Doctor Who and the Ribos Operation by: Ian Marter: Conjuring Tricks

Doctor Who and the Ribos Operation is written by Ian Marter based on The Ribos Operation by Robert Holmes.  It was the 52^nd story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Why does Doctor Who and the Ribos Operation have to be told in 140 pages for such a simple story?  I praised Robert Holmes for his simple story and to be honest much of the story should be told in a simple way.  It really only needs 120 pages maximum to be told adequately in a novelized form, but Marter uses 20 extra pages.  What that doesn’t mean, however, is that the extra page length is wasted.  No Marter does add in the events just before the original television story opening with the Doctor actually deciding to go onto a holiday before being intercepted by the White Guardian.  Is it really needed, no, but as he is going on the script the adaptation of Part One runs much more smoothly considering the original episode had pacing problems in the opening scenes.  Marter includes many of the lines and actions of the Doctor and Romana, only about a minute or two’s worth of screen time, left on the cutting room floor before broadcast.

 

The medium is a bit of a detriment to the performances of the original television story.  The Doctor and Romana make it through alright, as they aren’t difficult to capture and Marter knows Tom Baker personally.  It’s actually all the supporting characters that become boring here as they don’t have the acting to back them up.  There is something lost with Garron and Unstoffe without the performances of Iain Cuthbertson and Nigel Plaskitt.  They just lose a lot of the chemistry the actors gave the characters from the script alone when in novel form.  The Graff Vynda K, or as Marter decides to change the character to the Graff Vynda Ka, is also really boring without Paul Seed’s over the top emotional portrayal.  He just comes across as a standard spoiled brat in the novelization.

 

To summarize, Doctor Who and the Ribos Operation is not equal to the sum of its parts as it uses a lot of what made the story work on television, but sadly it doesn’t amount to much in the long run of stories.  It tells the story with some improvements but many losses to the characters, which was where the magic of the story was.  70/100.