First thing’s first – yes, Empire of Death is the novelisation of both parts of the Series 14 (or Season 1 if you absolutely must) finale, including The Legend of Ruby Sunday as well as the eponymous final episode with the giant dog of death.

Second thing’s second – it’s written by Big Finish alumnus and Doctor Who script editor for the season, Scott Handcock, based on not just the transmitted version of the story but a handful of development scripts as well, with several cut sequences reinstated.

And third thing’s third – the translation to the novel and then audionovel format allows for a significantly larger scope of devastation to be delivered by the arrival of Sutekh’s “dust of death” – and we hear it here, blowing through many more planets than the Disney dollars gave us on the screen. 

Resurrecting The Empire

It feels important to get those points nailed down before we talk about how the audionovel translates a finale that most long-term fans felt failed to stick the landing for Ncuti Gatwa’s first season in the Tardis, and potentially raised the overall volume of fan disquiet about the shift to more outright fantasy and less hard science fiction in the Gatwa era as a whole.

Handcock is, let’s make no bones about it, a great writer in terms of Doctor Who storytelling, so the elements he adds here deliver more value than they might at first glance be thought capable of. 

In particular, the various versions of the Susan Triad character are given much more page-space.

That sells the concept of them significantly better than was managed in tiny brief occasional flashes on screen could ever have hoped for. 

We spend some time with Comms Officer Gina Scalzi (from Space Babies) and her guilt at the space babies’ abandonment. We go deeper into Triad’s dreams of being an automated ambulance on a planet at war. And we get other planetary name-checks on both planets familiar from New Who (yes, there’s a Susan Triad on Malcassairo, planet of the Futurekind from Utopia), and those going all the way back through the Doctor’s recorded history to the black and white Hartnell days, in a reference which will delight most fans.

He also sells the horror of what initially happens to Colonel Winston Chidozie somehow more effectively than was managed on screen, largely because he reports it as a beat in a complex situation, without, for instance, the implied ramping up to a reveal in the TV version, with Murray Gold working himself into a metaphorical frenzy to sell the concept. Without the music, Chidozie’s fate is allowed to fill up the screen of your mind with its horror on its own terms.

Sutekh himself? Mmm, slightly better in the novelisation, because of two main elements. 

Firstly, while he’s described fairly faithfully to the version from the screen, you are of course free to let your imagination run entirely riot in conjuring the big death-dog, and Handcock helps you along, replacing the somewhat shuffling version from the show with a version that, for instance, makes floorboards creak when he moves, suggesting significant weight and presence. Go hog wild with how you imagine the go of death to be – nobody’s going to stop you at this point.

And secondly, we get the most in-depth history of Sutekh and the Osirans ever devised for the show, taking in everything we learned in Pyramids of Mars, stepping significantly outside the action of Empire of Death and essentially giving a rationale and a motivation to Sutekh beyond “Screw you, I’m a god, I do what I like!”, which helps anchor the reality of what is an initially clever but ultimately daft plan. 

So, there are definitive upsides to the novelisation.

Survivors of the Scripting

Some of the weaker elements of the TV story though make it through unscathed, largely because they have to, or you’d be telling a fundamentally changed story. 

There is still a whole lot of faffing going on with the time window sequence, and that sequence still seems to go on far, far too long.

The mechanics of why nobody can see Ruby’s mother in the super-duper enhanced CCTV footage remains highly questionable, with the “inability to go back there and look” plot convenience, the “randomly pointing at a street sign behind the Doctor” silliness, and that whole “Sutekh’s been in and on the Tardis since an unseen sideways scene at the end of Pyramids” vexplanation surviving entirely unscathed.

Yes, vexplanation. I’m coining the word, dammit. If we can entirely rewrite bits of Doctor Who history on the fly, we can coin new words to express how it makes us feel. Deal with it.

The seeming plot hole of the Doctor and friends going forward to a future in which Roger Am Gwilliam developed mandatory DNA testing while in office, despite the previous events of 73 Yards in which Ruby appears to have stunted his governmental career (and the timeline) before he ever got that far makes marginally more sense in the novel than it did on screen, for which there’s gratitude to go around. 

And of course the classic Russell T Davies ending with the never-more-literal deus ex machina of Sutekh bringing death to death remains in place because it has to, irrespective of how “big red Reset button” it feels, and how robbed much of the audience felt by its magic wandery and the truth that that’s in no sense how death works.

Question: it never seems to have been raised at the time, but if you bring death to death, doesn’t that mean all death on the planet? Like a combination of the Bad Wolf solution, Missy’s Cyber-plan of raising the dead and the Torchwood: Miracle Day?

It’s jussst possible I’m thinking about this too hard.

Handcock does deliver due diligence though, returning to some of the various incarnations of Susan Triad around the universe in the wake of the revivification of their planets and life forms, which gives more of a sense of satisfying closure than the on-screen version did.

The Audiobook Factor

In terms of the audiobook, it makes perfect sense that Susan Twist, who played all the Susan Triads on screen, delivers the reading, and she’s pretty damned conscientious on place and planet names (no Matt Smith “MeTTebelis” slip-ups here, thank you very much), though naturally, her Sutekh can’t compete with Gabriel Woolf’s – spoiler alert, no one’s could. 

Throughout the reading though, she’s brisk, efficient, and gives both character and narrative a touch of warmth that while not exactly missing from the on-screen version is distinctly welcome, and leaves you feeling better disposed towards the audiobook version of Empire of Death than many fans felt towards the televised version of the finale.

As such, and while this is becoming a reviewing cliché, the audionovelisation of Empire of Death is probably the best version of that story you’re ever going to get. 

Does that make it a good story? Mmmmaybe not – the plot holes and “just because” elements, like Sutekh needing to know the identity of a mystery woman for the spurious reason that “people are important because we invest them with importance,” still survive to mar an otherwise interesting idea with an aching sense that (presumably) Russell lost interest in answering the questions he’d built up across the course of the season. 

That was always going to feel like a cop-out, and it duly did, and as such it still is in this new audiobook.

But Handcock in this format does his damnedest to make Empire of Death as logical as it can be, as correctly weighted and as emotionally involving as possible. And Susan Twist never lets him down, carrying the reading with confidence and an authority that makes even some of the dodgier remaining ideas at least sound plausible, in ways that our authority sources in the on-screen version, Ncuti Gatwa and director Jamie Donoughue, weren’t able to deliver, even (or especially?) with the Disney dollars to back them.

One To Buy?

So, should you get The Empire of Death as an audiobook? Absolutely – it’s well-written and delivered with heart, and while some of the most questionable choices from the TV version remain, it’s still as good as the story’s ever likely to get, which is especially useful if you’re still seething over the missed or ignored potential of the televised original. It might not ever make you entirely comfortable with that TV interpretation, but by broadening out the universe, making sure particular beats land with better weight, and being less overtly self-conscious in its determination to write a sequel to a story that didn’t especially need one, it works better than the version you know right now. Tony Fyler