Deadly Reunion

Somewhere after the end of the Second World War, Lieutenant Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart is on a recce in Greece. Separated from his division he meets a family of three living in isolation in the countryside and is drawn towards the eldest daughter, Sephie. Before he knows it, he is in love, and finds himself drawn into the family's secret: they are the last of the Greek gods and Hades, lord of the underworld, is making a push for power once again. Flash forward to the UNIT days and Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart has his hands full with a massive pop concert which he knows is just a big drug deal in disguise. But the supplier, a Mr Hadley, has much bigger plans than simply recreating Woodstock. The Doctor has suspicions that an affluent family watching from the sidelines can help. And the Brigadier thinks he knows the girl.

This one was really hard for me to read. Hard because it was not enjoyable. Penned by the duo of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks - the elder statesmen of the Pertwee era - I thought this was going to be a defining piece of literature, something we fans of the classic era would devour and scream to the heavens why oh why was THIS not made on television. The answer is because it's not very good. Oh sure it's got everything it needs to be good, it's got the UNIT crew together and it's got the architects of the whole UNIT putting the words together, only they really aren't good prose writers. I realize this sort of statement doesn't sit well with a lot of fans of this duo and it is not meant to be a major slag-off - without them the series would probably have died in the early 70s but their skills were not in writing the scripts but in taking them and imagining them for the screen.

Part one of the book is set in the Brig's pre-UNIT days and he's a lot more optimistic in his youth. He falls for Sephie pretty hard, and she in turn for him, and literally goes through Hell for her with the assistance of her brother, Hermy. The entire first half of this story is like this, which would have been fine as a story of its own instead of cut down to serve as a really long prologue to a Doctor Who story. It's set far enough back to not really collide with the recent Lethbridge Stewart series which ran mostly parallel to the final season with Troughton in the role, and it does pay homage to the New Adventures continuity of the Brig's relationship with his eventual wife (then ex-wife in Scales of Injustice) Fiona. It just feels so... slow. This was the part of the book that really took me the longest amount of time, and it's not because the Brigadier's early years are not interesting by any stretch, it's just not written with any real style.

When we get to the second part where the Doctor is present, there's a jump in the quality of the writing and although the descriptive narrative is a bit thin, the characterizations are spot on - so good one can almost hear the voices of the actors and "see" them interacting. There's not a lot of detail added to the characters though, mostly because Dicks (I'm sure this was the part he wrote) assumes we already know them inside and out (and maybe we do, this was actually published in 1993 as a bit of a 40th anniversary special) so why take them anywhere new. There's continuity to be observed of course, but a lot can still be done within its bounds. Of course no celebration of the show (or at least this era of it) is complete without the Master, and when he does make his appearance it's actually not that impressive or necessary. He is actually pretty inconsequential to the story and his presence is just a waste of him - I can see he was tossed in as an ingredient to a UNIT era story but he deserved better than to just be a bit player.

Man that was rough to read though. The lesson here should be just because you feel you should be nostalgic doesn't mean you just just go ahead and do it for its own sake. A 40th anniversary special should have had more meat to it, and really either half of Deadly Reunion would have served well if it had been fully developed instead of just being squished together under the anniversary banner. Anniversary stories run this risk of turning into nonsense as it is, one only has to look at what was served up in 2013 for the 50th for proof of that.

Oh well. Back to the DVDs...

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