DW: Prisoner of the Daleks

Will the third highly mysterious evil guest villains please sign in? Who could it be, in Prisoner of the Daleks, by Trevor Baxendale.

Okay, I have been a fan of Trevor Baxendale, but this does not rate as one of his better novels. Or a good novel in general. Somehow the Doctor is in pre-Time War time (really? that can happen?) and encounters the Daleks in a year that we never find out, but I kept thinking of this as happening during the Big Finish Dalek Empire series. He encounters a group of Dalek bounty hunters (although none are called even a slight variant of Tannant), but soon uncover a Dalek plot that probably means the end of everything, but if the entirety of reality isn't at stake apparently we aren't in a proper Doctor Who story.

As for being a Prisoner of the Daleks, that's a lot of a wet noodle. May as well have called the story Dalek instead Prisoner of van Statten for all the Prisoner-ering there is.

The bounty hunters themselves are extremely generic: the aggressive one, the grizzled captain, the engineer, the one that dies at the beginning... not a lot of originality here. The Doctor doesn't get huge reams of character development either. He doesn't like Daleks. Ooh, now there's deep insight.

Even with the Daleks, even with Baxendale writing, I still can't recommend this.

Order: Whatever.

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