Plot
Captain Karl Taylor is sent to investigate mysterious alien signals from the Moon, but the sights and sounds of the alien "city" he encounters are entirely incomprehensible to human perceptions. Taylor thus orders his people to open fire, apparently fearing that they are under attack. This is the start of a war between the alien Myloki and PRISM, the secret organisation created to fight the invaders. The Myloki attack by transforming ordinary human beings into their puppets; most are merely drone-like zombies known as Shiners, but two are different. One is Captain Taylor, who is sent back to Earth as a walking, indestructible, reanimated corpse, an emotionless killing machine. The other is Captain Grant Matthews, who is killed and duplicated while on a routine escort mission; however, his duplicate is caught and deprogrammed of his Myloki conditioning, and, like Taylor, is found to be literally indestructible.
The Doctor and SILOET's Colonel Storm trace PRISM's Lieutenant Verdana to a private hospice in Barbados, where his body is slowly wasting away, perhaps due to the hours he spent monitoring the Myloki's unfathomably alien signals during the war. He is bitter that he has been condemned to this slow death while Matthews, a jumped-up clerk and chauffeur, became immortal; this is why he wrote the book exposing PRISM. He refuses to help track down Matthews, but when he makes a snide comment about Matthews' rich friends, Storm deduces where Matthews must be. Storm offers to put Verdana out of his misery, but Verdana refuses, determined to cling on to life until the bitter end. As the Doctor and Storm leave the hospice, Storm admits to the Doctor that he was a mercenary for hire before the war; SILOET Commander Bishop freed him from a Polish prison and gave him the authority to kill whoever he had to in order to defeat the Myloki.
John Sharon – once the wild child of the Sharon family, who run Global Response – is now working as a doctor for an isolated tribe in a tropical rainforest. A nearby village was recently struck by a blast from the Myloki grid, and the Doctor chips in to help John tend to those affected by the blast; like everything else touched by the Myloki, however, their bodies have been warped by contact with the alien energy, and the Doctor knows that he can do nothing to save the victims' lives. John eventually explains to the Doctor that the people of the world turned on Matthews, fearing what he had become, after Verdana's exposé revealed his secret; Matthews turned to John's father Buck for help, and he agreed to let Matthews hide out on the Sharons' private island. As far as John knows, Matthews is still there. However, John is torn by conflicting emotions regarding his family and his inability to live up to their shining example, and when the Doctor sees that the photographs of John's beloved family members have been repeatedly defaced, he realises there is nothing he can do to help the unfortunate man.
Reception
The novel has received mixed reviews. Mark Campbell, author of Robinson's Doctor Who: The Complete Guide, rates it 8 out of 10. [4] Richard McGinlay of sci-fi-online.com calls it "an intriguing book, but sadly not tremendously riveting. The narrative reads like a sequence of events that are not strung together very tightly by the slender plot. Still, it should help you to destroy a few long winter evenings, especially if you're an Anderson fan." [5]
In a review for Doctor Who Magazine , Matt Michael wrote that The Indestructible Man is "every bit as steeped in Anderson lore (sometimes impenetrably so) as [its] cover suggests". He commented that although the novel begins well, Zoe's subplot is thinly written and the story's "energy and focus" drop during the scenes set on SKYHOME. While he found the Myloki memorable for being "truly unknowable" villains, he criticised the abundance of "charmless expository dialogue", combined with "camp" and eventually "grating" Anderson references ill fitting the sobriety of the plot. He concluded: "Epic in scope, fast paced and never boring, but undermined by some poor jokes and occasionally crass execution, The Indestructible Man is perhaps more of a Terrahawks than a Captain Scarlet." [1]
Chris Bentley, who has authored books on the Anderson productions, writes that Messingham "[pulls] off the difficult trick of combining the format of Gerry Anderson's [...] series with that of Doctor Who's 1968 season to present a gripping, action-packed and thoughtful story which transcended all expectations of such a 'novelty' crossover." He adds that the story contains "serious examination" of the "physical and emotional deterioration" that an interplanetary conflict might cause. According to Bentley, the novel was "largely dismissed by reviewers in the Doctor Who camp, who found the Anderson references intrusive." [3]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
