The trouble with Four to Doomsday is that it has a weak
script and an extremely slow pace, but maybe the novelization could have rectified
that. Well it doesn’t do anything to
help the story, Adric still is a little traitor, the Urbankans still make
themselves out to take over the Earth for no real reason, and a lot of bad
space science, which all contribute to make the story fail, it’s actually a big
improvement on the original television story.
Now Terrance Dicks, having written for the Fifth Doctor has taken a few
liberties with the material while making it work better. The opening of the novel itself is enough to
get you roped into the story as you have this description of the empty
spaceship. Heck all of Dicks’
descriptions of the settings is enough to get anyone at least a little bit
interested in how the novel is going to proceed and the events are going to
unfold. Dicks also works well with
softening the characterization of the regulars with adjectives pontificating
the dialogue and descriptions of their actions that makes them more in line
with the versions of the characters that would develop. The televised Four to Doomsday had the problem of a lack of chemistry between the
main actors as they were doing their first shoot and it was with an already
weak script. Dicks uses the offset
nature of the characters to get in his own little digs through the mouths of
the characters. It actually works and
injects just a little bit of humor into an otherwise dry storyline. He especially goes after Adric for completely
justifiable reasons as Matthew Waterhouse always gave a less than stellar
performance.
To summarize, simply
through having an author who isn’t afraid to alter the material to engage the
reader, the novelization of Four to
Doomsday improves itself greatly. It
is still a bad story with all the problem of the original story, but it doesn’t
hit you nearly as hard. 40/100
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