Delta and the Bannermen by: Malcolm Kohll

 

Delta and the Bannermen was written by: Malcolm Kohll, based on his story of the same name.  It was the 139^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

There was a time where Delta and the Bannermen ranked as my least favorite Doctor Who story.  So much so that I have reviewed the televised story twice and there was some apprehension going into this batch of Target novelizations which includes Malcolm Kohll’s adaptation of his only Doctor Who television story.  Luckily in converting the serial to prose there are several issues that are either fixed or softened slightly in adaptation.  Kohll does take time in the opening act of the story to actually explore the Chimeron/Bannermen conflict as well as add just the tiniest bit of depth to Gavrok as a character.  The genocide is happening because Gavrok and the Bannermen are motivated by greed and profit over the life and environment of planets.  Kohll clearly cares about the impending threat of climate change, the novelization making it slightly clearer as to why Andrew Cartmel would approach him to write for the show.  The political commentary is still skin deep, Gavrok and the Bannermen are still just characterized as evil brutes with no real sense of inner life, but at least the backstory is something.  There is also an epilogue that attempts to explore the fates of the surviving characters, the living Bannermen being transported to prison, Billy and Delta living happily ever after, and Ray taking the motorcycle and heading to the European continent.  At the very least these additions add something to the novelization.

 

Kohll does not seem to have had any experience before or since in terms of writing prose and there is a sense with Delta and the Bannermen that there was a lack of editorial support.  There is a fairly famous typo that slipped through the copy editor, but the novelizations pace is also all over the place.  While some of the additional details are nice, Kohll does write these incredibly short chapters that fluctuate from being a single scene to multiple scenes tied together.  The prologue for instance isn’t a prologue, but a description of the Doctor and Mel in the TARDIS at the start of the story.  The epilogue actually serves as an epilogue as stated above, but that prologue could easily be cut and you would have a stronger book.  There is a sense that Kohll has seen science fiction novels with prologues and epilogues so he includes one of each of them.  It’s particularly odd as Delta and the Bannermen was not published during the experimental phase where novelizations became tests for longer Doctor Who novels.  Kohll also struggles with the different groups of characters.  Hawk and Weismuller are expanded but only in service of adding more comedy to the story, the same can be said with Burton Burton running the holiday camp, but a lot of this humor is outdated.  Burton feels like a parody of neurodivergent people, which I’d like to believe is unintentional from Kohll.

 

Overall, while there are some improvements to a particularly bad story, Delta and the Bannermen is still one of those stories that just don’t work.  Adding extra details mean that the story is easier to follow, but this is still a story with extreme tonal whiplash from outright camp comedy with silly aliens having a jolly old time to a genocidal invasion.  Fundamentally it is a weak story and no amount of expansion is actually going to save that.  3/10.

Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock by: Terrence Dicks

 

Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock was written by: Terrence Dicks, based on his story Horror of Fang Rock.  It was the 40^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Horror of Fang Rock is one of those Doctor Who stories that should probably not work as well as it does.  It was written rather quickly by Terrance Dicks after the BBC requested cancellation of The Vampire Mutations.  It’s a testament to Dicks’ skill as a writer that it’s the highlight of its season and one of Tom Baker’s best serials.  Since it’s a Dicks story it was also an easy candidate for novelization, Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock being published less than six months after the television story completed.  While not the quickest turnaround time (The Five Doctors hit the shelves the day before that story was broadcast), six months does mean Dicks has little time to adjust the story before his deadline.  His prose is the usual easy to read style, leaning itself nicely into the gothic horror tone of the original story.  There is a great sense of isolation with the lighthouse setting and some slight expansions of Fang Rock and its legendary beast.

 

Dicks avoids the temptation in adding to the legend of the beast to make it a previous Rutan that somehow made it to Earth, implying in Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock that the Rutans have only just become able to change their appearances.  They have only been intergalactic recently, far less than the Sontarans.  This does create an interesting perspective when Dicks writes a few scenes from the point of view of the Rutan.  It’s basic for characterizing a gestalt entity but it makes an impression when the rest of the novelization suffers from not having sterling performances.  Terrence Dicks does adapt his script well, the characterization is there, but without the cast a lot of the lines that transfer over don’t quite hit as well.

