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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