I’ve quite enjoyed it actually. Strutton does really well in making the action scenes more convincing than they are on screen, despite Richard Martin’s best efforts. I’m just at the bit with the Animus’s centre and the slightly different ‘backstory’ is interesting. The only thing I don’t like is how male-dominated he’s made it with only Hlynia surviving as a female Menoptra/Optera and the Animus being more obviously male-voiced (although that’s possibly due to William Russell narrating).
There’s just been an intriguing line about Christian years which I need to investigate by looking at the book. A rare instance in Who.
And now for that odd sentence:
Two things about this are interesting. Strutton sets out much more clearly what the Animus does. It draws in and assimilates other beings, draining them of their knowledge and culture. The Animus intends on doing this with the Doctor and the others - and actually comments on how it won’t now need the Menoptra. But this bit about the hundredth Christian millennium is really telling. It reminds me of the discussions of heaven in Farewell, Great Macedon. Explicitly Christian references don’t often make it into the TV show which says something for the parameters of science and religion that the production team were inclined to include on screen. It’s such an odd thing for an alien entity on a far distant planet to say and, if it was in the original scripts (which I doubt) it would most certainly have got cut by David Whitaker.
And with that, my trip to Vortis draws to a close. I have skipped over the Missing Adventure Twilight of the Gods. I read it many, many years ago and it’s probably the only Christopher Bulis-penned novel I didn’t really enjoy. But if you want to know more about it, there’s a page for that:
Doctor Who and the Zarbi audiobook was a lovely thread to having running through this - William Russell is such a wonderful narrator, and the sound design on the story was excellent. There’s even a little bonus interview with Russell at the end of the book.
I know The Web Planet is rather maligned nowadays but I still maintain it has buckets of ambition and a vein of poetry which is often overlooked. I do admit it drags in the middle but Doctor Who would be poorer without this most alien of stories.
So, I realised I left one story off this iconic journey and that is Orphans of the Polyoptera which is a story/game that was part of Doctor Who Infinity.
