Second paragraph of third chapter:

She finally had a name.

I wrote of the two TV episodes that this book is based on:

The Legend of Ruby Sunday summoned back lots of old favourites – UNIT, Mel, the recurrent character of Susan Twist, and most of all, Gabriel Woolf – another actor over the age of 90! – as Sutekh. It looked good, sounded good, and had a good twist, but there wasn’t a lot of substance; it was running around for the sake of running around. I hoped this would be put right this weekend.

And I’m afraid it wasn’t. Empire of Death was a real mess. The visuals were superb (as we have come to take for granted, now that we are Disneyfied), and the lead performances were great as usual. I also loved the explicit throwbacks to Pyramids of Mars, one of my favourite Old Who stories.

But the plot was very weak. As soon as people started disintegrating into dust, I knew that they would all be resurrected. Why should Sutekh care about Ruby’s unknown mother? (And indeed why could he not use the available technology to find her?) What was the point of the devastated future world with one inhabitant? And I missed the explanation of the snow, and of various other things.

I do have sympathy for the narrative of finding Ruby’s parents by DNA… one part of my own real life that I have now seen brought into a Doctor Who plot; and it could have been done much worse.

Still, I had been hoping for better.

I ranked them sixth and eighth out of last year’s eight episodes,

As sometimes happens with novelisations, the written word is capable of fixing some of the flaws of the televised story. The sillier special effects are lost, thank heavens, and we do get some more background to Susan Twist and indeed to Ruby. But it remains a fundamentally messy story, privileging spectacle over substance. Not Handcock’s fault, of course: it’s a good novelisation of a disappointing story. You can get Doctor Who: Empire of Death here.