Book Review: Doctor Who - Lux

Lux was the 2^nd televised episode of the fifteenth series of modern Doctor Who which featured Ncuti Gatwa as The Doctor and Varada Sethu as The Doctor’s companion Belinda Chandra.  The Target novelisation of this episode is penned by long-time Doctor Who writer James Goss.  The narrative of the story follows The Doctor and Belinda as the pair begin their journey to try and get Belinda back home to Earth on March 24^th 2025.  With the TARDIS being pushed off course on every attempt to reach their destination, The Doctor lands the TARDIS in Miami in 1952. Using a machine he calls the Vindicator, The Doctor hopes to tether a hook line to March 24^th 2025 to help him navigate to there.  While exploring the local area, the duo learns about the mysterious disappearance of 15 people while attending a movie at the local cinema.  Taking it upon themselves to investigate, The Doctor and Belinda soon discover a sentient cartoon has manifested in the cinema by the name of Mr Ring-A-Ding.  While the cartoon comes off as a jolly, friendly ‘fella’, the pair soon learn there’s a far more sinister side to the cartoon as he seeks to torment the duo with a trip to literal big screen.

I remember enjoying the actual episode quite a bit when I watched it. As a story it does a good job with establishing an interesting premise with a historical setting and a larger-than-life threat. It works as a quintessential standalone episode just based on the core traditions it upholds throughout the course of it’s runtime. The novelisation does a great job faithfully capturing the essence and core structure of the episode and that’s all down to James Goss.  As a writer I find Goss has an excellent ability to faithfully adapt an existing story while injecting it with his own unique contributions.  His writing style is able to reflect the metatextual tone of the story really well. I was curious with how much this story commentates on the world of cinema with some interesting visual sequences, whether Goss would be able to translate it well into the prose format, Goss does find some smart ways to work around those factors though and it ends up making the book feel quite fun and distinct to the actual episode as a result.

Like most Target books, this is a fairly breezy read in terms of page count so it’s all the more impressive how it feels like all the key areas of the original script are given fair representation in the novelisation without any clear omission. In fact, Goss was able to expand on a few subplots in the story quite nicely with the prose format.  He’s also able to incorporate a few additional scenes into the story too.  I think the tone and scope of the story is really fun, it captures nearly all aspects of the episodes emotional scope quite well.

Lux is a great story on all accounts and James Goss did a fantastic job translating it into the prose format.  It’s structure and format follows all the core beats while seamlessly interjecting original elements alongside them. It’s probably one of my favourite stories from Series 15 with how imaginative and sharp it feels. I know a lot of the writing credit for this story goes to Russell T Davies for his original screenplay, but James Goss as I mentioned is always fantastic at adapting existing work without losing any of the original quality, Lux is another notch on his record to reflect that skill.