The Zygon Invasion

"The longer one lived in these bodies, the more one began to understand."

Writer: Peter Harness 

Format: Novel

Released: July 2023

Printed in: Target 175

Featuring: Twelfth Doctor, Clara

Synopsis

"We will die in the fire instead of living in chains."

For years, 20 million shape-changing Zygons have lived among us in secret. They wear human form, hiding in plain sight. Now a fanatical Zygote splinter group seek to expose their own kind and provoke a conflict that will force both sides to the brink of Armageddon to ensure their own survival.

It took three Doctors to broker a fragile peace between Zygons and Humans. Now the 12th must face the fallout alone. With his allies compromised and his companion believed dead, can he stop the world from plunging into war?

Verdict

The Zygon Invasion was a great novelisation of the two-part The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion from Series 9! When the next batch of Target books were released I thought this was a strong choice to represent the Twelfth Doctor era because this is a defining story for this incarnation. The moment where Peter Capaldi delivers that speech on war can’t ever be done justice in prose, but a stellar job was done at trying to present that. I liked that the prose format was used to show that the Doctor felt like he needed to perform and put on a show with this speech. The alternatives if it went wrong were pretty dire. I enjoyed how well the book was represented as a sequel to The Day of the Doctor and having a number of flashbacks to that with the three Doctors was good. Clara being the bridge between the two stories was excellent too and I thought she had a strong outing in the companion role. It was a little weird just tapping into the era for this story here and she almost feels bigger than the companion role with her not constantly travelling in the TARDIS. I didn’t like that on television and I don’t like it here. It just doesn’t feel right and the Doctor begging after her with 127 missed calls seems a bit desperate. She revelled in that, but I’m not sure it’s the dynamic needed. The use of footnotes in the book to reference a couple of other Target novelisations was a really nice and it’s just lovely that Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster got some love as the first Zygon book. Some of the Zygons feeling abandoned by their Skarasen was a really nice inclusion too. I was a big fan of the Zygon continuity. I loved how Osgood was presented and her desire to not reveal which version - human or Zygon - was killed by Missy was great. I think a little more could have been dwelled on with that, but the effects were clear. She’d screamed for two days with the link they had. I do think there was a little bit of silliness with the likes of Clara pondering on what her bum looked like when she saw Bonnie in her body print, and some of the Doctor’s comments and puns were too cheesy. Too much disco. I think that’s the Steven Moffat influence though. I thought Jac was good as Kate’s second in command and Walsh was a strong character too, especially when killing a Zygon that was posing as her son. That was very powerful stuff. It was inevitable that the ceasefire was always going to fail, but the way the Zygon High Command had tried to keep it intact was a big shock. The fact Etoine had been ordered to kill some of his own race because they wanted to be free and risk breaking the treaty was horrible! Bonnie sympathised in setting him free. She was a really fun character and I liked the addition of the flashback scenes with Clyde having the body print of Danny. It tapped into Clara’s mind nicely and the grief she’d felt of losing him. I thought the cliffhanger moment was presented very well in the book and I liked the anticipation of the presidential plane being shot at. I’m still not a huge fan of Clara being able to control Bonnie from within, but the communication to the Doctor through winking was a clever touch. The Osgood Box was a fun deceive and it being empty was obvious but the moment Kate and Bonnie realised and stepped away was terrific. The Doctor’s performance paid off. I do think the return to ceasefire was done ever so slightly quickly, and maybe divulging some firm details would have been good. But alas, Bonnie taking the form of the deceased Osgood and them being a double act once again is a really nice touch. I totally forgot that happened so that was a fun moment at the end. Overall, a great novelisation of an iconic story!

Rating: 8/10