Thursday, August 18, 2016

The Edge of Destruction by: Nigel Robinson: Like A Person Possessed

The Edge of Destruction was written by: Nigel Robinson, based on the story of the same name by: David Whitaker.  It was the 136th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Adapting a two part story into a novel is really something interesting as two part stories rarely have enough plot to stretch along for quite a long while.  Nigel Robinson uses this to his advantage when adapting The Edge of Destruction into a novel as the television story which was just meant as a placeholder to get us to Marco Polo is lacking in a detailed plot as it used its vague ideas of the TARDIS being alive to tell a story.  Robinson does the smart thing in taking the original script of the story, putting it down into a novel and adding in the gaps that make the TARDIS a lot larger than it ever could have been on television.  There is a large portion with Ian lost in the hallways early on in the novel which describes the sounds and sights of the inner workings of the ship.  There is also an opening added fleshing out the strange behavior from the beginning of the story with Ian and Barbara thinking they are back at Coal Hill School in the staffroom during a class.  That’s why they are acting so oddly.  What the clock is actually doing in “The Brink of Disaster” is melting which is much more riveting than in the televised story.  Robinson also alludes to future stories in this one as he knows that things are going to continue on a path.  We get some hints on how Gallifray works, but these are smaller little hints as this novel was published in the late 1980s when Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor.

 

To summarize, The Edge of Destruction is a novel that is much better than the original televised story, having very little to live up to.  Nigel Robinson is able to create a much better air of mystery than David Whitaker was able to on television as this is a novel where tension is much easier to create.  It isn’t perfect, but it makes the story much more enjoyable.  95/100

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