 

Overall, Terrance Dicks clearly understood the story he was adapting when writing Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock, even if there is just a bit of the novel suffering from being a novelization.  His breezy prose is for the best, even enhancing the feeling of isolation while characterization does suffer slightly.  8/10.

The Nth Degree by: Joe Menosky and directed by: Robert Legato

 

“The Nth Degree” is written by: Joe Menosky and is directed by: Robert Legato.  It was produced under production code 193, was the 19^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 93^rd episode overall, and was broadcast on April 1, 1991.

 

2001: A Space Odyssey is a revolutionary piece of science fiction.  Stanley Kubrick defined cinematic science fiction, all during the initial broadcast of Star Trek.  The original series never outright produced an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it was made up of writers with connections to Arthur C. Clarke and often discussed similar themes.  Star Trek: The Next Generation was produced in a world where the reputation of 2001: A Space Odyssey fully cemented, and yet it took until the back half of the fourth season to cannibalize some of its surface plot elements and visual style with ideas from Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon.  “The Nth Degree” is about the Enterprise encountering an alien race that exists as pure thought, calling other species to them for an exchange of knowledge.  This is done through invading and controlling the mind of Lt. Reginald Barclay, played by Dwight Schultz, giving him fundamental knowledge of the universe.  This develops Barclay into a HAL-9000 figure, integrating himself into the Enterprise computer and controlling the ship.  The explanation of the aliens as peaceful and using Barclay as a conduit is a twist so the episode presents this as horrific, Barclay is losing his humanity.  The buildup to this is the fear that the Enterprise crew cannot take any action because Barclay is simply becoming more intelligent and more socially competent.  He makes a pass at Troi which is brought up as potentially a problem, but that is quickly forgotten and she actually agrees to go on a date with him.  At least there is an attempt to frame it as inappropriate with Troi’s position as counselor, but he still gets the date in the final scene of the episode.

 

The biggest issue with “The Nth Degree” is Schultz’s performance.  This was clearly an issue in “Hollow Pursuits”, Barclay’s introductory episode, where he learned not to retreat into his own fantasies in an episode that calls for a particularly nervous performance, coded as through an anxiety disorder.  Joe Menosky’s script for “The Nth Degree” shifts the anxiety not to something he can control but actively resets his development back to being able to work, though with far less derision from the rest of the crew.  Schultz, however, is tasked with playing Barclay as becoming increasingly confident with his increase in intelligence throughout the episode and he simply doesn’t.  With every line delivery there is this undercurrent of that nervousness that makes the confident dialogue stilted.  It is not helped by Schultz’s physical presence still embodying that anxiety, making himself look small and weak.  When the performance shifts to voiceover in the final act that problem decreases, clearly indicating that it’s the physical presence of Schultz that is making Barclay more awkward than he needs to be.  The pre-credits sequence calls for Barclay to perform in a scene from Cyrano de Bergerac poorly, and it is difficult for a good actor to give an intentionally bad performance, but oddly enough these scenes are somehow some of Schultz’s best work in the episode.  He’s paired on stage with Dr. Crusher and Gates McFadden is clearly drawing on her experience on and off stage.  It’s very possible that director Robert Legato isn’t directing Schultz properly because these weren’t issues in “Hollow Pursuits”.  That’s particularly a shame because there are several moments where the blocking and framing of the episode is particularly excellent.

 

Joe Menosky’s script clearly understands the character of Barclay but writes the character arc as a retread of ground from “Hollow Pursuits”.  In the script there is a lack of external conflict from the rest of the crew, Menosky almost cordoning off Barclay when he becomes too smart so the rest of the cast can sneak in to try and turn off the computer.  Where Menosky’s script does fall particularly flat is in its ending, the reveal of the aliens coming into the story simply because a resolution is needed.  Barclay as a character sits in the role of a potential fan of Star Trek, he is supposed to represent the introverted nerd stereotype which in the mind of the general public and the production staff is the type of person who likes science fiction.  Rhetorically it is sympathetic to this type of person, however, the stereotypes it draws upon for Barclay are of bad people.  Retrospectively, while the writers want the viewer enamored with Barclay’s growth and give him the reward of a romantic date at the end of the episode, it is these elements that are precisely why the character doesn’t work.  Once again, it is at the expense of Deanna Troi, often the female character on the show reduced to the role of potential love interest or even just a simple sex object.

