WHO Audio: "Prisoner of the Daleks" by Trevor Baxendale

WHO Audio: Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale, 2009, Wisconsin Digital Library.

An original novel and enjoyable.

The Doctor is by himself when the Tardis makes a goofy landing on a abandoned planet that was once used as a refueling place for starships. When poking around he gets locked into a room. Six days later the small crew of a privateer lands and lets him out. Then some Daleks show up.

The Daleks are there to EXTERMINATE. The spaceship crew are there as Dalek bounty hunters. the Doctor is there to be the Doctor.

When a Dalek follows the crew onto their ship a crew member is killed before the Dalek can be frozen and ultimately defeated and killed. These is immediate distrust and dislike of the Doctor by the rough guy crew who end up blaming him for their crewmate's death.

The Doctor does not ease the relationship by advocating against torturing the surviving Dalek squid-thing-creature after he is pulled from his robot shell. It doesn't matter because everything is a set-up anyway as the Doctor and crew arrive at the remains of a destroyed planet, are captured by new Daleks, and discover they have stumbled into a trap for EXTERMINATION.

We get the irrepressible Doctor. The gruff ship's captain. The gruff ex-soldier crewman. The tech crewman. The last surviving member of her planet crewmember. Dalek X who is the Dalek's supreme inquisitor. Plus some: scary Daleks, some sort of ghost creatures, a planet cut in half, humans worked to death as miners, a massive Dalek command ship, more details on the Human-Dalek War.

All fun. All better than the many WHO TV story arcs I have listened to on audio. Those TV shows with descriptive narration can have really spotty audio.

EXTERMINATE.