The Pit

Summary: 6/10 The Doctor and Benny try to discover why a system vanished years before Benny's birth, and instead descend into The Inferno.

After "Time Lash", haven't we learned *not* to include historical figures as pseudo-companions? It is one thing when the Doctor and company encounter a historical figure, but it's quite another to put them in as something approaching a companion role. It's hard to get it to work properly. "The Pit" handles this better than "Time Lash", perhaps becuase Blake isn't a poorly kept secret.

The Pit also suffers because it leaves many things hanging. I've been told that The Pit was the first book of a planned trilogy by Mr. Penswick, and that Virgin passed on the rest of the series. This may have made The Pit more satisifying - especially if the first book hadn't left things hanging. But a book has to earn the right to have a sequel -- and the unit of judgement isn't the whole series, but the individual book.

This books biggest problem is that he fails to pull off what he's trying to do -- of course, Paul Cornell's first novel [Revelation] also had a high potential of not pulling off what it tried to do. I think if it had thrown out most of the time travel work in the novel, it would have had a better plot, and a more successful novel.

One of the reasons why I think it's as much the editorial staff problem as it is Neil's is they shouldn't let someone's first Doctor Who novel play with some of the pieces it did -- No Gallifrey, certainly no ancient Gallifrey. I suspect many of Virgin's rules dealing with such matters came about precisely becuase of this book -- and I think this book suffers because of it.

"The Pit" is certainly not a book I'd rank very highly -- a standard D grade, 6/10.. I think it tries to do too much and fails to accomplish those goals. You can be over ambitious -- a good simple story is better than a bad complicated one. I would say that the Pit is better than "Genesys", "Apocolypse", and "Deceit", so it hardly qualifies as the worst Doctor Who novel, and I think there could have been a good Doctor Who novel spring from some of the ideas in the book, but "The Pit" didn't turn out to be anything spectacular. But it is better than I thought it would be.

If you haven't read it, you might as well pass on it and go on to better books -- unless, like me, you're a completist about these things. :) There were some good ideas in the book -- but they should have been focused on and isolated instead of having more put in the mix as well. It's possible that if Neil Penswick had stuck with something closer to something he would have submitted to the television show, the Pit's reputation wouldn't be so low.