Author: Jon Peel

Originally published: October 1997

Read: December 2025 and January 2026

Context: back into the EDA’s, I had heard bad things about this one so I went in with a degree of trepidation…we shall see.

THE REVIEW

What I thought: I was pleasantly surprised with this one, more readable than I thought (very readable in fact), and I could imagine at least some of this in a fairly standard story, should the old TV movie have become a big budget TV series in the 1990’s, alas not to be. I suppose the main problem with this is its incredibly deferential to old who and cannon, in the sense that it is constantly refering to old Dalek episodes, and this in some ways is almost a sequal to Rememberance of the Daleks, with the ‘trickys’ Dalek emperor having in fact tricked both the Doctor and Davros into thinking the hand of Omega had dstroyed Skaro at the end of that TV adventure when in fact it was a decoy. Kind of interesting idea, but unnecessary, and undermines a great TV episode in Rememberance. The portrayal of the doctor is ok, but fairly generic, not sure there is much that is recognisably Eighth Doctor here. Sam is fairly well written, and there are some interesting side characters. Davros isn’t really up to much other than the usual, lots of ranting, having a shite plan, etc., etc….his portrayal is fairly disappointing here. Anyway, not awful but rather unnecessary in my opinion.

What I felt? Its an easy read, and I read this in a decent amount of time, which was needed as my reading of Who has become rather slow of late. I did enjoy some of this, but it feels rather unnecessary…it doesn’t really push on anything in terms of the development of the 8th Doctor’s adventures.

Rating: 3 out of 5 eye stalks: it’s ok, nothing special, but readable, and some fun Dalek/Thal warfare…but far too much linking this to old who, and not specific enough to this incarnation of the 8th Doc (this may not be entierly fair though, this was written with very little to go on re: this incarnation).

What am I left thinking?

• When do the truly great 8th Doctor stories start?

Memorable bits

• The spider daleks are cool
• The Dalek emperor is pretty cool
• Thals are like agressive vulcans in this one, good fun.