by Peter Harness

BBC Books, out now

The 12th Doctor faces the fallout of the fragile peace between Zygons and humans – can he stop the world from plunging into war?

Peter Capaldi’s 2015 Series 9 two-parter The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat is novelised by Harness as his first Target adaptation.

Prologue tackles the moment at the end of The Day of the Doctor where a peace deal was brokered between the Zygons and humans, and is one of many references to previous stories, asterisked to helpful annotations. Indeed, on frequent occasions additional information is mentioned to bring us up to speed with where each character is at.

Across 13 chapters, Harness details the two episodes, at times settling solely for the dialogue as transmitted in the final shows, but there’s also two chapters (The Stranger on the Bus and The Motel on the Edge of Town) where we’re able to go inside the mind of Bonnie the Zygon to experience her thought processes and the birth of her consciousness.

The big moment of the episodes is of course the Doctor’s anti- war speech, serving as the backbone to Chapter 13 – Truth or Consequences – and it’s still a stirring piece of writing.

Verdict: More tied to the final episodes than some of the Target novelisations where the author went off at a tangent, this is nevertheless a solid record of a significant brace of episodes. 7/10

Nick Joy

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