Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit by: David Fisher

 

Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit was written by David Fisher, based on his television story The Creature from the Pit.  It was the 63^rd story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The Creature from the Pit is not a good story on television.  The first produced for Season 17 there were several production problems, enough to stop Christopher Barry from ever working on the show again.  Lalla Ward famously hated her costume and the fact she was written for Mary Tamm’s Romana and the creature itself is phallic.  David Fisher is an author who has a hand at improving his scripts when novelizing them as evident in Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive, so there was a chance Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit could have fared well, and in some aspects it does.  The novelization is very much a punchy adventure where a lot of the televised story ends up dragging as Fisher’s style of writing is very comedic which fits the types of stories he wrote and this era of the show.  It’s also very short, the paperback only coming in at 121 pages, so there isn’t much time to be wasted.  There is tightening of the adaptation of Part Four which is where the televised story ran out of any real steam into just two chapters, though one of those chapters feels quite long.  There’s also some inner life of characters revealed that we’re missing on television allowing for more humor to be added into proceedings.

 

So, if there are a lot of improvements, why doesn’t Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit manage to stick the landing and turn a bad story good?  Well, mainly because the premise behind the story doesn’t actually have a whole lot going for it.  The plot is all about an ambassador being captured for years and eventually being saved by the Doctor while a planet’s evil ruler is overturned.  While this is a story which has been done before in other stories, here the setting and characters could have made everything work, but it feels like Fisher’s plot just goes through the motions of a Doctor Who story.  It’s also apparent that even in the novelization Romana’s part is meant for Mary Tamm and K9 somehow has even less to do with the plot here despite having quite a large part on television.  The creature doesn’t feel like its own character and there’s even a loss of the camp appeal of some of the performances which helped.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit manages to improve on some things while other things get lost in translation from screen to page.  While David Fisher has a fun writing style, the story at the heart of the novel isn’t one with a whole lot of merit and ends up leaving the reader feeling kind of empty with how ‘meh’ it turns out to be.  The audiobook has the advantage of being read by Tom Baker, but even that doesn’t help matters too much.  5/10.