Hoookay, so, Kerblam! spoilers for both the televised episode and the novelization follow.
McTighe has added a lot of backstory for Judy, the Head of People for Kerblam. On her sixth birthday, her dad gets laid off, and while she is enjoying her birthday meal, her parents talking in hushed tones down the hall, she witnesses her dad crying, which she'd never seen before. This is how the book opens, before transitioning to the scene in the TARDIS where the Doctor receives the package from the Kerblam man (who she loves, even loving the logo that appears after he teleports away, just like on TV. Gross).
The book removes the bit Judy reads on the psychic paper about the TARDIS crew being related to the Kandokan royal family, Judy instead just says "your references are excellent." I'm not sure why this change was made.
Judy says Kerblam is a 10% people company, just like she says on TV, but the book also adds a new line, "I know some people are against quotas, but I'm fine with that one!" which implies, of course, that she is against other ones. What other ones, McTighe?
The book really does want us to empathize with the fucking robot system. It gets some first person narration, calling itself Max, deciding that it is male. Even the descriptive narration says "a battery farm of willing organics worked hard under artificial lights, amid recycled air, meeting punishing schedules and expectations. And most were grateful for the opportunity." Given that the book barely even attempts to make the fake!Amazon company less evil (and I would argue, doesn't do so successfully), I don't see why McTighe doubles down on descriptions like this. They are peppered throughout the whole book, incoherently.
Interestingly, Dan (the guy Yaz works with briefly in the warehouse, played by Lee Mack on TV), asks Yaz if she's from "the union" - which is a word not used on screen a single time. So, apparently, there is a union, but it must be pretty weak considering Kerblam is still only 10% human powered.
Dan, like on TV, says he is happy he and Yaz have jobs, unlike half the galaxy - good thing Chibnall will destroy half the universe in a couple seasons, remedying that problem Thanos-style! Jesus.
Another little change, the sole gift Kira ever got in her life was not a gift from her boss, Judy, but an anonymously sent box of chocolates. Presumably these were sent by Charlie, one imagines, but it is never confirmed in the book and she doesn't suspect they came from him, either.
Oh and also, Kira had "dads," but she never knew them, because she was orphaned in the riots. Her dads were apparently killed by leftist agitators - and we get some more offscreen gays who die offscreen to add to the giant pile the Chibnall era accrues, one of it's weirdest, darkest tics, that wasn't even in the original televised episode! One could argue this Target novelization truly captures the era it comes from!
We occasionally get a few paragraphs from the point of view of "Max," who is apparently the personification of the Kerblam system. I assume McTighe did this to try to make it seem like the Doctor isn't straight up siding with a faceless, emotionless machine at the end, but it doesn't come off, and I don't really know why he bothered. There's no character there whatsoever in my opinion.
We get an added scene where Dan, Yaz's coworker from the warehouse, is sitting in a room much like the one Kira will later die in. He sees an old coworker of his carved their name into the table he's sitting in front of. He thinks back to her, and he internally says she was "bolshy." It's like McTighe is deliberately taunting me. A package then materializes in front of Dan, and he presumably opens it offscreen, pops a bubble, and dies.
Judy - who's dad got laid off and we will learn later joins protests and riots against automation - wonders aloud if the disappearances in Kerblam are either system issues or "staff walkouts." Shouldn't she know? She's the fucking Head of People, and apparently proud of it! She later says her boss, Slade, "failed upwards." This is confusing characterization to me.
When the Doctor is arguing later on with Judy and Slade in the latter's office, Judy says she thought people might have been quitting and had meant to follow up, but the system had logged it all and she hadn't gotten around to it. The Doctor says in a line not on TV, "You don't need a system to do everything for you, Judy. Come on!" Given how this book ends, that line rings hollow.
Yaz suggests they call the police, but there are none, because Kerblam is essentially a company town, and only the company has jurisdiction over anyone there. This would be excellent worldbuilding if the plot was building towards "Kerblam bad," but considering that is not what happens at all, it's just pointless.
We get some backstory for Charlie, too, at this point in the book, before it's revealed he's the baddie. He apparently comes from a "care home," where a friend of his taught him to break locks and hack, apparently.
We also get a flashback to an eleven year old Judy, who can't sleep one night, and goes to see what her dad is doing in the kitchen since the lights are on. He is painting a protest sign that says JOBS FOR PEOPLE, NOT ROBOTS and is, apparently, drunk. Because, you know, people that get laid off and protest must have issues, right, McTighe? The drunkenness doesn't come up again, but seems like a mean detail to put in about someone Judy looks up to. The next morning she hears her parents arguing about the protests her dad wants to attend. Her mom thinks they're too violent. She says the activists have recently "bombed a robot factory," to which Judy's dad replies "Good!" She says violence is not the answer. The book clearly wants us to side with Judy's mom. Her dad goes to the protest anyway, and Judy sneaks out and follows him. The narration describes some of the signs she sees: "SAY NO TO AUTOMATION," "PEOPLE NOT ROBOTS," and "DON'T STEAL OUR LIVELIHOODS," which are described as "shouty" in the book. I will note the signs are rendered in all caps in the novel, so adding the descriptor "shouty" reads to me as a moral judgment on McTighe's part, I assume. Judy and the rest of the crowd are then hit with pepper spray, at which point "a girl with long hair and a ponytail" and "a short, older man carrying an umbrella with a strange red handle" pull her out of the crowd. McTighe fucking puts the 7th Doctor and Ace in this fucking book! The Thirteenth Doctor doesn't bring up these events at all, which means she either forgot about them or is perfectly fucking fine with Kerblam spraying tear gas into a crowd of protestors who have lost their jobs, and still enthusiastically shops at Kerblam and defends its systems later on. What a fucking low point. Obviously nothing in this paragraph is in the televised version.
