There's an odd suggestion in this novelisation that the Doctor might be responsible for Libri's death.
It all starts with a baffling lie on the Doctor's part as he tries to stop Noah:
The Doctor looked straight into Libri's eyes. “Noah must be stopped,” he said. “There was a systems fault during his Revivification—his brain is damaged”.
Why does he say that? There's never any suggestion that Noah's pre-Wirrrn infection attitude is down to anything except his fundamentally dickish nature. The only reason I can think of is that it somehow helps him wrongfoot Libri and so ease the hypnosis which swiftly follows:
Libri gazed at the glittering watch, mesmerized. Then, when the Doctor finished speaking, he looked up into the Doctor's huge, piercing eyes. "Noah must be stopped," he cried, and rushed out of the Cryogenic Chamber in pursuit.
Then, when Libri confronts Noah, there's a clear echo of the fact the Doctor mesmerised him into giving chase:
Noah seized the weapon with his good hand and tried to twist it from Libri's grasp. The young Medtech stared at his leader like a hypnotised animal.
Noah then kills Libri.
First up, the Doctor is clearly responsible for the death in as much that, since he hypnotises Libri into chasing Noah, Libri's actions are not of his own volition and solely motivated by the Doctor's instructions, and the echo of that at the moment of his death emphasises that. More intriguingly, the passage reads as if the mesmerism has somehow affected Libri's ability to react to the situation, reducing him to little more than a rabbit in the headlights as Noah lunges at him.
I don't particularly think this is deliberate, but Marter has specifically introduced the hypnotism for the novelisation and then reminded the reader of it at the moment of Libri's death. Why else would he have done that?
Libri's death is also pretty baffling in itself:
directed the relentless pulses of energy at the body of the young Medtech until it had completely disintegrated into nothing. Then the weapon clattered from his grasp as Noah's human awareness gained supremacy again.
It's pretty clear it’s the Wirrrn rather than the human Noah who blasts Libri to nothing, but Libri’s already been infected (‘something flew through the air and cut him across the face. He fell back, screaming and clawing at the intense burning sensation in his eyes’) so wouldn’t be in the Wirrrn’s interest to keep him alive and in the human’s to destroy his body?
Anyway, for a look at the novelisation beyond Libri's death, click here...
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