Who Killed Kennedy

Newspaperman turned investigative journalist James Stevens has been covering the news in the UK for a while now but he has started spotting something odd. There have been some strange goings on around London, starting with a tip off about a man who doesn't have human blood, to a strange deadly plague outbreak, a crisis at the space centre and a cover up at a government funded experimental drilling installation. Through it all Stevens had noticed the presence of a covert paramilitary organization called UNIT - a presence no-one will confirm but will repeatedly warn him away from. In his quest to blow the whole affair wide open and expose what he thinks is the cover-up of a lifetime Stevens begins to notice another common link to events: where there is UNIT, there is usually an operative known as "the Doctor"...

When this was first published in 1996 I was not immediately interested in it. I can't remember exactly what it was that turned me off but it may just have been the fact that it was a first person account of something not exactly a Doctor Who story - one of the first Doctor-lite tales out there but I gave it a miss anyway and carried on with the other novels which were on offer. Paul McGann had just appeared on TV as the Doctor and word was the whole Virgin Publishing line was about to end so as far as this appeared it was not even a Doctor Who novel. I walked past it a few times at Coles and never thought much about it until a couple years ago when I got a copy from eBay for $7.

Who Killed Kennedy is what I can only describe as a continuity bomb, although some might say it's just a big old fan wank. I will just say it was an ambitious idea to have someone outside the action spotting what was going on and trying to make sense of it as he follows the first two years of the Earthbound adventures of the Doctor. The question is always asked why no-one notices any of these alien invasions and how they can possibly be covered up; in a future adventure companion Ace will ask the very same question about a Dalek incursion in 1963 - Stevens knows something is going on but the truth is well hidden from the public, buried under D-notices and in some cases intimidation by thugs. Stevens does, actually, get the truth when he goes digging for it but ironically dismisses a lot of the alien invasion stories as nonsense as he believes that UNIT are some sinister force with their own world dominating agenda. Objectivity right out the window there.

The cameos come fast and furious as the pages turn, most of them coming from the stories of the first two Pertwee series including Greg Sutton and Petra Williams from Inferno, the Brigadier, Liz Shaw and even the Doctor himself. And there are some clever moments where Stevens is worked into the background of some sequences from television, including The Mind of Evil so note to self to go back to that one and actually see him.Of course it's fun to see Liz back but there is still one more past companion who gets a comeback which is far more interesting: Dodo.

The last time we saw Dodo was when the Doctor was putting her under to counteract the influence of the supercomputer WOTAN in The War Machines and then she just never came back, having decided off screen to stay in London. The abruptness of her departure irked the Doctor and seemed unrealistic at the time (as did her sudden joining of the TARDIS crew) but the retconners of the expanded universe had since revisited Dodo in Salvation, Bunker Soldiers and The Man in the Velvet Mask to redraw her as a confused, scared and tremendously insecure girl who was always putting on a facade for everyone due to her upbringing by her Aunt. That facade turned out to not be enough to shield her from the horrors she witnessed with the Doctor and when she was out of his sight she was slowly sinking into a depressed funk, so the chance to escape when it came was one she could ill afford to pass up. Flash forward to Who Killed Kennedy and Dodo is a broken woman suffering from PTSD, lonely and scared with no friends, no money and no real memories about her past except for flashes of monsters. The question I still have is whether she would have ended up this way after all or if this mental breakdown is due to WOTAN's influence or the Doctor's attempt to counter it, or maybe both.

And then came the moment I dreaded; the whole thing fell apart in a jumbled mess of predictability and science fiction cliche. You can see it coming, really, there is one line at the end of a chapter to just make you sigh "Oh no..." and then read on to another of "those" science fiction endings when it could have done so much more. The brightest side I can think of is that the ending of the story gives a better reason for the ninth Doctor to be present at the assassination of John F Kennedy than just some stunt to prove he can travel in time. I also discovered that I read it a bit too soon as well; this should be left until after Day of the Daleks to make it work right.

I wouldn't say this was a total lost opportunity for something great but really, it could have been so much more than a clever fan wank.

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