Reviews

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace by Nigel Robinson

saroz162's review

2.0

This is a fairly straightforward late-stage novelization of a frankly terrible script. Robinson, God love him, tries - but there's just not a lot to work with here; the plot is entirely made up of rushing back and forth with no real sense to any of it. He does manage to expand the scope a little, removing some of the budgetary considerations and giving a couple of secondary characters a little background. The most significant thing about the book, though, is that it "corrects" the villain's comeuppance, which in the broadcast version is quite callous even by the Doctor's standards. Here, it's unavoidable, and Robinson manages to tie it into another character who simply disappears in the TV story.

Would I read it again? No. Would I have been good with it when I was 11 and read Targets regularly? Probably. I still have an issue with it not really having a story, though; it's just a series of incidents, and that really shows.

isabellarobinson7's review

Rating: 3(?) stars

Aaah I have nothing to say about this book but I set a goal for myself to review every book I read in 2022 so this is that review.

nwhyte's review

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1028417.html#cutid2[return][return]This is very poor. It's not quite as bad as Robinson's novelisation of The Sensorites, and in the earlier chapters I thought it seemed quite promising. But the prose soon descends into his trademark clunkiness, and the story's most famous line actually manages to come over even worse on the printed page than it does in the original.