‘Doctor Who: Time and the Rani’ – Pip & Jane Baker (Target)


Page Count: 143 Pages

Just a quick post for you today… Yesterday was a busy one and today looks like it’s going to be a busy one as well. In a nice way though, I’m on leave this week and hanging out with my two daughters, which is always brilliant :o) Doesn’t leave me with a lot of time for reading though, not that I’d swap that time at all.

As luck would have it though, I managed to carve out a little reading time last night after I’d dropped the girls back home with their Mum. When I saw ‘Time and the Rani’, in the charity shop, the other day, I knew that its slimness would come in handy this week and you know what? I was right :o) ‘Time and the Rani’ was last night’s reading then, let me tell you what I thought of it…

Assailed by violent bursts of energy, the TARDIS is blasted off course and forced to land on the barren planet of Lakertya, and the violent buffeting triggers the Doctor’s sixth regeneration. But that is the least of his worries. He has been hijacked by that ruthless female Time Lord, the Rani.

But why has the Rani brought the Doctor to Lakertya? What are the hideous Tetrap guards? Who are the eleven geniuses she has imprisoned in her stronghold? What is the vital significance of the asteroid of Strange Matter? And can the Doctor stop the Rani’s diabolical scheme before it affects the whole of creation through time and space?

I’ll be honest, more often than not, I swipe cover art from Amazon and while I was there, I thought I’d have a quick look at the reviews and see if they matched my thoughts. There was only the one review and it was all of one word long – ‘Okay’. And funnily enough, that one word matched my feelings exactly. The novelisation of ‘Time and the Rani’ is, well… Okay. It does it’s job well enough but will it stay in my head? I doubt it.

Is that the book’s fault though? Not when all it has to go on is what you see on the TV. I spoke about ‘Time and the Rani’, on the TV, over Here and one of the issues that I had was that it was basically four episodes of people running in and out of the Rani’s lair. Having read the book, I can say that this approach works far better on the small screen. To be fair, it is fun watching the Doctor grapple with a new regeneration, and all that entails here, but from where I was sat, what we get here is still a lot of running around and not a lot of finale at the end.

Not the worst read ever then but if you’re novelizing a story that wasn’t up to much in the first place (again, from where I was sat)… Well, what I got here wasn’t really a great surprise. It’s… Okay ;o)

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