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.
Chapter 12:
And we’re back to the rescue ship. The story never really cared about them personally. They were something in the back, a sort of time clock that only mattered because it was the only thing giving Vicki hope at the time. I’m not against doing something with them, but in the events of the story they’re kind of…there. Again, I think the author’s just trying to pad out the book. I don’t even think they needed to be knocked off course by the TARDIS phasing through it, which again is the only time I’ve seen this in any version of Doctor Who even though the new series has been known to make the Doctor crash in real space more than once. I’m not sure that’s how a TARDIS works, but we’ve seen it travel through normal space (Susan once referred to it as the “fifth dimension” when Ian asked her what was missing from an equation along with time) so I could be wrong. Have they ever really taken time to explain how a TARDIS truly works?
Anyway, they’re trying to get back on course while one guy returns to his crossword puzzle and the American in the group mentioning “pigs fly” gives him one of the answers. Then the…captain? Honestly I’m not following who these people are. They don’t matter in the story so it’s tough to care. Someone calls for the radio man to attempt contact with the Astra Nine to get back on course, and mentions that they’re not just here to play rescue ship but learn why the ship crashed. I kind of thought that was a given, that they’d investigate. It’s what Captain Kirk would have done. This is the shortest chapter outside of the epilogue, at only two pages and three lines on the fourth page.
Chapter 13
This one clocks in at 5 pages and six lines on the final page. It’s more original storytelling as our human trio keep looking either for the TARDIS or a way out. They come upon the Didoian city and it looks like a dead city. It also looks like a pretty big city. or at least a town-sized city that still have tall buildings. Just how powerful was Bennett’s explosive that it did this much damage? At best I was thinking this was a small village, or maybe an underground community given the nature of the planet when it was in the right position around their sun to be a terrible place to live.
For that matter, how did live evolve here that wasn’t all wiped out during this season without evolving to tolerate it? I’m no expert, being a creationist and all, but I don’t think that’s how evolution is supposed to work. You evolve to survive your climate. Even among humans, that’s the real origin of “races”, as some folks treat them. Growing up in jungle had different alterations than in a forest or a desert. It’s why the concept of race is so stupid to me in the first place, just another reason to separate us as humans. Sorry, didn’t mean to preach. My point is the additional lore being added with these new story bits raises more questions. We also have a giant worm thing show up because we didn’t make the running through corridors/caverns quota for the story, I guess.
They see the silver people carrying something and decide to follow them. The trio speculate that the silver people seem to be the better possibility of to have built this city rather than Koquillion because they still don’t know he was actually Bennett. They soon make all make their way back to the TARDIS, were the silver people leave the unconscious Doctor, with the cliffhanger of Barbara worried that he’s dead. This should lead back into the story, as Ian and the others told the Doctor they found him out cold outside the ship.
Marter meant well, or by necessity had to add to the story, but it raises questions about the story I didn’t have from the episode. The level of destruction makes me wonder how Bennett could have killed them all. The nature of the planet makes me wonder why they evolved to be killed by it and threaten the species. Meanwhile we have the rescue ship and I really don’t care about those characters. To my knowledge, unless the “wilderness years” books or Big Finish picked up on them we’ll never see them again and their presence was already tangential at best in the episode.
We have two more chapters to go and they should be reviewable separately. We’re almost to the end, and given the last book I had to do multiple chapter reviews for and took a year to get through, it’s kind of a relief that this is it and nearly over.
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