The Murder Game

In the year 2136 the Doctor receives a mysterious mayday call directed at the TARDIS. The message does not say who it is from but only that he is needed, so along with Polly and Ben the Doctor arrives at the disused Hotel Galaxian where a host of people are there to play a murder mystery game. Hoping to make contact with the message's sender, the Doctor joins in but soon things become too real with an actual murder and then another for them to solve. But the Doctor suspects there is more going on, and his suspicions are confirmed with the arrival of a savage alien race known as the Selachians, and they are not there to play games.

So despite it being a Steve Lyons novel, whose work I usually enjoy, I was not really as taken with this one as I wanted to be. Maybe because I don't like murder mystery games to start with, or maybe because the players here are a pretty unlikely sort who all seem to want to be elsewhere (which begs the question why be on the station in the first place) and to top it they're all kinda cliche'd characters at that. This applies to our main cast as well; they don't feel as real as they should for some reason. At this point, though, Ben and Polly are still coming to terms with the Doctor's regeneration so they might still be a bit guarded around him but they're openly saying they trust him and are his best friends.There is even a bit of development for Polly and Ben's relationship, with hints about their future descendants tossed in which the Doctor is quick to shush up. Oh and Polly was, apparently, a model in London before she became a secretary for Professor Brett. Imagine that - a model and then a secretary, although this kind of life doesn't exactly stick with the posh image of her pre-TARDIS life alluded to in Steven Cole's Ten Little Aliens (although this one was published first). Ben gets knocked out a couple times, although the truth is if you get hit hard enough to lose consciousness your brain would turn to goo, so more than once in one novel would have Ben with as many brain bleeds as professional boxer. And one of the vapid female players of the game takes to Ben and makes Polly jealous, although every time it happens there's this internal dialogue Polly has about what right she has to be jealous.

The era the novel is set in is a bit of a strange choice. The back of the book says it's 2146 but once I started reading I saw it was 2136 so for a while I thought there was going to be some 10 year time jump in the plotline, but it turned out to be a typo. Still, whichever year it is, it's worth noting that the Daleks would / will invade Earth around 2158; it may have been 1964 television production values but The Dalek Invasion of Earth didn't seem to be on the same wavelength as this book where futuristic notions like orbiting hotels are concerned. Colony worlds maybe - there's a sly reference to a planet called Terra Alpha which will feature in a seventh Doctor adventure but again, placement seems odd as those events were purportedly some centuries in Earth's future.

The only thing I can think of is that the book was either written in hurry or a "safe" way; BBC Books had only just started making their own novels and their mandate was to pick up from the Virgin Publishing books but in a less graphic way, which meant the violence and sex was cut right down for the first few, and as a whole the series started getting this "dumbed-down" feel to it. The Murder Game was one of the first in the new line and could have been a hasty self edit re-write of something that was going to be submitted to Virgin until their license went away.

Lyons attempts to so something every Doctor Who writer dreams of, though: create a legacy monster to rival the Daleks. The Selachians are very similar to the Daleks in many ways; physically they are not powerful creatures if they are removed from their native marine environments, so they have created fearsome shark-like exosuits to carry them places they cannot go. They are merciless monsters but they differ from the Daleks in that they try to make deals with other races who they deem beneath them but save the contempt until they are on the offensive. The Selachians have gone as far as to create luxurious areas in their space cruiser for business dealings to put prospective clients at ease, and they have enough aesthetic sense to realize that Polly is attractive and can be used as their PR agent, which is great because he she was a model and a secretary, right?

Was this supposed to be a comedy?

Despite being a bit too over the top for me as villains, the Selachians impressed the BBC Books folks enough to return for another novel sometime later, but also made the jump into audio with Big Finish a couple times. In this outing, though, I'm not sure how that happened. At least it won't be for a while.

NEXT EPISODE: DYING IN THE SUN