War Crimes

"The Time Lords were putting the War Lords' crimes to rights."

Writer: Simon Bucher-Jones

Format: Short Trips

Released: March 1998

Printed in: Short Trips 03

Featuring: Second Doctor, Jamie, Zoe

Synopsis

From Neolitch Earth to the furthest reaches of the universe in the far future, Short Trips brings together established Doctor Who authors and first-time writers in a collection of stories exploring the ever-changing worlds of the Doctor and his friends.

Witness the last days of the siege of Masada with the First Doctor and meet the Fourth Doctor's extraordinary 'old flame'. An evil enemy makes life difficult for the Seventh and Third Doctors, and while the Fifth Doctor is under attack on a sinister ship shrouded in fog, the Second may soon be guilty of a grave error of judgement... The Sixth Doctor's hopes of a holiday are dashed when he discovers a pleasure planet is hiding a shocking secret, and the Eighth Doctor is caught up in a deadly drama played out during the construction of Stonehenge.

And, of course, that's just the beginning...

Verdict

War Crimes was a decent little story to continue my reading of the Short Trips collection of prose adventures! It's a great idea and with the variations of Short Trips anthologies across prose and audio, and now having its own Big Finish series, it's staggering to think of just how many stories there are comprising this range now. Probably more than is possible for me to blog in a lifetime! Especially with how rare some of the later Big Finish books are. But alas, here we start with the third ever Short Trip and it's definitely adhering to what is on the label with it coming in at just ten pages long. That really isn't a huge amount of time to tell a story so I was very surprised that the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe turned up with just three pages to go! I was fully expecting them not to feature at all given how things started and that was completely fine. The War Games goes down as my absolutely favourite Doctor Who story of all time so getting any kind of continuity or extension of it is brilliant in my eyes. We had that with Save Yourself in The Target Storybook but this one did it first! And it's not quite as good as that one, but it's fun to explore. Getting an insight to the plan of the War Lords with a brief memo and how they considered races other than humanity for their War Games was magnificent and it's intriguing to think of how different things would be if a different warmongering species was chosen. Having an insert from the Time Lords and their cleanup operation was also great and I liked the suggestion that some quarters of the Prydonian ranks advocated for those other species trialled that they just be killed as crimes against war. That was staggering from a race like the Time Lords! The planet of Ulk-Ra and how it was impacted by the War Lords was a good exploration into the far reaching impact the events of their actions caused and it was clearly a planet where the local species were in the middle of evolution. It felt very contained with all of the forestry which gave it an interesting feel, and the Aelckluk clan with Ossu-male the focal character made for good light reading. It didn't really amount to anything but in a story like this that was absolutely fine. It was just nice to read along. Once the TARDIS did arrive, it was clear the story took place during The War Games episode 10 which was wonderful to think about as that episode really did change Doctor Who forever, in so many ways. And here was a brief glimpse we didn't get to see on screen with the Doctor trying to escape his fate. The species they had encountered was being examined quite comically by the Doctor and Zoe and that was all down to Jamie not having a clue. He didn't have time for all of the scientific jargon and had his own simple terminology for what happened to the beastie. That was really nice and even though the trio barely featured, it was a fantastic use of their characters. Things ended a little abruptly, but tying everything back to the Doctor thinking of Jamie and Zoe and having to endure them losing their memories always hits hard. Overall, a good little read!

Rating: 7/10