Episode 54: Shakedown

The Doctor Who Book Club Podcast

Following up our discussion of Lords of the Storm, we read its sequel Shakedown by Terrance Dicks. Shakedown was originally conceived as a short fan film featuring the Sontarans, a solar sailing crew, and one very evil Rutan. Dicks eventually adapted it into this Virgin New Adventure, but faced the challenge of working with a Doctor Who-inspired script which actually doesn't feature the Doctor at all. The result is a three-part novel with the original story sandwiched between two parts featuring the Doctor and his companions. From the back cover:

'The Sontarans can never defeat us. It is we who will win.'

For thousands of years the Sontaran clone-warriors and the Rustan gestalt have fought each other across the galaxy. Now the Sontarans have a plan to strike at the heart of the Rutan Empire, and utterly defeat the Rutan race.

The Doctor has his suspicions, but only one Rutan spy knows the Sontarans' secret. He is being pursued from planet to planet by Cwej and Forrester and by a Sontaran hit squad. After a confrontation about the racing space-yacht Tiger Moth, the chase culimates on the library planet Sentarion - where Professor Bernice Summerfield's researches into the history of the Sontaran/Rutan war turn into explosive reality.

Although Terrance Dicks is known primarily as the show's script editor and author of the Target novelizations, he has written a handful of novels for the different ranges, including The Eight Doctors and World Game, both of which we have discussed on earlier episodes.

So sit back and relax with a glass of rekkar (with a beer chaser) and listen in as we talk about Shakedown.

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