Last Man Running by: Chris Boucher

Chris Boucher wrote three stories for Doctor Who between Season 14 and 15: The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death, and Image of the Fendahl.  Outside of the show he worked on Blake’s 7 as a script editor, but left his novels to be novelized by the legendary Terrance Dicks in 1978 and 1979.  It’s important to note that Boucher has not written any prose work before the fifteenth BBC Past Doctor Adventures release, Last Man Running.  If one wasn’t familiar with the three television stories from Boucher, Last Man Running would be both one of the best and worst examples of his writing styles.  Last Man Running is a novel that encapsulates the atmosphere and science-fiction ideas from the television stories of Boucher.  The novel’s primary setting is a mixture of a lush jungle and ancient spaceship straight out of The Face of Evil, however, with the prose there are expansive descriptions to transport the reader right into the alien landscape.  There’s also a third act twist about the actual ‘last man running’ that feels reflective of The Face of Evil.  The surprise over the top villain is a reveal from The Robots of Death with the deeper meanings being nowhere to be seen, but not to the detriment of the character.  Morley as he is named here, brings some great chemistry to the novel right in the final third.  His interactions with the Doctor and Leela are excellent and one of the few real highlights of the novel.  The atmosphere draws the most from the gothic uncertainty of Image of the Fendahl, with the idea of some Lovecraftian beast killing a society.  The difference here is in the setting that while Image of the Fendahl is preventing an apocalypse, Last Man Running appears long after the world has ended.



The novel, however, is structurally weak.  Writing for television and writing for prose are two very different forms of writing.  Boucher is excellent when it comes to television which involves cooperation with entire teams of cast and crew to bring a story to life as well as having scripts edited by others.  His style of writing in Last Man Running is how you would describe a set and the type of actors you would cast in characters.  The two characters who Boucher captures in prose are the Doctor and Leela, as Boucher is responsible for creating the warrior of the Sevateem.  The rest of the characters are just names on a page, with defining characteristics ranging from couple which secretly hates each other to here to build up a body count.  The plot itself is incredibly an incredibly standard Doctor Who story that could have been an excellent addition to the Philip Hinchcliffe era of the show with some work.  Putting Boucher on his own as an author with only one editor looking over the script leads to a novel that reads almost like a television script which just does not engage.   It feels like something that needs to be performed to be good, but as it stands it’s a subpar Doctor Who adventure.  3/10.