21 June 2016

Review: Doctor Who: Spore by Alex Scarrow

Mass market paperback, 67 pages
Published 2014 (originally 2013)

Acquired December 2014
Read August 2015
Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor: Spore
by Alex Scarrow

Despite the fact that he originated in a very different style of television, Big Finish and BBC Books both wasted no time forcing the eighth Doctor into the mold of classic Doctor Who: BBC Books' Eighth Doctor Adventures felt of a piece with the Virgin New Adventures, while Big Finish locked him into the same 4x25 format as the classic Doctors, despite him never having appeared in such a format on telly! The eighth Doctor, after all, originally appeared in a 90-minute telemovie of the week. One could imagine an alternate world where Fox commissioned a series of them, the eighth Doctor periodically appearing on American television screens for a standalone adventure, like how The Librarian was originally. If that had happened, I think you'd have ended up with stories very much like Spore: the Doctor turns up in contemporary America, discovers something odd is going on, befriends a local woman, and puts a stop to it. Slight, like a lot of these novellas, but an intriguing glimpse of a version of Doctor Who that never was.

Next Week: A missing adventure for the ninth Doctor in The Beast of Babylon!

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