Lock-in

This book is not especially hard to get into, but finishing it really is a challenge. The whole plot centres around a group of alien beings who crashed on Earth in the thirtienth century and now a wealthy Englishman is trying to revive them, even if it means starting a nuclear war. A solid enough plot. However, its just the way it's done that I dont like. The aliens feature in it at only two points both of which are relatively short. If it wasn't for those two brief sections of the story you wouldn't know the plot even involved aliens and at times it seems to run independently of them. It does feel very Bondian at some points, especially in the parts involving the Russians and the Americans. Not a bad novel, just incredibly boring.

A better title for OPTION LOCK might be - DOCTOR WHO, OR HOW I STOPPED WORRYING ABOUT THE BOMB AND LEARNED TO LOVE SAM IN A WET T-SHIRT... and yes, the wet t-shirt does make it into this novel, and it's just as odd and misplaced as pretty much everything else found between the pages. OPTION LOCK, the Eighth 8th Doctor adventure, is an odd mix - just by reading it you can tell that nearly all of this book must have been written and submitted by Justin Richards to other publishing houses and rejected. It's a gripping tale of US nuclear policy and a secret space defense platform known as STATION NINE - with this in hand, he hammers in the Doctor and Sam, steals BIG from the Third Doctor's adventure - THE DAEMONS (almost all the plot and feel from that adventure is in OPTION LOCK - if the BBC didn't own it, and this wasn't a DOCTOR WHO novel... they would have sued), plus adds in the Fifth Doctor's THE AWAKENING - and hopes for the best. But it dosen't work - Sam and the Doctor are hardly in this novel, and even when they are, they are reduced to playing roles that just outright bore you and make you cringe (see said passage about the wet t-shirt). Sam still is one of the worst WHO companions - and I think I finally have found the reason why, and it's this: she has no skills. None. Other than biting her fingernails, hiding, and still making eyes at the Doctor - she does nothing. At least with other companions, they had a talent - Ace could fashion explosives (and she could fight), Susan was a Time Lord, Viki was a mental giant, and on and on and on... the only companions Sam might feel at home with are Mel (who never got an introduction in the series proper) and Dodo (who never got an exit - she just disappears about two episodes into THE WAR MACHINES and is never seen again) - but they are rare cases. Overall, this book is just plain dull and offers nothing new to the DOCTOR WHO universe. But, they are becoming harder to find... so if you're a collector, I recommand picking one up to make the set - but as for entertainment, you're better of either writing your own - or watching the series on tape.

OPTION LOCK is a very visual book, perhaps one of the most visual Doctor Who books I've ever read. This means that there's a lot of dialogue, a lot of action and not a lot in the way of character introspection. We get a lot of information about what things physically look like, where they are in relation to each other and comparisons to other objects. The locations are vast and sprawling. We have a large James Bond type control room with giant view screens and computers with blinking lights. It comes complete with it's own Bondian villain with a silly twitch under his eye.

This visual flavour makes the story feel more like the book version of a multi-million-dollar film that's already been shot rather than an adventure that's written specifically for the book format. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing at times and to the author's credit, it's done very well here. The visual nature of the prose leaves the reader with several of the pivotal scenes etched into the mind. It has a very large and cinematic feel to it that can be quite enjoyable if one is in the mood for that. The plot is not actually overly complicated, yet the action moves forward fast enough to keep things enjoyable.

In short, this is a fairly good, fast-paced, solid action-adventure. It's quite entertaining and if you're looking for something that's light but not at all bad, this is probably one of the early BBC books that you should look into.