TYPE: New Series
FEATURING: Ninth Doctor, Rose Tyler
AUTHOR: Stephen Cole
PAGE COUNT: 253
SYNOPSIS:
The TARDIS takes the Doctor and Rose to a destination in deep space - Justicia, a prison camp stretched over six planets, where Earth colonies deal with their criminals.
While Rose finds herself lock up in a teenage borstal, the Doctor is trapped in a scientific labor camp. Each is determined to find the other, and soon both Rose and the Doctor are risking life and limb to escape in their distinctive styles.
But their dangerous plans are complicated by some old enemies. Are these creatures fellow prisoners as they claim, or staging a takeover for their own sinister purposes?
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
REVIEW:
The Doctor and his companions always manage to get themselves into trouble wherever they go. But this time, their arrival spells disaster when they are immediately arrested and separated, apparently doomed to spend a twenty-five year sentence in prison.
I've had this book sitting around for a long time, but I had never actually read it up til now for several reasons, chiefly among them 1) That it has Rose (who is my leat favorite companion in the new series), 2) And that it has the Slitheen. who are, in my opinion, one of the worst alien concepts ever. As a quick review for those unaware, the Slitheen are a family of beings from the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius. They're big, ugly, and disgusting, and when impersonating humans they use compression technology, stuffing their huge bodies into human skins. Due to this, they're constantly letting rip with farts and belches. I am not a fan of body humor at all, and I find it quite repulsive, so from their first appearance in the series, I have developed a strong loathing of them.
When Doctor Who first returned to television, I was overjoyed and didn't pass to harsh a judgement on the first season, just glad to be watching brand new episodes. Since that time and with subsequent seasons, my opinion of Season 1 has gone down, and it is easily the weakest season of the new series. I don't have that much of a problem with Chris Eccleston's Doctor, but with such a short tenure he didn't get a real chance to do much. Another strike against the first season is how they never left Earth. Eeven when they weren on ships or space stations, it was always above Earth. It was only in the novels that Rose got to visit alien planets, and this one was the first.
It's been a long time since I touched Season 1, and now that I've returned to it, I'm actually glad I finally read this book, because it manages to redeem a lot of what was wrong in the TV series.
First, there's Rose. I always felt that Rose complimented the Ninth Doctor much more than the Tenth. They were a much better and more natural team, and it shows in this story, despite spending the majority of it apart from each other. It was also fun to read a book with the Ninth Doctor. It's not easy to put into words quite how different he is from the Tenth, but you can tell it's him. For one thing he isn't as wordy, rattling off a mile a minute, he's more snarky and his speech is different (thanks to that Northern accent).
Second, there's the Slitheen. The Doctor ends up cell mates with two of them, and at first it seems like more are lurking around, but these turn out to be the Blathereen, a family related to the Slitheen, though there's a lot of animosity between the two groups as the Slitheen at this point in time have fallen into disgrace while the Blathereen have taken their spot in the criminal hierarchy. The sheer scale of the Blathereen takeover of Justicia is quite disconcerting, as they have been inflitrating the system for years and replacing those in authority with their own people, which turns out to be painfully easy considering the fact that everyone on Justicia is willing to turn a blind eye to what's going on around them and maintain the status quo.
I've always thought the Daleks were the most evil aliens in Doctor Who, but as I read this book, I felt that the Slitheen and Blathereen might actually be worse. While the Daleks are convcined of their superiority, they either want to destroy everyone else or convert them into more Daleks. The Slitheen and Blathereen are also convinced of their own superiority, but they are worse in that they are willing to murder as many people as it takes to gain a profit, plus their love of hunting their prey. They're worse than the Daleks in that they derive pleasure from their killing.
One of the reasons I find Doctor Who so interesting is it's portrayal of the future, which is quite often bleak. Humanity doesn't seem to learn from it's mistakes for long, leading to war, greed, the loss of rights, empire, slavery, and all the rest of the bad side of human nature. This is exemplified in a place like Justicia. The Doctor and Rose are assessed and incarcerated without trial, with no one even caring whether they're innocent or not. The place Rose ends up in is an experiment in old fashioned prison systems to see if they can be revived and used effectively. The Doctor becomes human "property" and gets shipped off to a place where other aliens are put to work coming up with new technologies to benefit the human race. In the world of Doctor Who, the monsters can just as often be humans as they can slobbering aliens.
So, in the end, this book exceeded my expectations by a good measure. If only the TV episodes of Season 1 had been of this quality, I might have a higher opinion of it.
