Doctor Who at Christmas: The Church on Ruby Road

For fourteen years now, I've read a Christmas-set Doctor Who book every Christmas, beginning with Short Trips: The Ghosts of Christmas in 2011. The most recent book in this sequence is Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson's novelisation of "The Church on Ruby Road," the 2023 Christmas special. (And, seemingly, the last, but perhaps I will be surprised; I have certainly thought this sequence to have ended before.)

As readers of my blog know, I've recently been reading novelisations of Doctor Who stories from the 1963-89 version of the show. These were important books, because in those days it was difficult to rewatch stories—or, in many cases, even watch them to begin with. But what's the point of a novelisation in the 2020s, when I can just pop the episode on Disney+ whenever I want? In the case of some stories, it's to give you a deeper understanding of the episode as its writer saw it; of the twenty novelizations of post-2005 stories, fourteen of them have been written by the writer of the original story. However, that's not the case for The Church on Ruby Road, whose script was by Russell T Davies, but whose novelisation is by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson. (Fun fact: Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson's first novel was published thanks to a contest sponsored by Ben Aaronovitch, himself a writer of Doctor Who television stories and novels.)

I would argue that, ideally, what a good novelisation does is allow you to approach the ideas of a story based on the strengths of a different medium. How would you tell this story novelisitically, if it was a novel to begin with? I think that's the question I'd ask myself if I was novelising a modern Doctor Who story. Paul Cornell did a decent job of this with Twice Upon a Time; shorn of the spectacle and performances of the tv version, he gave us a book with more of a character arc.

Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road
by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Originally published: 2024
Acquired and read: December 2024

When The Church on Ruby Road succeeds, it's because it's doing that. Like Russell T Davies's previous pilot for a new Doctor Who programme, "Rose," a lot of "The Church on Ruby Road" is told from the perspective of the new companion, and The Church on Ruby Road leans into that, making new companion Ruby Sunday the focal character, getting us into her head more.

Aside from this, though, it's a pretty straight down-the-line novel of the tv script, doing that kinds of things that work well on screen but not always on the page, like quick cuts away to mysterious strangers; for example, I found it jarring when, in a book that had been pretty solidly focused on Ruby up until that point, we suddenly went to the Doctor saving a random woman from a giant sculpture falling onto them. This works fine on screen, but it kind of disrupts what had until then been a tight focus in the novel. I would have liked to have seen the novel be mostly (entirely would be impossible) told from Ruby's perspective, reorganizing scenes to make this work.

Indeed, I think the thing that's missing here is a strong character arc for Ruby, and what is particularly frustrating is that I also think there's a really obvious one! "The Church on Ruby Road" is, appropriately enough for Christmas, a riff on It's a Wonderful Life. Like George Bailey, Ruby is removed from history—and the resulting world is worse off. In It's a Wonderful Life, this resolves George's character arc; he had seen his life as futile and pointless, and he is shown that it's not. But in "The Church on Ruby Road," there's no such pay-off; it's just a problem for the Doctor to solve. And yet... the obvious character hook for Ruby is right there! Ruby thinks she needs to know who her biological mother  was to have a good life. What the Doctor's journey into the Ruby-less timeline could have shown her is that she doesn't need her biological mother to have a good life, she already had one. Adding this into the book would have 1) given it more of a character-focused, and thus novelistic, pay-off, and 2) leaned into the Christmas themes more, which are to be honest, a little thin in the book devoid of the visuals of the screen version.

Now, I know you shouldn't criticize a book by saying what you would have done. So I guess what I am saying is, I don't know that Jikiemi-Pearson needed to implement my idea per se. It's a competently written book based on a decent tv story. But I do think this book needed something to make it pop, to make the project of novelizing a tv show broadcast in 2023 more of a productive undertaking.

I read a Doctor Who Christmas book every year. Barring a surprise announcement in the next ten months, this is the last post in this sequence.