I recently got a boxed set of Doctor Who novels, featuring the 9th and 10th Doctors along with Rose Tyler, from a second-hand bookshop. I've been devouring them (figuratively), so I'm reviewing each one. The second book in the set is The Monsters Inside by Stephen Cole. This review contains spoilers, so if you suspect you might read the book yourself, suffice it to say that this is a good one that I do recommend to any Doctor Who fan.
The story opens with something momentous. It's Rose Tyler's very first visit to an actually alien planet. It never occured to me, nor bothered me, that the TV show skipped over exploring that. It would be a big deal in any Companion's life, stepping out of the Tardis onto the soil of another species' homeworld. Then again, maybe it wouldn't. By this book, Rose would have encountered aliens on Earth and on space stations, so maybe visiting another planet wouldn't seem as novel as you might expect. Whatever the case, it's a definite moment at the start of this book, and it's kind of nice to share it with her.
Unfortunately for the Doctor and Rose, they're arrested by the end of the intro and incarcerated in separate prisons by the end of chapter 1. As I said in my review of Clockwise Man, I find it unnerving and a little disappointing when the Doctor and Rose get split up in these books. I'm here for the combo depicted on the cover, and it just feels strange that they're hardly ever in the same space. In the author's defence though, as I rewatch the TV show from the beginning I'm realising that the first series (so far) separates them more than I'd remembered.
Rose ends up in a girl's prison, and the Doctor ends up in a cell on different planet entirely. Luckily for the Doctor, his prison planet's administrator is pretty high up in rank, and happens to be under pressure from her superiours to get some technological problems sorted out. The Doctor steps up immediately to help sort it out, mostly as leverage for him to escape and rescue Rose.
As for Rose, a rescue couldn't come too soon. She catches on pretty quickly that the prison has been infiltrated by Raxicoricofallapatorians, the alien species (in the form of the Slitheen family) we all met in Aliens of London. Knowing that Raxicoricofallapatorians can be dangerous, and having heard of some recent disappearances, Rose is determined to escape for her own safety, exposing the aliens along the way if possible. Neither plan works out for her during the second act.
Eventually, the Doctor gets the bright idea of telling his captors that he can solve their technical problems only with the help of his brilliant assistant Rose. It takes some convincing, but eventually they set up a call with Rose so she can prove her genius. This, obviously, is the author promising us the impossible. We know Rose isn't a physicist, and there's no way she'll be able to fake it. So what could the Doctor possibly have in mind?
I pondered and puzzled over it. Would he somehow use a time delay to make it sound like he were asking questions that retrofitted her answers? Had they cleverly planned for this all along? Maybe she'd answer incorrectly every time, but the Doctor would use circular logic and charisma to make her answers seem exactly right.
Or maybe there'd been hidden clues in previous chapters pointing to some grand orchestration of the Doctor? Maybe he hadn't been captured, but had manipulated the aliens into placing him and Rose into exactly this setup. This was the scene where he revealed all!
In short, I was captivated. I couldn't imagine how this was going to work.
Sadly, neither could the author. The way this impossible mind game ends does qualify as a resolution, but it's not clever like the TV show. It does successfully demonstrate that the Doctor and Rose have been through enough for Rose to know how the Doctor thinks, and for the Doctor to know stuff about Rose's life back on Earth. And there's some tension while Rose struggles to decode the Doctor's subtle hidden messages in his prompts, but it feels forced and pretty unspectacular.
The book isn't, by any means, spoiled because of this moment. I think the real problem with the scene is that it got built up (or maybe I built it up in my own head) as the thing that would finally get Rose off that prison planet and back with the Doctor so we could wrap up this adventure with a bang.
It wasn't that, but it was the weakest part of the story.
Despite not having an intelligence to match a Timelord, Rose gets to do a bunch of cool things in this book. She holds her own in space prison, she practically flies a space ship, she does heroic things. The story's entertaining, and as with the other books in the set, it's just really nice to spend more time with Rose and the 9th Doctor. And, in a weird way, it's nice to spend time with another Raxicoricofallapatorian family. Maybe next time, they'll stop taking over humans and find some larger skin suits that actually fit them without the need for those compression fields. Everybody deserves to be comfortable, after all.
Photo by Charlie Seaman on Unsplash