 

Overall, while “The Nth Degree” isn’t a bad episode, it is one that is drawing on two science fiction stories that have been engrained in pop culture and it does try to say something about Barclay as a character, it’s brought down quite a bit by Schultz’s poor performance and inability to have more than a nervous presence and particularly poor direction of the actors.  In far too many ways it retreads the previous Barclay episode without having much new to say on the character.  6/10.

The Massacre by: John Lucarotti

 

The Massacre was written by: John Lucarotti, based on his story of the same name.  It was the 125^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

On television, The Massacre was rewritten several times by Donald Tosh at the behest of producer John Wiles.  This was largely due to production difficulties: there were uncertainties whether William Hartnell could adequately perform the double role of the Doctor and the Abbot of Amboise as well as if the production team could feasibly film the episodes within the typical 90 minute recording blocks.  Hartnell was also given a week off for the second episode of the serial and the initial plans to introduce new companion Anne Chaplet fell through as Wiles and Tosh believed she would have the same issues as Katarina, both characters out of the long distant past.  Tosh would be credited on the fourth installment as cowriter, being responsible for a full-scale rewrite of the entire serial and leaving his position as story editor during production.  When it came to novelizing the story in 1987, John Lucarotti made the decision to go back to the original scripts instead of following the televised story.

 

In using the original scripts, The Massacre immediately improves by involving the Doctor far more actively in events.  Lucarotti enhances the mystery of whether the Abbot and the Doctor are the same person by resolving it earlier.  While the Abbot and the Doctor do not share scenes, the Doctor does impersonate the Abbot to actively attempt to save people.  Lucarotti’s other Doctor Who scripts played up the Doctor as a trickster figure, something that was lacking in the televised version of The Massacre, and reading the novelization makes you feel its absence.  If given this material to work with William Hartnell would have excelled in accentuating how different the Doctor and the Abbot are.  This does mean that the final scenes in the TARDIS are absent, the Doctor does save people, so Steven does not have nearly as much anger, but it’s a clear decision from Lucarotti that understands the character motivations for leaving.  It denies the novelization of one of Hartnell’s best speeches but in its place the story is overall stronger.

 

There’s a sense that Lucarotti is using The Massacre to comment on The Aztecs.  The Aztecs is a story that writes into stone that “You can’t rewrite history, not one line.” and on television The Massacre draws its drama from the Doctor following that to the letter.  The novelization takes almost a delight in making the Doctor an active participant in rewriting history, not so much that the grand scheme of things changes, but enough that the massacre of the Huguenots is less deadly.  It’s still a tragedy, there is still a massacre that in the novelization Lucarotti leaves to the reader to fully embrace the horror of the situation, but the Doctor saves people.  He also comes dangerously close to breaking the laws of time, Lucarotti writing this book from a perspective where Doctor Who has just broadcast its 23^rd season all about the Doctor being put on trial for doing just that.  He even includes a framing device of the Time Lords extracting the Doctor from his timeline to question the events of the story.  It’s an odd framing story, Lucarotti clearly likes the idea of the Time Lords but hasn’t actually seen The War Games or The Trial of a Time Lord, yet it works for the novel.  It’s a literary device to portray the Doctor as an underdog.

 

Overall, The Massacre as a novel ends up becoming one of the strongest examples of how to novelize a story.  Some of it might be the fact that the television story is the story hit most hard by the junkings, no episodes or telesnaps or clips exist and the soundtrack is a poor quality, and reading the novelization is a more consistent exploration of the historic setting and one with a better grasp on the characters.  Lucarotti has always had a unique voice for Doctor Who but The Massacre is his masterpiece.  9/10.

Wolfsbane by: Jacqueline Rayner

 

The BBC Books line of Doctor Who novels have this tendency to create multi-Doctor stories where the pair of Doctors do not interact.  The Colony of Lies was the oddest of these in terms of structure, the Seventh Doctor was almost exclusively in the prologue and epilogue while the rest of the novel was a standard Second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe story.  Heart of TARDIS was Dave Stone’s attempt at a Fourth and Second Doctor novel where the TARDIS teams got close to meeting while Interference: Book Two is its own beast.  Jacqueline Rayner’s Wolfsbane is the most interesting example of this trend.  It is a multi-Doctor story that separates the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane from Harry Sullivan by a couple of years due to a TARDIS malfunction.  Harry finds himself with a different Doctor, one that he has to be convinced is the Doctor while his Doctor and Sarah find his grave.  Now it is important to put this into the context of the Eighth Doctor Adventures at this point: the multiverse is collapsing and it’s clear that the previous Doctors’ timelines are being altered, often with the deaths of companions.  The Doctor Harry meets and spends the novel with is the Eighth Doctor, set during his exile on Earth after the events of The Ancestor Cell, meaning that he is suffering from amnesia at this point.  Rayner plays with exactly what the Eighth Doctor knows, his segments are entirely from Harry’s perspective and he isn’t sure if this mysterious Doctor is at all related to his Doctor.

