Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen by: Gerry Davis: The Cyberman Controller

Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen was written by Gerry Davis, based off The Tomb of the Cybermen by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler.  It was the 41^st story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Writing a Target novel to a missing story that is then returned to the archives is interesting and Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen is one of those few novels that has the opportunity.  Yet I cannot help but feel that the adaptation by one of the original authors, is just lackluster in comparison to the original story.  Sure The Tomb of the Cybermen had bad special effects and the Cybermen really didn’t do much, but Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen is a novel that adapts the story in such a slow pace that a lot of the original quality of the story.  It’s a book of 140 pages with the first 50 pages or so being dedicated to just the first episode of the four part story, then the next 40 for the second episode, 30 pages for episode three, and the final 20 pages for episode 4.  It makes the first episode which is exposition and set up feel extremely dragged out and difficult to get through while the actual story feels rushed.  There’s also quite a lot more wrong with the structure of this book, mainly the prose itself.  It isn’t like a novelization from Terrance Dicks who writes with a pulp fiction style, but comes across as very dry for the story.  There are passages of dry things obviously written based solely on the memories of Gerry Davis and the scripts of The Tomb of the Cybermen to make its story which you think would work.  The Doctor’s character and actions suffer the most as Davis is unable to bring Troughton’s charisma into a novel.  Davis also suffers from writing structure as the book is split into chapters which are supposed to end on a way to keep the reader interested and this is an adaptation of a story with great cliffhangers.  Yeah the chapters never end on the cliffhangers and the imagery of the scene loses some of its radiance with this change.

 

To summarize, Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen is a novel that is stripped of what made the story a truly great story, even though it does a straight adaptation of the original story.  The problem is in the structure of the novel is off and the performance of Patrick Troughton is missing.  50/100