The Chase by: John Peel

 

The Chase was written by John Peel, based on the story of the same name by Terry Nation.  It was the 145^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Going back to read John Peel’s novelization of The Chase is honestly a weird one after having experienced his novelizations of The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Power of the Daleks, because this is the first book the man wrote.  It’s also the only novelization that Peel has a story to work with and in the forward to the book he apparently used Terry Nation’s original scripts which Nation’s wife Kate just had, before being script edited and tightened up for television by Dennis Spooner.  Structurally The Chase follows the same plot beats and episodes with minimal deviations, the proper deviations are more in terms of not following the script dialogue which in many ways is better and worse than what we got on television.  The biggest disadvantage to the novelization is the handling of Barbara Wright as a character.  Peel already just doesn’t have a handle on how Barbara works.  Now this possibly Nation’s original scripts, as a writer he did have a tendency to put female characters into one category but there are several points throughout the novel where Barbara is just reduced to a gibbering, screaming wreck.  This is especially apparent in the adaptation of “Journey Into Terror”, Peel using this as an attempt to really get the horror element down.  This is one of those things where it’s reduced to just Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, still in their Universal film guises, but to make them scary Peel has Barbara become this nervous wreck.

 

Barbara does give more background on the Mary Celeste, that sequence actually being extended because Peel desperately wants to include the historical details and then a further discussion between Ian and Barbara about how they may or may not be responsible for the deaths on the Mary Celeste.  If I had to guess this wasn’t a Nation original, but a Peel, Nation as a writer never really thought about time travel mechanics even though he wrote (or co-wrote) three serials with major time travel implications that are almost certainly from other people, mainly Robert Holmes and Dennis Spooner.  It’s a discussion that is circular.  The only other thing that really feels like a misstep is again in the middle sections, this time in the Empire State Building sequence where Morton Dill is no longer just a comedy yokel, but is presented rather cruelly by Peel as a total idiot who is treated with heavy handed ableism by Peel.  He is committed to an asylum at the end of his sequence which is meant to be funny but just comes across terribly.

 

It's now weird that I’ve spent so much time discussing what went wrong with The Chase, but here’s the thing.  Peel does a lot right.  The bookends of the story, Aridius and Mechanus, are converted to be played completely straight.  The opening scenes in the TARDIS genuinely feel like this TARDIS team is a family, some of the dialogue is toned down so Ian and Barbara aren’t really annoyed at Vicki for being a bored teenager.  It creates his great sense of domesticity and family, meaning that the Daleks are actually more of a threat.  The comedy of the Daleks is really kept to the occasional wry line, they are a complete threat, immediately slaughtering the Aridians while they are collaborators.  Peel makes the collaboration utterly pathetic, and rightly so, it’s out of self-preservation and only needs one of them to actually stand up and fight.  On Mechanus they are also immediately ready to kill, the duplicate of the Doctor being somehow darker and the idea that if Vicki was found she wouldn’t even be captured, just exterminated.  Okay in the end there are some injected bits of continuity into Steven’s backstory, something that feels more like a reflection on the idea of the Earth Empire that mentions the Third Dalek War and the Draconians, but it’s genuinely these great bits.

 

Overall, The Chase is one of those novelizations that feels so completely different from the television production.  There are plenty of negative things that John Peel brings to the novelization, some of which might be Nation originals or might just be Peel’s general problematic tendencies.  Still, I find this novelization to be better than the original serial, it’s not a rambling comedy and somehow the exit of Ian and Barbara hits harder here because they have passed through fire with the Daleks being an actual threat.  7/10.