“I know its name,” [Ruby’s foster/adopted mum, Carla] asserted. “It is the beast.”
In-universe, she was talking about Sutekh, but she could’ve been talking about Empire of Death, the novelisation of the final two episodes of Series 14/ Season 1, The Legend of Ruby Sunday and (obviously) Empire of Death by Scott Handcock, the script editor for the the Fourteenth Doctor specials and the first series of the Ncuti-verse. At 42,000 words (234 pages), this is one of the longest Target novelisations so far – range editor, Steve Cole recently shared a breakdown on BlueSky showing that this was in third place behind Warriors’ Gate and The Day of the Doctor.
Some of the length comes from ‘material reinstated from earlier drafts’. Although it’s mentioned on the back cover as a selling point, some of it turns out to have been omitted in the final episode because, like most deleted scenes, it doesn’t add anything. For example, the first chapter is almost entirely devoted to the Doctor and Ruby’s repeated encounters with Susan Triad’s doppelgangers across time and space. That’s fine, but I feel the episode gets across the same idea perfectly well, and once you’ve read the first example, the rest feel like padding. (Some people care that the Zarbi are back. I don’t.) I can see the argument that you need to give this context for the reader who’s coming in blind, but I’d like to know how many people don’t watch the episodes before reading the books nowadays.
Not all the material suffers from this, mind; there’s an expansion of the Department of Health scene with an extra monster that sadly wasn’t realised on screen. I feel like it would’ve properly shut up any little kiddies watching. There’s also the fun payoff where, thanks to Sutekh’s death wave, Ruby doesn’t remember that she’s seen Einstein in person.
The tome is full of nice touches like that. There’s some clever business with the structure of the book, as the Doctor/Susan-centred prologue is slotted into the narrative two chapters after the book has started. I also wouldn’t normally bother praising typesetting, but it does add something here, especially in the scene where Colonel Chidozie gets munched on by Sutekh.
Like all the best Target novelisations, it adds depth to the characters. I really appreciated the chance to peer inside Sutekh’s mind and get a proper look at his backstory and motivations. Likewise, we get to see Mel Bush’s thought process as she’s trying to fight off Sutekh. And in case there was any doubt, the book seems to confirm that he latched onto the TARDIS directly after the events of Pyramids of Mars.
There’s also a tiny humanising exchange between Colonel Ibrahim, Rose Noble, and Ruby that’s just fun to read. Little character moments can sometimes get cut in the service of the uneven pacing in Russell T Davies’ second era as showrunner, but it can really shine in a book of this length. Despite the significantly higher page count, it’s still written in a very approachable way and could easily be done in one sitting if you were so inclined.
One of the main joys of the Target range is that they can serve as their own form of time travel. Even though the episodes came out just over a year ago, Empire of Death acts as a time capsule for a simpler time when Ncuti Gatwa was still the Doctor, and his story was still set to end in ‘absolute terror’ (per Mrs Flood’s fourth wall break at both the end of the episode and this book).
Yet, as we now know, his story ended in ‘absolute joy’.
