UNDERWORLD

[Tony]

Here we are discussing Terrance Dicks' novelization of UNDERWORLD! If you want to hear your review of or comments on this book read on the air, or you have a specific question about the book, please post it here by no later than 5pm CST on Friday, August 13!

[Michael]

This was one of the few Tom Baker/Louise Jameson stories I had in my initial Target collection, mainly because I kept missing it when it aired on my PBS stations. (Or in one case, it was skipped).

I listened to the audiobook recently and I think it's one that deserves better (storywise) than its reputation is.

Of course, this being a Baker and Martin script, there has to be the attempt at a catchphrase with "The quest is the quest." Thankfully, Dicks keeps inclusions of this to a minimum and they never feel quite as forced upon the consumer as they do on-screen. I have to be honest and say my only memories of this one are the connection to the Time Lords and some dodgy CSO that was done to cut the budget. Dicks wisely puts the Time Lord connection front and center with a prologue that feels right out of his Jon Pertwee era novels and then minimize the amount of time the novel spends corridor running down various CSO corridors. The final episode feels fairly condensed on the printed page, possibly because it's just so many battles between various parties that can be easily summed up in a paragraph or two.

I can't help but feel like this one takes one of the themes of classic Star Trek with a computer that is bent upon keeping and maintaining its power and status within a society that seems to be stuck in neutral. Indeed, the Doctor pulls his own version of Captain Kirk using illogical logic to defeat said computer in the final pages -- though in this case, it's the Doctor pulling the old switch the McGuffin trick instead.

[Damon]

Not one of the TV stories I remember very well but this book is okay, again lots of tunnels instead of corridors to run down.

Another computer gone rogue so not the most inventive story plot, a good ending though.

3 stars

[Dave]

Another story where the effects were so bad that the book is automatically an improvement. Except that, once again, my memory has lied to me. There is a lot of CSO, and it's fairly obvious so spoils the illusion somewhat, but it's not as bad as I thought I 'd remembered. Nevertheless, the book did benefit from rereading it before rewatching the TV version.
Dicks adds a bit of back story for the Minyans, but otherwise it's pretty much script to page. I'm OK with that as the mythology element is left intact. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed spotting the references to Jason/Jackson, Persephone/ P7E and so on.
The original writers, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, had by this time aquired a reputation for including hackneyed catchphrases in their stories, such as "Eldrad must live!" or "Contact has been made." This time it's "the quest is the quest", and it fits the story rather better than the others fit theirs. The crew are beyond tired, so anything they habitually say is going to sound tired and cliched.
Sadly, though the book improves the story in some ways, it also reveals a big flaw. At its heart, this story has strong echoes of "The Sunmakers", with an underclass of local yokels, and we focus on Idas who, in the book, is a clone of Cordo, the difference here being the father lives. Without pictures, parts of the two stories are so interchangeable, I kept expecting Gatherer Hade to appear on the P7E.