 

As the premise dictates, Harry is doomed to die in Wolfsbane.  Rayner uses this to play with expectations, while the Doctor and Sarah Jane find his grave his actual death only comes at the very end of the novel.  Wolfsbane examines what role Harry Sullivan actually plays as a character.  His function on television was made redundant by the casting of Tom Baker as the Doctor, being initially envisioned as filling any required action with the potential casting of an older Doctor.  In developing the character, however, something interesting happened with Harry, he became the more old-fashioned character.  Rayner in Wolfsbane, by putting him into the 1930s setting, is putting him into essentially the older time that he should fit within.  He was written to make several chauvinist remarks towards Sarah Jane especially and Rayner does not diminish that attitude, but there is also the sense that he is pushing forward into the “modern” times of the 1970s at which Season 12 was produced.  Outside of Harry’s death, Wolfsbane is on one hand a story about a werewolf terrorizing an English village and on the other hand an examination of British myths.  There is a man convinced he is the son of Mordred, intending on taking the throne if/when Edward VIII abdicates, and the search for the Holy Grail.  To add to Harry’s chauvinism is a dryad, portrayed by Rayner as ethereal and as fickle as you would expect from the fair folk.  The choice of entrapment of Harry with a dryad is a deliberate choice made from love, despite separating the TARDIS teams Rayner clearly loves them.

 

Emmeline Neuberger is the novel’s werewolf, Rayner laying out these werewolves as unable to control themselves on the full moon although they can force the shift.  There are connections made between the moon and silver that create the weakness of it, specifically discussing the connection of colors.  Making the werewolf female creates a subtext of the werewolf as a further metaphor for femininity.  This is in addition to being in the explicitly patriarchal society of the 1930s, Emmeline being initially presented as a victim before becoming closer to a full person through the course of the novel due to her interactions with both Doctors, Harry, and Sarah.  The mythic history of Britain is framed by Rayner as masculine and specifically aristocratic.  It is power as subjugation, the villain isn’t actually Mordred even if the magic and supernatural elements of Wolfsbane are explicitly real.  There is the thematic element of a mother scheming to usurp the power as a parallel of Arthurian legend, but Harry Sullivan is not a knight destined to find the Grail, Sarah Jane is not Guinevere, and the Doctor is not Arthur.  That particular parallel does weaken ever so slightly the commentary on gender in Wolfsbane.  Rayner’s plotting is meticulous in how it actually ends with the possibility that this story does not actually happen at all, or happened in a different way, but again that is partially the nature of myths.  There could be a mote of truth, and on some level the reader knows that Terror of the Zygons is going to happen eventually, but for where it stands it is a myth.

 

Overall, Wolfsbane is a novel that works because it’s examining both an aspect of Doctor Who, in this case a companion, and putting them in the context of their archetype and a larger look at British myths and legends.  It plays the supernatural incredibly straight and finds a way to write the story where it feels right that the two Doctors don’t meet in the end.  There’s a lot of this novel about the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry as a team and how they fit while also tackling a larger societal underpinning.  In terms of Rayner’s novel work it’s the strongest novel she’s written.  9/10.

Hunger from the Ends of Time! by: Dan Abnett with art by: John Ridgway and lettering by: Annie Halfacree

 

“Hunger from the Ends of Time!” is written by: Dan Abnett with art by: John Ridgway and letters by: Annie Halfacree.  It was released in The Incredible Hulk Presents issues 2-3 (October 1989) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: Nemesis of the Daleks by Panini Books.

