Second Skin

"The patches make you change."

Writer: Richard Dungworth

Format: Novel

Released: March 2008

Series: Decide Your Destiny 10

Featuring: Tenth Doctor

Synopsis

When you find yourself on a twenty-third century space station, you soon realise a dangerous alien parasite has taken over most of the people on-board. Can you and the Doctor destroy it before it reaches Earth?

Verdict

Second Skin was a great Decide Your Destiny novel! I'm usually pretty critical of these formatted stories but I have to say that I thought this one was pretty terrific and really captured the reader's attention right from the off. I'm still not a huge fan of the reader being a central character and essentially the companion with the Tenth Doctor travelling solo here as we don't get to input our own words, but we do get to decide a number of actions which I guess is something! I had thought of something intriguing when it came to that aspect of the method of storytelling here though and that was the issue of things being canonical. Is every possible choice that the reader takes officially part of canon? It's fun to think about because I'm not entirely sure how many different possible routes this adventure can take, but it must be a lot given the number of choices I had to make on just one route! Would avid readers really utilise every possible version of this story? There just isn't enough time in the day for me to be doing that and let's face it I can't be blogging several different versions of the story. If anyone didn't decided to go into the TARDIS early on then they're mad and lacking sense of adventure for me. What young fan with knowledge of Doctor Who wouldn't choose the time and space machine? I thought the story opened very strongly and immediately it felt more mature. It didn't feel childish much at all throughout the adventure which was fantastic and it just had an impact right away with the Doctor being thrust into action and handing off the sonic screwdriver to the reader right away. I think it also helped that it took a little while for chosen dialogue for the reader to occur as we were just an observer of the Doctor's actions at the start. That was as it should be. I was interested to see that this story was released in March 2008 ahead of Series 4 airing but the Tenth Doctor was travelling solo. Whenever he is companionless I always naturally go to the era of the 2009 Specials but here he was yet to be reunited with Donna. A fun little quirk. I thought the plot at the heart of my version of the story was actually really impressive and I liked the environmental education that would occur for younger readers. The concept of the patches was really strong and it was good to have an alien race commercialised. Humanity at its finest right there. What wouldn't we harvest for monetary gain? In this instance, it was a means to tackle UV light which was interesting and I really appreciated the twenty-third century setting as it showed just what kind of impact the environment had experienced. Something somewhat ordinary was now a real problem and people were paying good money to be pale. How times change! I thought Blip was a pretty good little character although in my chosen route he did seem to arrive slightly late. Perhaps my decisions meant the ending was somewhat rushed? I didn't get that feeling for the story overall, but just for his involvement. I thought the way things ended was strong in having the Doctor rejigging the spaceship's thermal controls so once it did enter Earth's atmosphere it would simply burn up and take the patches with it. The Doctor was confident in his actions as we never actually saw this happen, but I feel like we can trust him! Overall, a strong little read and a fine use of the library once again. There's nothing quite like an essential freebie. 

Rating: 8/10