‘Doctor Who and the Power of Kroll’ – Terrance Dicks (Target)

 


Page Count: 128 Pages

Despite all my best intentions, my reading plans pretty much collapsed, over the last few days, and there was only one thing left to do… Rip up all my plans and start again! It’s not like I don’t have plenty of other books to choose from when I hit a slump ;o)

And where better a place to pick myself up and start again than another old ‘Doctor Who’ Target novelisation? Nope, me neither ;o) For far too many years, ‘The Power of Kroll’ had sat, filed under ‘Hadn’t read it since I was a very young Graeme, vague memories of not being that impressed’ but I saw a cheap copy and had to give it another go. I mean, it couldn’t have been that bad… Could it?

Well… ‘Six or seven year old me’ was a far harsher critic than ‘middle-aged, just wants a little fun with his reading’ me but I can kind of see where he was coming from…

The huge, octopus-like Kroll lived deep in the swamps of the humid, steamy planet.

To the native swamp-warriors, Kroll was an angry, mythical god. To the money-grabbing Thawn, Kroll was a threat to his profit-making schemes.

In their search for another segment of the Key to Time, the Doctor and Romana have to face the suspicion of the Lagoon dwellers, the scheming of Thawn and, finally, the power of Kroll itself…

Luckily for ‘The Power of Kroll’, it’s pretty much a universal law that it’s impossible to screw up a story that involves a giant octopus or equivalent monster with tentacles. Think about it and you’ll see that I’m right. Okay… Hush, you. Maybe don’t think about it too much ;o) Anyway…

Kroll makes for a surprisingly decent foe for the Doctor to face; its pure animal instincts offer a different type of challenge, for the Doctor, and it has tentacles that liable to attack you when you least expect it. And did I mention that Kroll is absolutely massive? It is, Kroll is absolutely massive. So, a huge (almost mindless) force of nature that still has the capacity for a jump scare, here and there, as well as battering the hell out of the landscape . Terrance Dicks delivers on both fronts here so, see? I was right about ‘giant octopus media’ automatically being great ;o)

It’s a bit of a shame then that the rest of the plot doesn’t quite match the sheer spectacle of a ‘pissed off Kroll’. Neither Thawn nor Ranquin are particularly interesting and that’s not a good thing when you’re meant to be the villains of the piece, especially when Kroll just steals the show. And a plot that boils down to the Doctor rowing back and forth across a lagoon, annoying people on both sides, is only going to go so far as well. Dicks does a great job of capturing the Fourth Doctor’s irreverent humour, as usual, so Kroll to one side, it wasn’t a complete loss. It just felt a little threadbare.

To be fair, ‘The Power of Kroll’ probably works a lot better when placed in the context of the ‘Key to Time’ series as a whole. On it’s own, there’s just not enough to the plot for it to stand on its own. It does have a ‘Giant Octopus Creature’ though so on the whole, I was happy ;o)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Conan the Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone’ – Zub, Scharf, Canola (Titan Comics, Heroic Signatures)

Image
It’s starting to look like this could be the week where I make a half decent dent in my ‘Comics TBR Pile’, lets see how we do... I’ve really been struggling with the ‘Savage Sword of Conan’ collection just recently (more than one reason but I want to finish the collection first before I talk about it) and I thought that I’d have to take a little step back from ‘Conan’ comics and come back when I was in a better mood for it. Until I realized that there was another ‘Conan’ comic lurking in the TBR pile and maybe I could give that a go instead. So that’s what I did. I’ve caught little glimpses of the ‘Black Stone’ storyline, in other ‘Conan’ comics, but I can’t help but feel that the event has kind of passed me by a little. That’s on me though to be fair, I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish right now and there are so many books that I just haven’t been able to focus on; I suspect a couple of them talk about a Black Stone… Oh well, I’m here now. Where better a place to catch up on ‘B...
Read more

‘Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth’ (1992)

Image
Every time Halloween comes round, I promise myself that I’ll watch more horror films and read more horror fiction; we’re halfway through the month and you can see how that’s going so far… There’s still plenty of October left though so lets see how I do from now until the end of the month ;o) First up is ‘Hellraiser 3’ which I watched last night, mostly because I love it (you can tell how this post is going to go, sorry…) but also because it was cheap on Prime and I’m still just on the wrong side of payday. Here goes… TV reporter Joey Summerskill’s life is changed forever when she witnesses the horrific death of a teenager, torn apart by bloody chains. Joey’s search for a story leads her to the Lament Configuration Box but it has already been opened, waking an old evil from its slumber… Now Pinhead walks the earth once more, creating a new army of Cenobites from the transmuted flesh of his victims; his one desire to reclaim the Box. Even with help from an unexpected source, Joey Summers...
Read more

‘Dig Me No Grave’ – Robert E. Howard

Image
  Page Count: Fourteen Pages, eight lines and two words (sorry, it has been one of those weeks) I was looking for something short and sweet, to end the week on, and came across ‘Dig Me No Grave’ courtesy of Paperback Warrior’s write-up . Having read it, I can attest to it being short (all of fourteen and a bit pages in ‘The Dead Remember’ collection) but sweet? Not at all and that is meant in the best possible way :o) ‘Dig Me No Grave’ was originally published in the February 1937 of ‘Weird Tales’ and while it has appeared in other collections since then, I read it in ‘The Dead Remember (The Dark Man Omnibus: Volume 2) and also found it in my copy of ‘The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. If you’re an e-reading type, you can grab yourself ‘Dig Me No Grave’ over at Project Gutenberg. John Kirowan is woken, in the middle of the night, by his friend John Conrad, bearer of bad news and come to beg a favour. The occultist John Grimlan has just died and Conrad asks that Kirowan att...
Read more