Of all the Target Novels in the last few years, this one's more traditional as it's basically a scene by scene retelling of the original with little to no new things added. The only bit of fun the book has at standing out from the original is all the chapter titles are named after the countdown in the episode. It does a solid job with building the tension in writing form for that first portion of the story where the Doctor and Donna are wandering around the ship, but where it stumbles is that sequence of them unknowingly having conversations with the Not-Things, which was always gonna be difficult to pull off in prose format and really was the sort of twist that could only work onscreen. The way that sequence was paced and inter-cut between the two conversations made it seem like we were watching a montage over a period of time, only to throw in that shocking reveal. The book however while trying to convey the same vibes, does make it obvious that we're reading two different conversations playing out at the same time.

Again like The Star Beast, this was a solid read, I enjoyed it more than the latter mainly cos of how much I already loved the TV version, but the book falls short from choosing to be an exact scene by scene recreation and stumbling with the strongest moment of the episode