Second paragraph of third section (of the first of two chapters):

‘That’s all the sixes,’ his companion said, joining us.

Another of the recent Who novelisations, by the writer of the original TV story. I don’t seem to have made a note about this story when it was first broadcast. When I first rewatched it in 2013, I wrote:

I fear this is becoming a boring refrain, but I had forgotten how good The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit actually is. I think it is our first proper base-under-siege story in New Who (perhaps arguments can be made for The End of the World or Dalek, but I won’t) and perhaps it’s a return to that comfort zone of Old Who, with the difference of a more diverse base crew than Old Who would have had (the black guy would never have been in command in the old days, and the smart woman would never have been chief scientist). The scarily different bit is not so much the monster – though it is well done, both the descent to the pit and the technical realisation of a superhuman incarnation of evil – but the Ood, who are very creepy indeed. Having a slave race never works out well in Who, but here the message is that by exploiting the Ood, humanity has opened a potential route for its own destruction. Terrific stuff.

In 2022, coming back to it for Simon Bucher Jones’ Black Archive, I wrote:

Rewatching it now, I was again pleasantly surprised. David Tennant is always watchable, but here the chemistry between him and Billie Piper is at its peak. It also struck me that the plot element of the TARDIS being lost on a world where a more cosmic battle is playing out had been done before, and worse, in Frontios.

I didn’t rewatch it again before reading the novelisation, as my memory was still pretty fresh.

This is another one of the good ones. It is presented as a set of testimonials, and other incidents, from the enquiry that the Krop Tor base crew faced when they finally got back. This neatly solves a story-telling problem: you don’t need an omniscient narrator when you have a bunch of different viewpoints, and each admits from the start that each has only a partial view of the events.

Doing the story that way means that you end up with quite a different experience of the plot from watching the original TV version, but a good one. It also centres the guest characters, and the impact that the Doctor and Rose make on the rest of their lives, which doesn’t often feature in what we see once the TARDIS departs. There is one chunk of narrative told from the Doctor’s own point of view about three quarters of the way through, and it’s not clear how that gets into the book, but I think most readers will swallow it anyway. The original story is good, and the novelisation is good too.

I don’t think I had realised that Jones was the author of one of my favourite Bernice Sumnmerfield novels, Beyond the Sun, and of the New Adventures novel Bad Therapy which I also enjoyed. He also wrote the “Dead Man Walking” episode of Torchwood. One to keep an eye on.

You can get The Satan Pit novelisation here.