Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
In our previous chapter we started the second episode proper, a pet was lost, and I forgot to note that our crew is back together.
We are now halfway through the book visually, but that doesn’t account for the four pages list of other novelisations plus an order form for posters based on production art or something. So maybe we were halfway through the story when we started last time? Not sure. Point is we’ve reach the halfway point. There have been some added scenes that I can only assume are there to pad out the book. Novelizations (or “novelisations” if you’re British) are usually interesting to see what got lost on the cutting room floor or cut from the recording for time. Here we have Marter taking advantage of being a book that doesn’t need a budget for costumes to fill in gaps, which not only helps with the mental visuals of the scene but you can bring them back to watching the episodes. This lets your brain fill in gaps left by the budget, and classic Doctor Who never had much of a budget.
With that in mind (heh) let’s head back to see how Vicki handles her pet being lost and maybe what our villain will be trying next.
BW Media Spotlight 
BW’s Saturday Article Link> Evil Has Become Good
In a fictional sense that’s what we’re getting, as the villains of fiction are just given sympathetic backstories anymore. Their tales are being rewritten entirely so that the Wicked Witch, Maleficent, and Cruella DeVille (a name that speaks to her role in the story) are only some of the characters who were actually the heroes all along and the heroes are actually evil. It’s a form of propaganda I haven’t seen since a small group of Transformers fans back in my newsgroup days insisted the Decepticons were the actual heroes and the stories we grew up with were propaganda. Yes, this actually happened and I don’t know how serious…most of them were. One I know was way too serious, but that’s another conversation.
The Literature Devil, usually known for videos and his Morning Nonsense podcast, has started a Substack version of his old The First Edition YouTube channel and for his second article he looks at Maleficent and Elphaba specifically and how their stories compare with a fallen to darkness take on the wicked Queen from Snow White in the retexualized fairy tale series Once Upon A Time. In the article he goes over how you can have a villain fall to darkness and still be the villain while seeing the tragic events that corrupted him or her. There’s a difference between the fallen character and just changing the entire story. Plus, as I’ve gone over before while defending pure evil characters, villains serve a role in the narrative and taking them out of that role ruins the story.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on January 17, 2026 in Book Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged commentary, Maleficent, Villain, Wicked, Wicked Queen (Snow White), Wicked Witch Of The West.
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