I’ve often said that Paul Leonard is a writer who does brilliant work until he has to get to an ending of a story, then the ball is dropped.  It’s always nice when he is able to prove me wrong as he did with “Special Weapons”.  Leonard placing the Seventh Doctor and Mel in the middle of World War II while the Nazi’s are working on several experiments on an alien being to isolate a small British town, holding the residents hostage and terrorizing them.  That’s just the surface level, for much of the story the Doctor and Mel are actually split up and Mel is paired with young Oliver, an adolescent who ends the story traumatized but determined to go off to war in the next year to kill Germans.  It’s difficult to describe just how tragic that ending feels, he is going off to kill Nazis after all, but even doing that means he will come back a changed man.  This is also a story that despite the reader knowing that the Doctor and Mel must make it out alright, the tension is some of the thickest I’ve ever seen in Doctor Who, making it a very nice companion piece to Lance Parkin’s Just War which was being adapted to audio around this time.  10/10.