Frontios by: Christopher H. Bidmead

 

Frontios was written by Christopher H. Bidmead, based on his story of the same name.  It was the 91^st story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Christopher H. Bidmead novelized all three of his television stories for the Target novelization range fairly close to their original airdate, Frontios being the closest, published not even a year after the television story was aired.  This is interesting as while this certainly isn’t out of the ordinary it marks one of the first times the majority of a season’s stories would be put out within the year making the writers have less time to actually flesh out their stories.  This might be why Frontios is a story which takes most of its cues from the original television stories without any real sense of expansion.  The Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough still arrive on Frontios outside of the general remit of the Time Lords which scares the Doctor and finds the last of the human race struggling to survive.  People are being eaten by the earth, the current leader of the colony is losing his mind, and there are things beneath the surface which cause a race memory to emerge in Turlough.  The plot beats are there so it is really interesting to see how Bidmead’s prose develops a very stark story with scientific and desperate themes and how he turns up the pulp horror vibes.  Under script editor Eric Saward there really isn’t a whole lot of pulp in Doctor Who, yeah there is danger and dark themes (especially in Season 21) but in Frontios on television the direction by Ron Jones is one of those directorial styles which are just fine and the script only plays up the desperation.  The production design also is really lacking, especially with the Tractators and the Gravis which are clearly trying, all of the actors are trying (especially the Gravis), but they just don’t work.  The novelization of Frontios allows the desperation to play out with a lot of the dialogue being stark and simple, giving it a ragged feel for all of the characters, and by the time the Tractators, their technology, and the Gravis appear Bidmead makes the shift to horror work really well.  It’s really only a book that’s let down by not making any plot changes, the stuff with the Time Lords is even made more explicit as a threat while not amounting to anything.  They just get a few mentions because it’s apparently dangerous for the Doctor to be here.  Same with Turlough and the race memory, we don’t get any further idea of Turlough’s past, just this tidbit though Tegan is a lot of fun in the book, especially when she’s on her own.

 

Overall, Frontios as a novelization works about as well as its television story outside of being a bit longer and still not doing anything to explain why the Time Lords might want anything.  Turlough doesn’t get depth but the colony itself has more life and the horror elements are actually played up throughout.  8/10.