong. This was no creature native to Antalin.
It was wide, about six feet across, and two thick at the centre. It swam by undulating its entire body, like a ray.
Twin stalked eyes stared at him, malicious intelligence evident.A Slyther.This was a creature from the Daleks' home world. They must have released one to patrol the sea about the platform. It would envelope its prey like a jellyfish, grabbing hold and then absorbing it through its membranes.
It could pump stomach acids from the underside of its body to weaken its prey and partially digest it. Those acids would be able to penetrate his suit if it enveloped him.The creature swam closer, and he unsheathed his rifle. There was the possibility that the Daleks might detect an energy discharge underwater, but he had to weigh this against the certainty that the Slyther would kill him otherwise. As it drew closer, Faber could see it preparing to extrude its stomach and envelope him.
At the last second, he opened fire, raking that disgusting organ with a white-hot beam.The Slyther thrashed in agony as he opened it up. He moved to one side as it dirtied the water with its outpouring blood, squirming in agony as it perished. Then it stopped moving, dead in the water. The little scavenger fish closed in again, tearing away at the creature. If he kept this up, he was going to have his own piscine fan club.There was now no time to waste. The Daleks might well have detected his rifle's discharge, so the need for subtlety was gone.
He sent a signal for the raft to join him, and moved to the closest pontoon, planting the two mines he carried, and adding the grenades for good measure. The raft closed in, and he started using the explosives there on the second pontoon.A pressure wave slammed into him, and the water thrashed.
He hit the pontoon with a bone-jarring force.The Daleks were dropping depth charges at him. D.a.m.n.He placed the three mines he had as a second detonation slammed through the water. There was no time for any more precision work. He locked the raft on to a collision course with the final pontoon, set his jets to maximum and shot himself out of the immediate area. A third explosion slapped his back, giving him a little extra thrust, but doing no damage.He had to get out of range before triggering the mines. But if he waited too long, the Daleks might have time to remove or defuse them.
And then, in the water ahead, he saw another shape. This was no Slyther.
It was larger, bulkier and rounder.Marine Dalek.It was torpedo shaped, with the eye stalk at the point, scanning forward. Halfway down the streamlined body, parallel to itself, were the gun stick and a grappling arm. The inevitable sensor globes flowed towards the reactor at the rear that propelled the Marine Dalek through the water.h.e.l.l. There was no time to waste. Faber triggered all of his explosives at once.The pressure wave slammed into him, driving him towards the Marine Dalek.
His sensors were overloaded in the blast, and he couldn't get a clear lock on it. Thankfully, its own equipment seemed to be scrambled, too. It opened fire on him as he drew closer, but the laser fire couldn't target him properly. The water was churning and bubbling ferociously, no doubt helping to hide his shape and exact position. It also made it difficult for him to make out the Dalek clearly. He managed to free his rifle, though, as his readings started to come back on line.If his were, then so were the Dalek's.
He didn't dare wait for a clear target. Instead, he laid down a pattern of fire in the general direction of the Dalek, hoping for a lucky shot.He didn't get one. Pain lanced through his arm as the Dalek returned fire, only with greater accuracy. His right arm lost all feeling, but he was left-handed, so he still had a hold of his rifle.
And now, he'd seen the flash of the blast, he knew where the Dalek was.His return fire tore across the belly of the Marine Dalek. Metal howled ferociously in the water, ripped apart and falling.
Oil or some other liquid gushed out, like the ink from an octopus, blurring the waters. He kept firing anyway, and was rewarded with a ball of flame. He jetted on, and saw the bulk of the Dalek falling slowly out of its own cloud, towards the waiting sea bed. Its belly had been torn open, exposing the green, writhing creature within.The omnipresent scavengers closed in, tearing at the Dalek creature as it slowly drifted down to the seabed.His arm was starting to hurt badly now, and he headed towards his waiting scout ship. As he did so, he glanced back through the waters.
They were filthy with clouds of darkness, but he could see something bulky tearing itself apart, and sinking slowly into the ocean behind him.He'd succeeded in destroying the platform hopefully, before the Daleks could send out word of his attack. With any luck, Dalek Central would simply a.s.sume something had gone wrong with its platform, and that Antalin wasn't a suitable place for mining operations.Faber made it back to his ship, and was inside again in moments. He stripped off his suit, taking great care with his injured arm. He'd been hit across the biceps, which explained the horrible pain. He gave himself a shot of painkiller, and then put a regenerative pad over the wound, fixing it in place with a bandage. As he worked, the throbbing fire seemed to die down in it, and he focused now on preparing to lift off.But were all of the Daleks destroyed? His quick glimpse of the platform on the way down hadn't revealed any starships moored there, but he hadn't had the chance to do a proper scan.
Leaving the ocean might expose him to withering fire. On the other hand, if there were any Dalek survivors, staying here was suicide.He powered up his scout, and armed all of his weapons. Then, grinning savagely to himself, he gunned the engine and shot towards the skies.As he broke water, fire erupted all about him. He shot back, though he could see no targets at first. As he rose, his ship shuddered, but the shields held. His sensors had started to make sense of what was happening two Dalek hoverbouts, their single Dalek occupants blasting at his ship.
They had to be all that was left of the Dalek base, and they were trying to take him out. Faber spun his ship over, and launched one of his heat-seekers.The first hoverbout exploded, showering metal and burning fragments towards the boiling sea below. The second Dalek fired again, and then Faber targeted it, too. Pathetic, really. They didn't have the fire power to take out his ship, but it had never occurred to them not to bother attacking. It would have been totally against their nature.Alone in the skies, he banked about, and examined his handiwork. Doctor Who War Of The Daleks Part 7 summaryYou're reading Doctor Who War Of The Daleks.
This manga has been translated by Updating. Author(s): John Peel. Already has 138 views.It's great if you read and follow any novel on our website. We promise you that we'll bring you the latest, hottest novel everyday and FREE.NovelOnlineFull.com is a most smartest website for reading manga online, it can automatic resize images to fit your pc screen, even on your mobile.
Experience now by using your smartphone and access to NovelOnlineFull.com.