BW Media Spotlight

Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

How can we have the villain defeated last chapter and still have about four chapters to go? Well, these two are short enough to review together to meet quota. That helps.

Plus we have had added scenes not just with the TARDIS crew and Vicki but actually seeing what’s going on with the rescue ship. That has to be to pad out the book. “The Rescue” is made of two episodes, where most serials are maybe four to six arcs. I miss those days. The serial made me want to come back for the next episode more than the current seasonal subplot. Plus, while there were longer stinkers in the serial format due to being the same story, you had less single episodes you could just ignore and less stinkers overall due to the good stories also taking up a good part of the season. Even when it was good, new Who just never grabbed me the same way the old shows did because of that one change.

Of course if you never saw those serials, your experience might be different and you prefer the subplot arcs around done-in-one episodes with the obligatory two-parter somewhere in the middle. That’s fine, too. I’m not saying they made the new shows bad (I blame the people making it, especially for more recent takes like Chris Chibnall and Russell T. Davies’ second run), just it doesn’t click for me in quite the same way. It does make this arc a bit harder to adapt into the usual Target novel length, while the new books I don’t think do novelisations. All I’ve seen are brand new stories, like they did during the “wilderness years”. All I know for sure is we have two chapters and it’s time to get to them.

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