Title: Shada
Author: Douglas Adams and Gareth Roberts
Publisher: BBC Books
Rating: Worthy
I can't believe I'm reviewing a Doctor Who book! Doctor Who is very much a visual medium and it's very much influenced by the personalities of the guy playing the doctor and the people playing his companions, so I never read the books, but I decided to make an exception for this particular one since it's canonical (in an important sense!) and since it is Douglas Adams, after all! You can read my reviews of the Doctor Who TV shows here (reboot seasons 1 - 5) and here (reboot season 6 and onwards).
Shada is a novel taken from an untelevised (due to a strike and the ep only being some 50% completed) TV script written by Douglas Adams for the long-running Doctor Who TV series - which is in its fiftieth anniversary year this year. Adams is best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a series of novels in which I've never had the slightest interest, nor in the radio series, nor in the TV show, nor in the movie! I do like Adams, though and went to a lecture given by him on one occasion which was quite entertaining.
I've also read Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic written by Monty Python's Terry Jones based on an idea by Adams, and published in 1997. That was good. Even better was the non-fiction Last Chance to See written by Adams with Mark Carwardine, and published in 1990. This book focused on animals facing extinction and was a most enjoyable read.
Though this episode was untelevised because it was never completed, it was later put together as a show for the DVD release. This ep is shorter, because there is much missing, but it is narrated by an older Tom Baker, with his hair somewhat silvered, and minus the mass of curls it sported when he played The Doc. The image quality is somewhat lacking, too, just so you know.
Shada is evidently the Time Lord prison planet, although neither The Doc nor Romana recognize the name. This amnesia is explained admirably in the story, which concerns a villain by the name of Skagra, who escapes confinement by stealing the minds of his five fellow confinees and somehow makes it to Earth. He has discovered that there is a book secreted away in a professor's office in Cambridge university which is from the Time Lord home planet of Gallifrey and which contains ancient and secret knowledge of one of the founding fathers of Time Lord society: the great Rassillon himself. The professor, a Time Lord himself, also happens to have a TARDIS in his room!
As Skagra looks from a bridge over the River Cam (in Cambridge, of course!), who should be punting beneath it but the fourth doctor and his then companion, Romana. It's a clip from this sequence which is one of two clips from this episode which are used in the Five Doctors - an anniversary episode in which Baker, for reasons unknown, declined to appear. In that anniversary ep, The Doc and Romana are captured (as are the other doctors) but the capture goes wrong and the two are trapped in the time vortex (or something!), thereby explaining why they don't appear in the rest of the show until the very end.
It’s heartening for us amateur writers to note that even a professional of Adams's stature screws up! On page 20, The Doc is punting, thrusting his punt pole into the dirty water, and then in quite literally the next sentence, Romana is trailing her fingers in the clear water! Romana is played by The Honorable Lalla Ward, who was once married to Tom Baker (who plays the fourth doctor in this episode) but is now married to Richard Dawkins, who was introduced to her by Douglas Adams!
Romana is one of the only two companions the Doc has had who has also been a Time Lord. The first such companion was his own Granddaughter, Susan, who hung out with the first doctor back in the mid-sixties. Romana is known as Romana 2 because she is a Time Lord who had regenerated in the show and was being played a this point by a new actress to the part.
As The Doc and Romana pass under the bridge, they both hear faint voices, which are indistinct, but which sound like people suffering and calling out for help. On the bridge is a guy wearing a silver cape and carrying a carpetbag. He is Skagra, and those voices are coming from a sphere he carries with him which contains the knowledge and experiences of his five companions from Shada.
Both he and The Doc (with Romana) make their separate ways to professor Chronotis's room. The groundskeeper, who knows The Doc, lets him in, but refuses access to Skagra, who retreats back to his ship, capturing the mind, and stealing the car of a human on his way. Why he didn’t do this same thing to the groundskeeper is an unexplained plot hole! It’s heartening for us amateur writers to note that even a professional of Adams's stature screws up!
In Chronotis's office, The Doc and Romana learn of this dangerous book, but the professor cannot find it. It turns out that one of his students took it by accident when he was borrowing some books from the professor earlier that day. This same student, Chris, is also conducting experiments on the book because he as discovered it has some very weird properties indeed. He calls a girl of his acquaintance, Clare, someone with whom he would love to strike up an intimate relationship, to share his discoveries with her.
While Romana is in the TARDIS retrieving some milk for the endless cups of tea they drink, Skagra suddenly shows up at Chronotis's room and extracts his mind into the grey sphere. Now Chronotis is one of those many voices the sphere contains. Romana returns after Skragra has left, to discover that Chronotis is dying. As she applies a med-collar to try and preserve his life, Chris shows up. Chronotis is only able to give them a cryptic warning about Skagra, using his hearts-beat as a form of Morse code!
Romana discovers that The Doc is in trouble, and takes the TARDIS to rescue him. Meanwhile Skagra has encountered the Doc, who has the book, and given chase. The Doc loses him, but cannot lose the sphere. In his haste to escape, he loses the book, which Skagra recovers. He's saved from the sphere by Romana retrieving him in the TARDIS (this is the second clip used in The Five Doctors). They return to Christ to discover that Chronotis has dematerialized. The Doc then reveals that Chronotis must have been on the last of his twelve Time lord regenerations, and is now gone forever. But he's really not. And indeed, he's really not Chronotis either!
The three of them enter the TARDIS and give pursuit when they detect another event with the sphere, and they end up in a field outside Cambridge, where Skagra's spaceship is parked, but made invisible to outsiders. The three of them enter the ship, and are separated, Romana, Chris and the robot dog confined in one room from which they cannot escape, and The Doc with Skagra, who uses the sphere to extra The Doc's mind when he will not agree to help Skagra. Romana is sprung from her imprisonment by Skagra and he steals the TARDIS, using The Doc's mind to open and fly it. He takes her to an asteroid way out in space, where he has set up his base of operations. Part of his operation is creation the Kraag, sentient beings made from crystallized carbon, which do his every bidding. He orders the head Kraag to set production of Kraags into overdrive.
The Doc, whom Romana had thought dead, revives. He had fooled the sphere into thinking he was dumber than he is, and so only a distorted part of his mind was extracted. Now the ship's sentience thinks he is dead, and no therefore longer an enemy of Skagra, so according to its limited logic, he is not a threat. This gives The Doc some leeway to ask favors of the ship, including taking them to the last place which Skagra was at before he went to Earth.
The last place Skagra was at was, of course, the prison he was in. The Doc and Chris visit that while Chris's girlfriend discovers that Professor Chronotis isn't quite as dead as he seemed, and his room at Cambridge is actually an old TARDIS, which is in working order, even though he isn't supposed to have one. Meanwhile Romana tries and fails to dupe Skagra!
Finally I finished this. It seems like it took forever to get through it, but it's only been a week! Graham wraps up the novel nicely by bringing Skagra to book in a delightful way when all seems lost, and getting Chris and Clare together as you knew he would. Note that while the screenplay and notes for the Doctor Who story were written by Adams, it was Graham who turned it into a novel and I think he's done a fine job. He lets Adams shine through, and emulates the latter's wit and writing style admirably where he had to fill in the blanks. He explains exactly how it was done in an afterword. I recommend this novel to anyone who is a fan of Adams and/or of the Doctor Who TV series.
