"The Governor is responsible
for the worst fraudsters and the cruelest murderers. So he's certainly not
impressed by Prisoner 428, the man they're calling the most dangerous criminal
in the quadrant. Or, as he prefers to be known, the Doctor. What does impress
the Governor is the way the new prisoner immediately sets about trying to
escape. And keeps trying. Finally, he sends for the Doctor and asks him why?
But the answer surprises even the Governor. And then there's the threat -unless
the Governor listens to the Doctor, a lot of people will die. Who is the Doctor
and what's he really doing here? Why does he want to help the Governor? And who
is the young woman who comes every day to visit him, only to be turned away by
the guards? When the killing finally starts, the Governor begins to get his
answers."
James Goss is one of Doctor Who’s better
writers and this tale set in the –what else- the Expanded Universe of the
franchise is a fast moving, dark, yet interesting and sometime humorous.
Depending on how you view which Doctor you like or watched, Goss captures The
Twelfth Doctor pretty well here (but if you’re a Tenth Doctor fan, I can see
where might get a bit confused, still Goss does capture Capaldi’s voice), with
Clara only really contributing towards the end. While not a huge fan of first
person narratives, especially with a media tie-in like this, it worked for me
here. The Governor is a bit of an unreliable narrator, but he’s also clearly
out of his depth here.
It’s a dark book, fast paced, and a reminder
that this series can sometimes out grown its children’s style origins and give
us a creepy story that also has some humor (the Doctor’s continual escape from
his cell and his ability to be several steps ahead of everyone else, a hallmark
of the TOS later years). It takes a bit to fully understand why the Doctor has
come to The Prison asteroid, and everything gets neatly tied up rather quickly,
but over all, if a lot of these tie-ins were this good, I would read them all,
instead of jumping around from site to site reading other peoples reviews. I’m
cheating, of course, finding the titles that most liked and ignoring the ones
with bad reviews, but if there was one thing I learned trying to read Star Trek
and Star Wars books over the decades, only a few are really worth the time and
effort.
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