A Twelfth Doctor Book written by James Goss
This is a rare case of the a Doctor Who novel doing something that the show just couldn't do. Generally these books feel like an episode of the show, albeit one with an extremely high budget. Goss uses the format to his advantage here though and tells a story in the first person.
The Governor of a prison on an asteroid is intrigued by new inmate Prisoner 428- the Doctor. He's a prisoner who keeps escaping and his friend Clara is really quite friendly when she comes to visit. But something is going on deep in the prison and the Governor is struggling to keep things under control.
The first-person narration is great because we get to see the Doctor and Clara through the eyes of a third party. The Governor is an interesting character, almost Doctor-ish in many ways, yet much harder and easily exploited. I also thought the setting was rather good, although the plot itself wasn't great. It's one of those cases where there was a good basic idea but a limited plot to put in it.
The other big problem was that we wait half the book to find out why the Doctor is in the prison and who the Governor really is but it's an underwhelming reveal and lessens the pace. I would have much preferred it if this had been done at the very start of the book- it would have been an intriguing start and would have set up the context of the prison much better.
Characterisation can often be an issue in these tie-ins. Clara is great here, although she barely appears in the first three-quarters of the book. This book was written before any Twelfth Doctor episodes were aired, so presumably Goss had only a few scripts to get the idea of the newest Doctor's character. Whilst there are some obvious Twelfth Doctor traits, it's a watered-down version of the Doctor- any of his incarnations could be shoved in here with little change to the dialogue.
I really enjoyed the book but it's a fairly middle ground when it comes to Doctor Who tie-ins. It's by no means one of the worst, but equally a fair way from the very best too.
No comments:
Post a Comment