Read by Mark Gatiss, some of the narrative power of this story flattened a bit. However, I really enjoyed it and was glad the library had the audio up listen to right at the beginning of the year. Yay! ( )

While Twice Upon a Time is a far more straightforward adaptation of its episode when compared to Moffat's adaptation of Day of the Doctor, it is no less enjoyable. Paul Cornell has always had a gift for strong prose, and that strong prose is very much on display in his adaptation of Twice Upon a Time. In a way, it feels like he, out of all the authors, is trying the hardest to replicate the classic style of the original Target novelizations. Honestly, though, it really works for this story, mainly because of the fact that it heavily features the First Doctor, who Paul Cornell writes beautifully for. The episode was heavily criticized for its depiction of the First Doctor (essentially, simplifying him into a bit of a caricature of who he actually was, playing up the more sexist aspects of his character and downplaying some of the softer aspects), and while Paul Cornell doesn't really shy away from what Moffat wrote in the script, he does contextualize it some as a result of the regeneration the First Doctor is fighting off for the entirety of the story. In general, Paul Cornell writes the First Doctor really beautifully, adding some lovely insights into his thoughts during the episode - in particular, there's a touching reference during the scene where Bill first appears where the First Doctor briefly thinks that the person the Testimony is offering the Doctor in return for the Captain is Susan, his granddaughter, and when it turns out to be Bill, he's briefly heartbroken. It's such a short moment, but so utterly powerful.

As for the actual meat of the story, it's mostly as you remember it playing out on screen. It's been reported that upwards of thirty minutes of footage was cut from the episode, and while some of it does reappear in the novelization, most of it remains lost to the sands of time. What is added in Cornell's adaptation really does help flesh out the story somewhat. While I really liked Twice Upon a Time as an epilogue for Peter Capaldi's run as the Doctor, I know a lot of people thought it was a rather anti-climactic way for a Doctor to bow out, given that there ended up being no real threat and the episode was far more an introspective look at Capaldi's run as a whole than a truly gripping adventure, and while the book doesn't fix that, I think that the very nature of the medium of novels ends up being a better medium for this story. Novels are often more introspective, and so this super introspective story ends up working really well on the page; possibly even better than it worked on TV.

Don't go into this adaptation of Twice Upon a Time expecting anything radically different from the televised episode. Don't expect it to be the fabled director's cut featuring all the deleted scenes. Go into it expecting to read essentially the same thing you saw on TV, but with some added insights from the characters (and expect to find out just what happened to Bill, Heather, and Nardole after The Doctor Falls; spoiler alert: Bill and Heather had a damn cute life together) and you'll have a very enjoyable time. Paul Cornell proves with Twice Upon a Time why he's such a beloved author in the Doctor Who universe. He has such a gift for perfectly capturing the voices of characters and embellishing the events in which he's telling that he makes every Doctor Who story he writes really come off the page. It's a much different beast to the adaptation of The Day of the Doctor, but no less enjoyable. ( )

This is a novelisation of the Doctor Who Christmas special from 2017, which was Peter Capaldi's final episode at the end of which regenerated into his first female incarnation played by Jodie Whittaker. My interest in the TV show had ebbed considerably during the Capaldi era and I had considered giving up on it before his last season, but I found that season an improvement and this was a good special to end his era. The Doctor encounters his first incarnation in the snows of Antarctica, at the very end of his own life after defeating the Cybermen for the first time in the story The Tenth Planet. They are taken out of time by a mysterious glass woman and encounter a First World War British army captain taken from the trenches just at the moment of his death. The glass entity is taking people from the point of their deaths, and recording their memories before returning them to their fates. The Doctor's former companion Bill Potts, whom he believes to be dead, is also present, but the Time Lord is not sure she is the real deal. The Doctors grapple with the dilemma over not being able to save the Captain (whose surname turns out to be Lethbridge-Stewart), which they resolve by rolling time forward to the Christmas Truce of 1914, thus saving his life. The story is good and satisfying, though some of the dialogue is banal and there are perhaps too many continuity references (e.g. the Doctor owning a VHS recording of the Daleks' Master Plan!). The depiction of the 1914 Christmas Truce owes somewhat more to myth than historical reality, but this is a suitably heartwarming conclusion to a Christmas episode. ( )

"Twice Upon a Time" is one of the least Christmassy Doctor Who Christmas specials; just a couple scenes of it take place at Christmas (though there are a couple more scenes in the snow). As a tv episode, I felt it left a lot to be desire: a couple good jokes, of course, but the episode begins with a character dilemma (will each Doctor give in to regeneration?) that it seems to forget about in favor of a not very interesting mystery (as the Doctor points out, the evil plan is a complete lack of an evil plan).

Cornell's novelization can't change the plot (or doesn't anyway), but the arc of the two Doctors' resistance to moving on is better explained, better explored, and better resolved. I also really liked what we learn about Bill Potts and her life after the Doctor-- and what we don't learn. It's not a great novel, but it is a very good novelization, and probably the best one this source material could sustain, to be honest, without major rewriting. Cornell does a great job pastiching the Terrance Dicks prose style, though he seems to lean less on that and get more introspective as the story goes on. The regeneration speech still isn't great, but it's better without the bombast of the episode, and I really liked the final chapter from the new Doctor's perspective.

There are some good jokes; my favorite was the one about Mary Berry of Great British Baking Show fame. It's not very Christmassy, but Cornell does bring out the poignancy of the Christmas armistice moment, and makes it more significant to the characters than it was in the episode of broadcast. All in all, another solid installment in this line of books.

Since we don't get a new Doctor Who episode on Christmas this year -- we have to wait until New Year's! -- I decided to fill the void in my life by reading this novelization of last year's Christmas special. Although, I must admit, I had mixed feelings about that episode; there were some aspects of it I really liked and others that greatly irritated me. Paul Cornell's adaptation evens those mixed feelings out a little, though, I think. Some of the more emotionally affecting moments in the episode hit me less strongly in this form, but others actually worked a bit better. And the things that bugged me bug me slightly less here. It helps that Cornell appears to agree with me that some of the First Doctor's dialog was quite out of character. He doesn't change it -- this is a very faithful adaptation -- but he does at least acknowledge its weirdness, which I found sort of comforting.

It's interesting, actually, to contrast this with the previous New Who novelization I read, Steven Moffat's [The Day of the Doctor]. That one was complex and experimental and meta, and added lots of lots of content that wasn't actually in the episode. This one, in addition to being very faithful, is also very straightforward. In fact, especially towards the beginning, it seems to be very deliberately echoing the style of Terrance Dicks' old Target novel adaptations of the classic series. It is less bare-bones than those tended to be, though, and adds in a fair bit of character stuff from various POVs, some of which I think really does enhance the story, as well as an entertaining in-joke or two.

Rating: I'm not entirely sure how to rate this, especially given my complex feelings about the episode itself, but it does what it's trying to do quite well, so I'm going to go with 4/5. ( )