The above is told to us just before Judy rips the head off the Kerblam robot in the scene where it attacks Charlie in Slade's office, which she knows how to do because she'd seen protestors do it. Judy goes on to say there needs to be human workers in every sector, and when Ryan wholeheartedly agrees and says that sounds good to him, she replies, "That horse has bolted. Industry won't go backwards. But there has to be compromise. Work gives us purpose." The Doctor then says Judy should be running the company. Fucking abhorrent morals here, folks.
Judy then explains a bit about how her dad used to be a deliveryman but got laid off, and started protesting, even getting arrested once. The Doctor replies, "Revolutions can start with one person. Takes patience, and courage, but one individual can light that spark. Trust me, I've seen it happen. I've made it happen." How the fuck does she end up siding against Charlie at the end of the book? What was McTighe even going for, here?!
Later, we learn why Charlie was at a care home. When he was eight, his parents, who had taught him how bad the robots were his whole life, told him to stay in the car one day while they went into a factory with backpacks on, telling him they had "a gift for the robots." They died in an explosion later that day. Remember, later on, the Doctor does not sympathize with Charlie, nor are we meant to, either.
McTighe wisely tries to make the conveyor belt scene both a little more entertaining for prose, and shortening it by quite a bit compared to what was on TV, but fucks up by making Ryan fall off a conveyor belt at one point but catching himself, with one hand, on a lower belt. His dyspraxia is forgotten even in novel form.
McTighe makes a change to Slade, the guy the Doctor thinks is initially behind the disappearances, to being a private investigator hired by the "People's Union of Kandoka." They apparently have the power to get this guy into a management position, but not to get more than 10% of the workforce be human. In any case, the Doctor castigates him for not contacting the union, but she says she thinks he didn't because she "knows a narcissist when she sees one." That's apparently why he didn't tell Judy about the disappearances either. So that's a weird, pointless change.
The system - Max, who remember, we're supposed to sympathize with - still kills Kira with bubble wrap to get at Charlie, and the Doctor, just like on TV, will still later defend it as a rational act. I hate this.
Charlie is doing this, in addition to what he says on TV, also for his parents. For their cause. The Doctor still throws that back in his face - "This isn't a cause. You're not an activist, Charlie. This is cold-blooded murder." I cannot believe McTighe put the fucking 7th Doctor in this book.
I'll give him that the joke the 1.0 delivery bot Twirly says that is both on TV and in the book, "Customers with your current heart rate browsed blood pressure medication and wine," is very funny. That's about all I'll hand to him.
After Charlie dies and everything is winding down, we get an added scene of the Doctor fixing "Max," the system. She tells Max that she will need to reboot him using Twirly's old firmware to erase all of Charlie's hacks. The scene then reads: "Max knew what this meant. It was back to square one. Everything he had learned, everything he had become, would be erased. He'd be starting over, without name, gender, or personality. 'I'm sorry,' said the Doctor quietly. But Max knew the Doctor had his best interests at heart. If he'd had a face, he would have managed a reassuring smile. Instead, he simply replied, 'Thank you, Doctor.' And Max was no more." Boo hoo for the robot who killed Kira for no good reason.
Completely changed from the televised story, Kerblam does not close down for a month and give its employees two weeks pay. It instead makes the robots do all the menial work, because Slade quit and recommended Judy as his replacement. She thinks she has still let people down - I would certainly argue she has, since she hadn't gotten around to figuring out what was going on after people had mysteriously disappeared - and yet she gets a promotion, which the Doctor thinks she deserves. Christ.
There are a few added lines at the end where McTighe adds some longing for the Doctor from Yaz. This means McTighe has forgotten Ryan's dyspraxia but has remembered the underwritten, queerbaiting plotline from Legend of the fucking Sea Devils that doesn't pay off in a satisfying way for anyone at all, actors, viewers, fans, etc.
The Doctor does give Judy a device that has a big red button that, if Judy so chooses, will shut down the entirety of Kerblam's systems forever. Only she, the boss, gets this - god forbid any power gets given to the workers. This is clearly meant to make the Doctor not be so blatantly pro-Amazon as she is on screen, but McTighe can't fool anyone with this bullshit, he clearly loves him some giant corporations.
The book then ends with Judy remembering talking to the 7th Doctor, who reassures her after pulling her out of the aforementioned crowd that had been teargassed, telling her that she could grow up to change things so riots and things like her dad's arrest won't happen in the future. What does Judy do with her power as an adult? As I mentioned above, she makes the robots do the tedious stuff and the humans manage them, but she doesn't appear to lift a finger to hire any new people and at no point in the book is there any word of anything akin to a pay increase, including at the end here.
I cannot fucking believe how morally bankrupt the novelization is, considering how bankrupt I found the televised episode. It's weird, because I enjoyed hate reading this book - it does move along pretty quickly and if I could turn my brain off and just enjoy the plot, I'd probably like it a lot, but my fucking god is McTighe a reactionary piece of shit. I really hope he never writes for TV again.