 

The second story to be featured in The Incredible Hulk Presents covers two issues of the magazine.  As such “Hunger from the Ends of Time!” is allowed to develop far more than “Once in a Lifetime”.  Dan Abnett writes a story that feels like a precursor to the New Adventures in terms of setting and supporting characters.  It’s a planet that has been converted into a digital library containing all the galaxy’s knowledge, predating “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” by 19 years, but it is besieged by bookworms.  These bookworms are giant, alien insects that are eating the books.  There is a group of space marines called the Foreign Hazard Duty who have been called to purge the worms, and the Doctor must go into a digital world to stave off the bookworms.  The twist of the story is that the library is storing its catalog in time and not in space, so the bookworms are going to collapse the web of time.  What’s particularly nice is that the Doctor treats the bookworms not as evil, but a problem to be solved, instead of killing them just exiling them back to their proper place at the beginning and end of time.  This is a grab bag of ideas that are going to become integral for several New Adventures, Timewyrm: Revelation, Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible, Love and War, and Birthright come to mind, so it’s interesting to see them all in a comic meant for young children.

 

The story is simple, although the Doctor is characterized as a touch too generic.  Some of this might be because this is meant to be for a general Marvel Comics reading audience and not the readers of Doctor Who Magazine, but it does mean that as a focal character the Seventh Doctor is a touch too boring a character in this story.  It is certainly closer to the Doctor than many of the Seventh Doctor Doctor Who Magazine strips up to this point and far easier to swallow than the characterization in “Once in a Lifetime”, but there should be more to the character at this point.  On the other hand, this strip is ten pages long and drawn entirely by John Ridgway.  Ridgway’s style is unmistakable and helps to elevate some of the ideas which would very easily become generic.  There is a particularly great use of background inks for the scenes set indoors on the planet, making everything evoke a computer even when the scene is set in reality.  The differentiation into the time vortex with the bookworms is also quite well done, Ridgway is the strongest of the artists brought in for The Incredible Hulk Presents and it shows.

 

Overall “Hunger from the Ends of Time!” works best because of its art and the twist of what the bookworms are is at least a little creative.  There is still the issue of the format being five page installments, giving this story two issues allows it to develop more as a story which is then tempered by writing the Doctor as the generic audience point of view character.  It is at least an enjoyable little story and a massive step up from the first installment of The Incredible Hulk Presents.  6/10.

Planet of Giants by: Terrance Dicks

 

Planet of Giants was written by: Terrance Dicks, based on the story of the same name by Louis Marks.  It was the 151^st story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The publishers behind the Doctor Who novelizations left Planet of Giants as the final novelization for the First Doctor as they thought there was not engaging enough when the possibility of novelizing it came up before.  This is ironic as the televised serial was originally commissioned and filmed as four episodes before being edited down to three episodes before broadcast.  This novelization was written essentially to fill in one of the last remaining gaps in the novelizations in 1990, after Doctor Who had been cancelled and giving it to Terrance Dicks was the default.  Despite only working on four serials of the 1960s (all 1968-1969), Dicks had become the default for novelizing these stories and at this point in his career he is just going through the motions of adapting the television story to the page.  As Planet of Giants is a serial that remains entirely in the BBC’s archive, there is no real imagination from Dicks having to fill in potential gaps.  He did have access to the original four part scripts and there are a few minor scenes reinstated to the novelization that do help the flow of the story slightly more than the version seen on television.  Outside of this and adding the occasional name to flesh out a character, Planet of Giants is incredibly faithful to the televised script.

 

The stronger points of Louis Marks’ original script do come through, as it is Dicks novelizing he is true to the characterizations of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Susan.  The First Doctor is especially warm under Dicks’ pen, despite being a Doctor he only wrote for in The Five Doctors and in that leaned on a fan perception of the character.  This is likely changed due to having access to the original scripts, and possibly copies of the original episodes at his disposal when novelizing this story.  He also does not resist the temptation to do an effective lead in to The Dalek Invasion of Earth which means the novel ends on a subtle cliffhanger.  There also isn’t a temptation of shying away from the environmental message of the original story, especially since the problems of pesticides hadn’t actually gotten better by the time Planet of Giants was published in 1990.

 

Overall, Planet of Giants has little to differentiate itself from the televised story and as such falls into many of the same trappings of being a bit of a slow story, despite a short page count.  The couple of reinsertions are nice, but the story is best in the early chapters where the TARDIS team are discovering their predicament.  Barbara is still secretive of being poisoned for no real reason and the back half is still quite a bit of a drag as the TARDIS team lack a lot of the conflicts necessary to work.  6/10.