As companion departures go, Hulke takes the next step up from 'Fury from the Deep'. Elizabeth Sandifer describes that story as the best exit for a companion 'since at least Steven, arguably Vicki or Susan, and really probably just ever' because the departure 'is actually seeded and dealt with through the entire story'. She also points out its flaw:
'This shouldn't be a story that also happens to be a bad day for Victoria. It should be a story about Victoria's bad day'
(eruditorumpress.com/blog/when-youre-living-your-life-one-day-after-another-fury-from-the-deep).
Doctor Who and the Green Death doesn't quite manage to be about Jo's departure, but it does improve on the TV episodes by seeding the reasons for her departure throughout the story.
The novelisation opens, as on TV, with her having grown up and effectively decided that she's no longer a Doctor Who companion. The action-adventure world of the series is then shown, as if through her eyes, to be peppered by a procession of childish events and characters, whether the Doctor's ludicrous Metebelis Three trip, the Brigadier's ‘playing toy soldiers’, the over-earnest Wholeweal Community, which the locals 'couldn’t help joking about', or Stevens, desperate to be told what to do by his bestest ever friend Boss, and his pet thug Hinks, who immerses himself in violent comic books whenever he gets a quiet moment.
Jo, meanwhile, is immediately accepted by the adults of the story, the miners of Llanfairfach, teaches Professor Jones how to not be such a prat and generally just acts on her own agency. She even gets to sigh and shake her head at the Doctor's petulant efforts to disrupt her relationship with the professor, sufficiently confident to never doubt his eventual failure or feel the need to confront him.
Unfortunately, this leaves her slightly marginalised within the story, having nothing to do with Panorama Chemicals bar clambering up their waste pipe, but it does make her feel beyond the reach of the more cartoonish aspects of the series before she's even left. It really feels like it's time for her to go and makes this the best constructed companion departure until K-9 Mk II's or, arguably, Turlough's. Maybe.
Anyway, for a hot mess of an attempt to condense the other joys of this novelisation, click here.
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