This is a cross-post from my Goodreads page and was the 62nd book I've read this year. I did say I read a lot, right?
I last read this book shortly after the Doctor Who TV movie was first released.
A big fan and an impressionable tween, I read it with delight – simply happy
that there was a new Who book out,
featuring the rather attractive new doctor, that I hadn’t read yet, having
devoured all the Target novelisations owned by my local library several years
earlier.
Reading it now, sixteen year on, while I am still a
fan, I can look at it more objectively. It’s still a fun romp through all of
the Doctor’s seven previous incarnations. Only the First and Seventh Doctor
meetings are brief. The others tend to either add flavour to the conclusion of
a story (as in the Second Doctor meeting), or show a coda to the events of an
adventure (as in the Third and Fourth Doctor meetings). There is a side plot of
President Flavia watching procedures in confusion and facing a minor conspiracy
on Gallifrey, and the Sixth Doctor gets a massive role when the Eighth
interferes in his trial.
It’s Terrance Dicks at his best – rattling along
nice and quick, fixing a few minor plot holes or adding reasonable explanations
for phenomena seen in televised stories as he goes. The language is simple and
easy to follow, Dicks always remembering that children might be reading. It did
lead to some laughably tame language from a 1990’s drug dealer and his gang,
chasing the girl who is to become the Eighth Doctor’s companion in the series
of books that follows. My copy also had several glaring typos that a good proof
reader should have picked up on.
A pleasant little Sunday afternoon read for a fan
of the series. Each Doctor has his little moment, made all the more enjoyable
as a retrospective on them in the show’s 50th anniversary year.
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