EDA #8 Option Lock

Option Lock by Justin Richards

In Brief: The Doctor and Sam must confront a country estate, a secret society and a hidden space-station.

The plot: The Tardis is forced to land near an English country estate which several hundred years earlier had been the landing site of a crashed alien ship. As an escape pod said aliens were able to put their "essence" into a stone which gradually gathers enough power to recreate them. To this end it controls the old families of the region to do its bidding and provide a large amount of energy. A plot is hatched to try to force several nuclear missiles to hit the house so that the aliens can emerge. The Doctor thwarts all.

I wanted to get "the plot" out of the way so I can stop trying to remember what actually happened in the book. While Option Lock is better than Kursaal that's hardly high praise. It's just another average entry, not bad but in no way interesting. Also it has a problem of containing only enough story to really fill about 70% of its pages. Although it's not as padded as Kursaal there's still a lot of the book which could have been edited out without the novel suffering.

I'm really starting to miss the amibition of the New Adventures. While not loved by all there was always a sense of the range trying something new to see what worked (and what occasionally didn't). There's just too much of an "aim for the middle" mentality with much of the recent books. There's nothing particularly wrong with the range trying to be more "straight-forward", but it doesn't have to mean the results are dull.

A big problem is that most authors have yet to be able to make the Eighth Doctor and Sam interesting. Sam is just too generic and old-school and no authors seems able to fill out her character at all. While The Doctor fares somewhat better removing the darker aspects of the character means the result can be a bit too light, the mystery has been reduced a bit too much. With the surrounding story and characters don't grab the imagination the result is rather flat.

However Richards can at least put together some decent prose, but the book needed a lot more. What was irritating is that some parts of the book were somewhat interesting, particularly early on as The Doctor investigates the background of the large house in which he finds himself a guest. It led to some early hoped which was unfortunately dashed.

After the promising start the book suffers after a sudden lurch into Mission: Impossible territory with stolen codes and secret nuclear bases. Then it meanders around a bit more before becoming a boring sub-James Bond ending involving secret underground lairs and space-bases. However at least the main antagonist, the hypnotist Mr. Silver *didn't* turn out to be The Master. The series doesn't need any more returning villains.

But at the end, while by no means a bad book, Option Lock is a rather mediocre entry in the Eighth Doctor Adventures. Here's hoping that the series improves soon.