The Target novelisation of last year’s Empire of Death restores missing scenes, but only compounds the original’s flaws
This year’s batch of Target books continues the recent trend of concentrating on the current era. Three of the set novelise Doctor Who episodes only months after that they aired on television. The one exception is Empire of Death, drawn all the way from the far off days of 2024’s season finale. The adaptation is the work of Scott Handcock, who as script editor on the original episodes The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death, is well placed to know ever nook and cranny of the original scripts.
Ironically, though, this may be to the book’s disadvantage. Weighing in at 256 pages this is one of the longer Target books. That’s partly due to the restoration of several sequences cut from the final episodes, mostly before filming even began. Some of these omissions were to keep the budget down, or to prevent the episodes completely exploding out of their BBC One time slot. So we get some fun ideas and visuals. For one, there’s a return visit to the planet Vortis from 1965’s The Web Planet. Here, a Susan splinter has just arrived in a retro space rocket. On another alien world, she’s a waitress in an American style diner. In Earth’s own history, she pushes a pram round Albert Einstein’s neighbourhood.
We also get a little more insight into the inner thoughts of characters like UNIT’s Colonel Ibriham, Susan Triad, and the death wave survivor the Doctor later encounters. While a highlight of the book is a sequence of undead civil servants stalking the corridors of 2040s Whitehall.
There’s even a brief origin story for Mel to throw on the pile with all the other versions.
The breakneck speed and raw emotion of the television episode gives way to some clunky prose which leaves the plot’s imperfections nowhere to hide
But the text is also a little too loyal to what we got on screen. There are multiple cases of a ‘belt and braces’ approach of characters repeating out loud exposition readers got just a paragraph or two before in prose. Meanwhile, no moment of on screen action is too small not to faithfully recorded in the text. Even dramatic fast paced scenes like the Doctor and Mel’s Vespa race against the end of the world aren’t immune. The text still make sure to pause so readers know exactly where Mel keeps her spare crash helmet.
The uneven pacing and tendency to err on the side of over-explanation exacerbates the inherent challenges of adapting a story like Empire of Death. As Blogtor Who said back in our original review, as a television story this depended on overcoming viewers with its big ideas, emotional gut punches, and sheer pace.
However, the novel format leaves readers with far too many opportunities to dwell on the plot’s various oddities. Characters, including the villainous god of death Sutekh and the Doctor himself, regularly make pronouncements with no real foundation. The text tells us that Sutekh has a bond to the TARDIS at a molecular level. Yet a few chapters later the Doctor simply yanks him off it with a rope. The dead Colonel Chidozie whispering from the darkness that he’s “in Hell” is a creepy moment. But it’s one that makes no sense given what we learn later about the fate of Sutekh’s victims.
If classic Targets often took the opportunity to tweak and correct such illogical moments, Empire of Death stubbornly preserves them. For instance, UNIT still uses the DNA from 2046 to identify Ruby’s mother by comparing in to the 2024 DNA register we’ve already been told she’s not on.
New readers will be utterly bewildered by the multiple references to other stories,
That Empire of Death sits at the apex of season long mysteries and subplots presents a unique challenge too. Handcock works hard to try and make the Time Window revisit of events in The Church in Ruby Road remotely intelligible in its own right. However, he such attempts are doomed to failure. Elsewhere, otherwise baffling references to the events of 73 Yards seem to exist simply to justify a footnote telling people to buy that Target book if they want this one to make sense.
The days of young readers stumbling across these novelisations as a gateway into the world of Doctor Who are probably largely gone. Even so, it’s disappointing that Empire of Death is quite such an impenetrable maze. The overall impression is that such concerns were very low on the agenda when this story was chosen for adaptation. However, if now targeted purely at existing fans of the story, it may well leave them liking it less, not more, than they did before.
Doctor Who: Empire of Death
What’s gotten into the TARDIS?
Enlisting UNIT in their search for an enigmatic woman who appears all throughout time and space, the Doctor and Ruby uncover deeper mysteries.
What is the secret of Susan Triad? What happened on the night that Ruby was born? The answers lead the Doctor and Ruby to a horrifying confrontation with the greatest evil of all…
Empire of Death is on sale now from your preferred stockist, at these links.
