Death to the Daleks by: Terrance Dicks

 

Death to the Daleks was written by Terrence Dicks, based on the story of the same name by Terry Nation.  It was the 43^rd story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Sometimes there’s really only so much one can do in novelizing a story without making things improve.  Death to the Daleks was the final Dalek story to star Jon Pertwee as the Doctor with Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, but it was also the seventh to be written by original Dalek creator Terry Nation and it is this novelization that really attempts to draw some originality out of a script that is a melting pot of different Dalek story ideas.  Terrance Dicks’ novelization doesn’t actually change any significant events from the television serial, but the few pieces of originality in the serial are adapted incredibly well.  The opening sequence where the power on the TARDIS is drained and any of the ideas dealing with the city of the Exxilons is treated as living are particularly well written.  The former manages to capture the desperation of the Doctor being stranded, though this is an aspect from the original script for The Daleks reused again here.  Dicks gets to the heart of the character drama instead of just running around the cave sets.  The living city while on television attempted to be designed well, and Michael E. Briant’s direction makes it look interesting, there isn’t nearly as much emphasis on it being alive.  Here Dicks really makes it feel otherworldly for a setting, especially as the story progresses and the city itself awakens.  The destruction at the end of the story also feels more real in prose, perhaps because Dicks is actually really good at building suspense.

 

Death to the Daleks, despite the evocative cover and having the best classic Dalek design, actually suffers from not being great as a Dalek story.  While Dicks’ adaptation tries to emphasize the scheming of the Daleks and the ideas of the space plague, as a force they just aren’t portrayed as effective.  The tenuous alliance between them and the human characters is something that just barely worked on television and it doesn’t work here, probably because the supporting characters aren’t actually all that well characterized, the book more concerned with making the Doctor and Sarah Jane work as a pair.

 

Overall, Death to the Daleks is far from a bad novelization, Dicks’ prose is as always quite breezy and light making it at the very least a fun read.  This is an occasion where a perfectly functional Terry Nation Dalek story becomes a perfectly functional Terrance Dicks novelization and in isolation that’s something that someone genuinely might love, but this is also a novelization I experienced immediately after three other novelizations of Terry Nation Dalek stories so that interference makes you really notice the issues with Nation’s plots.  Dicks doesn’t make any large scale changes to the plot which isn’t really helping matters either.  6/10.