Philip Hinchcliffe
becoming a writer for the Target Novelizations is an interesting idea
especially when he is adapting the stories that he oversaw as producer. He and Robert Holmes are responsible for
creating the gothic horror element in Doctor Who, and he could easily inject
that into the story he was writing a novel of.
Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom
doesn’t really do that too much more as it was already a gothic horror
story. So Hinchcliffe for the most part
just novelizes the story word from word from the script which doesn’t change
the quality, apart from a few little details.
First off when the first pod opens up and infects Winlett we get it from
Winlett’s first person perspective. The
novel describes how Winlett feels a power come over him when he is stung,
giving the implication that the Krynoid pod has a mind of its own. The Krynoid is already infiltrating his
mind. Second there is a scene in Part
Four where Chase’s butler comes into the cottage where Keeler, turning into a
Krynoid, is being kept with food. We
don’t get to see the Krynoid/Keeler eat the food, but the novel adds one line
to make the scene feel like we see him eat.
It makes him out to be a monster and it really works for the novel to
have everything feel terrifying. Finally
the scene where Chase gets crushed by the composter, Hinchcliffe adds some
description. He adds description
involving how the crushing bones sounded and a description of the blood spraying
everywhere. It adds an element of body
horror to the novel.
To summarize, Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom really
only has one advantage over the television story. It will take you less time to read through
instead of the original story’s run time of nearly two and a half hours,
whereas the book takes about an hour and you can read it on the go. 100/100
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