Munro, Rona
About the Author:
Rona Munro is from Scotland, UK.
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
3 out of 5
(2 books)
Doctor Who: Survival
The novelisation of Munro's own script for the final televised story of the classic era of Doctor Who, featuring the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and his companion Ace. Returning to Perivale, the Doctor and Ace discover that not only have people been disappearing but a strange plague of particularly vicious cats is troubling the area. Their investigations will lead them to the planet of the Cheetah People and into a confrontation with one of the Doctor's oldest foes.
To say that the TV version of 'Survival' had a troubled history would be an understatement, as it ran into all sorts of problems largely based around the BBC's determination to run Doctor Who into the ground in order to justify cancelling the show. It has to be said, however, that the story presented here by Munro is far from a strong one and definitely not a fitting end for the Doctor (thankfully, good sense would prevail and the Doctor would return, albeit after a long break).
The problem is primarily that the scenes on the planet of the Cheetah People are pretty dull. Also, the hamfisted concepts involved mean that I have to use phrases like 'the planet of the Cheetah People' when reviewing it and those concepts are every bit as silly as they sound. The ending also proves to be a rushed anticlimax.
It's not all bad and there are two elements which elevate the story ever so slightly. The first is simply having Ace return to Perivale where "Nothing ever happens", which serves to highlight how much she's grown as a character through her travels with the Doctor. You really get a sense that her world has grown far too large for her to ever return to 'normal' life (I love Ace as a character... and not just because I had a huge crush on her back in 1989...). The other element that I liked here were the early interactions between the Doctor and the Master. Sure, the later ones devolve into the pantomime villain tone of so many of Anthony Ainlee's performances, but those early ones are great. There's a brilliant moment where the Doctor realises that it is the fact that he's just slightly better at everything than the Master that is the very source of the other Time Lord's emnity and he wonders how different things would be if he's just let the Master win the trophies at the academy that he himself didn't actually care about. It's a great bit of insight and I loved how strained the Master is when he has to acknowledge that he needs the Doctor's help.
3 out of 5
Doctor Who: The Eaters Of Light
A novelisation of a Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) story, originally scripted by Munro, and featuring the companions Bill and Nardole. Seeking to resolve the mystery of the disappearance of the Roman Ninth Legion, the TARDIS arrives in 2nd Century Scotland. There the Doctor, Bill and Nardole discover that, amid the war between the Romans and the Picts, a creature has a emerged that threatens to devour all light in the universe.
The TV version of this story always felt a bit half-baked and low-budget, plot-holes aplenty; a cheap filler episode to pad out Series 10. That said, it had a few nice moments of humour that gave it a certain charm at times. Strangely, this novelisation is something of an inversion of all that.
Here Munro gives us a much more detailed and well thought-out story, delving deeply into the cultures of both the Romans and the Picts (even if her afterword acknowledges that we actually know very little about the Picts). We get full backstories for the Pictish girl Kar and the young Roman Legionary Lucius, giving some much-appreciated depth to two characters who were pretty shallow and unengaging in the screen version of the story. The Eater of Light is also given more weight here, feeling like a genuine horror in a way that the silly CGI version from the TV episode wasn't.
Unfortunately, the flip-side of this is that all of the humour and charm of the episode has been removed here. It means that we don't get anything to break the grim tone of the story and none of the camaraderie of the TARDIS travellers is in evidence. The Twelfth Doctor often has a serious air to him, but the humourless versions of Bill and Nardole presented here just really didn't feel true to those characters (I particularly missed Nardole's sardonic remark about the body drained of all light as being the victim of "Death by Scotland").
3 out of 5
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