Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by: David Whitaker: The End of the Power of the Daleks

Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks or Doctor Who and the Daleks was written by David Whitaker, based on The Daleks by: Terry Nation.  It was the 1^st story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The Daleks is the single most important Doctor Who story as it was the story to allow Doctor Who to actually keep the series going past the initial thirteen episodes.  You also may think that the practice of milking a story for all its worth was something recent, but one year after the completion of the serial Frederick Mueller publishing had David Whitaker write a novelization as one of three Doctor Who novels they would publish as a precursor to Target Books.  David Whitaker didn’t do the traditional turning the script into a book, but novelized the story before adding on a beginning and ending chapter that actually introduces us to the characters.  Instead of recounting the story at Totter’s Lane, Whitaker has Barbara be a tutor for Susan who gets in a car crash on Barnes Commons where we get a similar situation as to in An Unearthly Child, while Ian is a science teacher who happens to be there before breaking into the TARDIS and promptly passing out.  The first two chapters serve as an introduction to the concepts of Doctor Who which changes a lot of the characters.  First the Doctor is a lot closer to his character post The Edge of Destruction.  Yes he still causes the problems for the others by removing the fluid link, but he is much calmer to Barbara and Ian.  Ian remains unchanged except for the fact that he is a smoker and actually serves as the narrator for the novel which is really interesting.  As he is the narrator this allows us to get a quick summary of Part Three “The Escape” which is interesting.  Barbara, like Ian, isn’t changed but as The Daleks really isn’t a story for Barbara.  Susan also is treated the same as she is in the television series.  This novel is slightly better than the televised story in one regard which is that the pacifism of the Thals is played off much more than it is on television.  Ian actually questions why they just walked into the Dalek city and initially tries to teach them boxing before having to resort to violence to get them to go with their plan for invading the Dalek city.

 

To summarize, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks or Doctor Who and the Daleks is a good example of just how movies and television were adapted to a novel and actually adds a bit of depth to the original story.  It’s the novel that has been republished the most and is one of those readily available for purchase and with good reason as it somehow manages to be slightly more engaging than the television story it was based on.  David Whitaker is great at bringing the characters to life, but it is still a little bit padded.  80/100