Bunker Soldiers

It's 1240 and a Mongol army is advancing upon the city of Kiev. Nothing can slow this force down it seems and the people of Kiev are waiting for the inevitible; they are waiting to die. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo have landed in Kiev but are denied access to the TARDIS unless they help the people of Kiev. The Doctor knows he cannot interfere with history and the siege of Kiev is something he cannot change, but there is another alien presence in the city which a desperate faction is willing to unleash in the hopes that it will help their cause.

Hmmm. Bunker Soldiers is one of the BBC Books range of novels published in 2001 and it was the second to feature Steven and Dodo with the first Doctor, although while reading it I can't shake the feeling that author Martin Day was not really interested in Dodo's presence at all. How do I know? For starters she is barely in it. I didn't think to do an actual page count but she's not a very active participant in the story at all, relegated to hanging around with another girl her age and being a bad influence on her while the Doctor goes to ask the Mongols to spare Kiev and Steven gets entire chapters of action to himself told in the first person. But Dodo's inclusion makes for placement in that short bit of time between The Gunfighters and the next story, The Savages.

There is a monster on the loose in Kiev in the story; something that can change its shape to blend in with its surroundings and something that was expected to help protect Kiev but seems to want to kill anyone in its path. Its alien origins are hinted at in the odd flashback here and there be it to the past in Russia or somewhere else loaded with technical jargon. The cover art is a bit misleading where that is concerned; it looks more like an alien from V than a shape shifter and what is described is more akin to the monster seen in 2007's Lazarus Experiment. 

I couldn't really get into this one for some reason. I'm not sure if it was the flat supporting cast of Kiev or the shift between first and third person narratives or the fact that the whole alien monster plot just didn't seem to even be necessary; the story could have worked as a purely historical tale and the effort spent pasting together a passable plot for the alien could have gone into refining the supporting cast. Or the alien presence could have been refined itself and played more of a role; it's one thing to shroud it in mystery but it's another to just crash bang resolve it within the last 20 pages of the story.  Odds are BBC Books will commission an audio book of the tale and it might make for an okay translation but I kinda hope they don't... I'd rather just put this one back on the shelf and move on...

NEXT EPISODE: THIS SPORTING LIFE