Maius Intra Qua Extra

Sometime I will post a picture of it, when I get it set up. :)

River's always been a killer (after all, she was trained as an assassin), but her motivations have never been greed. I would have had less of a problem if she had been like Lady Christina de Souza and had been doing it out of boredom (though that is still rather out of character in my opinion). There've been lots of out-of-character moments this season (such as him not offering to take the mark from Clara), but this was the worst.

I haven't read the ones I just received yet (it takes me a while to decide to sit down and read), but I've read a few previously. The quality definitely varies a lot, and there's no consistent feel like there is with the TV show, since they're all written by different authors. I really enjoyed "Krillitane Storm", which I felt was a good adventure and explored the backstory of the Krillitanes very well. I liked "Beautiful Chaos". but I think that's the only Ten and Donna novel I've read. "The Story of Martha", which is about Martha's journey in the Year That Never Was, was terrible. The author really wasted a fantastic storytelling opportunity.

My husband's read about four of the novels that we received, and he's been pretty much disappointed in them. The adventures haven't been very inspired, and in general, the Doctor's been a jerk. Instead of portraying him as alien and therefore thinking too quickly and not fitting into the social norms, like he is in the show, he's sarcastic and mean to everyone. My husband also complained about the one he just finished, that the Doctor is meddling where he has no reason to be.

I wonder how much quality control the BBC kept on those novels. With the TV show, the showrunner keeps a tight rein on what goes into the scripts, to keep them all in line with his vision of the show, but I wonder if they have such a system for the novels, or if they just contract a person to write a novel and don't do much more than the usual editing and making sure the Doctor doesn't shoot someone. Certainly there's a lot more cohesion with the Big Finish audios. It's very obvious that they have large story arcs in mind for the Eighth Doctor. With the other classic Doctors, there are small arcs, but in general, they've established the story types that suit the Doctors. You don't see Five getting into situations where he has to be dark and manipulative, for example - a story like that will be a Seven story.

I will recommend "12 Doctor 12 Stories", though. That's a great anthology of short stories, and the stories for Nine and Eleven in particular are fantastic. I didn't like One's story (I hated the author's style), but I enjoyed all of the rest of them.