I approached "Shakedown" with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension -- anticipation that Terrance would be able to return to "Exodus" form and apprehension that this might turn out to be another "Blood Harvest".

Unfortunately, "Shakedown" is the kind of book which makes "Blood Harvest" look _good_.

"Shakedown" is plagued by a number of problems, not the least of which is Dicks' apparent inability to capture the Seventh Doctor. He didn't do too badly in "Exodus", but he was well off the mark in "Blood Harvest" and this is enforced here, as the Doctor drifts between Troughton's interpretation and just some kind of generalized Doctor figure. Cwej is a terrible caricature of his true self, lame-brained and hulking. A friend of mine recently asked if Roz was named after the character in "Night Court"; and suggested Cwej was analogous to Bull. I disagreed with him... but "Shakedown" certainly makes me doubt that view. Roz herself is really pretty faceless, although Terrance does occasionally write a scene which demonstrates flashes of her character. Of all the main cast, only Benny comes across nicely, her paranoia as she finds herself unable to trust anyone on Sentarion intriguingly portrayed.

The supporting characters are, almost to a man, faceless and boring. Karne, so interesting in "Lords of the Storm", becomes little more than a generic monster; even the Rutan in general are less interesting. The Sontarans are unremarkable and the cast of the Tiger Moth (about which more in a moment) are non-starters, Dicks apparently relying on knowledge of the video to get this aspect across (and, since far more people will read the book than see the video, this is a rather bad idea). Only the Ogron police chief and his underlings really fired my interest, but of course they disappeared a quarter of the way through.

Far more disappointing, however, is the plot, which comes across as a series of set pieces whose only raison d'etre is to support the novelization of the "Shakedown" video at the novel's center. It's astonishing, then, to see how poorly the video fits into the book. Not only does Dicks spend sixty pages concentrating intensely on half a dozen characters -- most of whom will never even be referred to again -- but he then has to spend much of the rest of the book undoing what was done in the video: Steg has to be resurrected (in an embarrassingly amateurish manner), as does Karne, and the "happy ending" of the video has to be undercut to reinvolve Lisa and Kurt in the action (not that they make any real impact in the rest of the book, anyway). The video segment of the book sits uncomfortably, obviously shoehorned in, really just a distraction and a page-filler as the reader waits to get back to the important part of the story.

"Shakedown" ends up as a poor example of how to expand a "short story" (ie the video) into a full novel. It is Doctor Who at its most vapid and most boring, and only Terrance's ever-crisp prose makes it at all readable. Despite being a banner year for the New Adventures, 1995 ends with an unmistakable whimper.

4/10.

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