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otherwyrld's review
2.0
This is an adaptation of a story that features the Fourth Doctor and Romana II and was first shown on TV in 1980. I have absolutely no recollection of seeing this serial even though it would have been during the time I was watching the show, which is not a good sign. An image of the cast on Brighton Beach did ring a vague bell, but could equally be a publicity shot I saw later.
This means that this book has to stand up to being read on its own merits rather than as an adjunct to what I saw on TV. Unfortunately, this just isn't a very good story no matter which way you look at it.
Part of the problem is that for a story called Doctor Who, the Doctor isn't in it very much. After the Brighton Beach introduction the Doctor disappears for over 30 pages, which is not good for a book that only lasts 127 pages in total. In his absence, we have a whole history lesson on the war between the two main alien species in the story which is probably just as boring to read as it must have been to watch.
Even when the Doctor reappears, he seems to be pretty much a passive spectator to the whole story, allowing his scarf to go missing and then ending up as a murder weapon, getting convicted of said murder and then allowing his sentence to be carried out, which is to be turned into an old man who is suffering from dementia. Quite frankly, the Doctor is a bit rubbish in this story, and it's a good thing that there is another Timelord here to pick up the slack(would a female Timelord be called a Timelady? I'm not sure it was ever discussed, and its a pity the BBC didn't pick a gender neutral title for their main character). Romana does quite well on her own, even sorting out how to make their Recreation Generator work.
Even if this wasn't bad enough, the main story just never engages. The war element doesn't work, and the less said about the megalomaniac who takes charge at the end the better. At least he (sort of) ends up getting his just desserts, being turned back into a baby at the end. The main plot hinges on the Recreation Generator, which seems to be able to do almost as many different things as a sonic screwdriver, and with just as much logic involved.
In the end everything is sorted out, but not by the Doctor (who at least gets turned back to his correct age). All this time, poor K9 is left a dripping mess in the Tardis, having accidentally got waterlogged at the beginning of the story just to get a cheap laugh.
Pretty much a miss.
nwhyte's review against another edition
http://nhw.livejournal.com/896496.html[return][return]David Fisher wrote two Doctor Who novels based on his own scripts for the Fourth Doctor stories Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive. (He also wrote the original scripts for two Fourth Doctor Key to Time stories, The Stones of Blood and the Androids of Tara, but the novelisations of those were done by of course Terrance Dicks.) I remember really enjoying his Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit when it first came out, and Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive is, for the same reasons, also a hilarious read Fisher has a Douglas Adams-like ability to build in circumstantial detail and hilarious commentary to make you feel that this is a real, zany universe in which the Doctor and Romana are dealing with complex alien societies as well as future technology.
brekah's review against another edition
3.0
Had to frown at the whole, "Whites vs Blacks, Foamasi Style" but otherwise it was fun.
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