Gary Russell

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-fourteenth-doctor-novelisations-the-star-bea...

This is a good start to the new regime. (One of my personal complaints about the Chibnall era is that little attention was paid to the spinoff publications.) As well as faithfully transferring the on-screen action to the page, we get more characterisation for the minor characters, especially Sylvia and Rose, and some delightful tips of the hat to the comic strip on which the story was based – the steelworks is called Millson Wagner, in a tribute to the original writers, and the original new companion, Sharon, makes an offstage appearance as Fudge’s friend. Basically it’s what you want from a novelisation.… (meer)

Novelizations live or die on the quality of the scripts they are novelizing - either the plot, the dialogue, or both. TV pilots are particularly hard to novelize because they're usually focusing on introducing you to characters, concepts, and tone, and the plots are usually pretty perfunctory. That's essentially the problem with Doctor Who: The TV Movie, which was, naturally, a TV movie that also functioned as a backdoor pilot. The plot is hokum, and while the dialogue isn't terrible, a lot of the life that was brought to it came from the actors' performances (ranging from the very good to the extremely camp). As far as the actual script goes, there's not a whole lot of there there.

In some ways these limitations are similar to Russell T. Davies' Rose, and so it makes sense that when Davies came to novelize his own pilot script, he enriched it by expanding our understanding of the human characters, their lives, relationships, and experiences. The TVM isn't a totally different plot - it is, again, about a mystery man showing up in a world of ordinary people - but novelizing it is even more uphill climbing because the people are "TV-ordinary" (meaning, they're very idealized and as thin as cardboard). Worse, the script really doesn't care about them. It cares about the mystery man, the Doctor.

That's fine for me because I'm a Doctor Who fan, and when I was 12 years old, the TV Movie on TV was great, too. There's no mistaking why average TV viewers didn't like it, though: the interesting stuff was full of unfamiliar jargon, and the real-life stuff was very, very generic. Here, Gary Russell has almost doubled down on the trick. Huge portions of the novel are fine but unremarkable. He has tried to add a little - just a little - to the "ordinary" characters, although it sometimes bounces back on him; his Americans constantly slip into British argot. None of them ever really rise above their roots, though, and a couple of them are actually less memorable than they were on TV. Instead, where he really focuses his energy is on the Doctor, and the TARDIS, and on smoothing over the bits that seemed inconsistent between the TV Movie and the original Doctor Who series.

Some of Russell's "improvements" are incredibly enjoyable - I particularly loved the more extensive exploration of the new TARDIS - and I'm glad that he was able to add back in things he was forced to cut, even if some of them are a little silly (like the extended prologue with the seventh Doctor on Skaro). By and large, though, they felt like set pieces, and I spent the book waiting for the next one...and then the next one...and then the next one.

Ultimately, it's a pleasant, slightly campy read, perhaps deliberately more like an American movie novelization. It is, however, somewhat uneven in its pleasures.… (meer)