Doctor Who and the Mutants by: Terrance Dicks

 

Doctor Who and the Mutants was written by Terrance Dicks, based on The Mutants by Bob Baker and Dave Martin.  It was the 35^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The Mutants is largely regarded as the weakest of Jon Pertwee’s serials and while I am certainly not it’s biggest fan, after reading Doctor Who and the Mutants I am genuinely wondering if it is this novelization that has weakened the original serial’s reputation.  This is largely because Doctor Who and the Mutants is quite a weak book, despite its evocative cover and Terrance Dicks attempting to add some depth to Solos as a planet (it’s more lush than the quarries and caves seen on television).  Dicks as an author is known for having a breezy pace to his prose and that should be present in a novelization written and published in 1977, yet Doctor Who and the Mutants is one that just drags.  Now this could be because Dicks is adapting a six episode script, but at this point he had done other six episode scripts including ones from eras he had no contribution to and The Mutants was right in the middle of his time as script editor.  Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s television script is largely an allegory against apartheid South Africa, something that translates to the novel but what is largely lacking is Christopher Barry’s direction.  Despite much of the serial being set in quarries and on futuristic sets, it is a serial with visual appeal, a similar decrease in quality happening when Barry Letts adapted his own script into Doctor Who and the Daemons.  There’s a lot in The Mutants that feels psychedelic, especially in the back half with the resolution after the twist that the mutations are just part of the natural life cycle of Solos as a planet.

 

Visually Terrance Dicks doesn’t actually render the sequences with any particular vision or passion, it just becomes a thing that happens.  There are issues transferring over from the original serial, the Doctor and Jo’s involvement comes from the Time Lords using them to deliver a package to an individual on the planet Solos.  This is someone they don’t know and the package will only open for them, having long sequences of the Doctor just handing people the package throughout the first episode and then there are random experiments the Doctor is roped into to open the package that honestly goes nowhere.  It works even less in the novel without the performance of Jon Pertwee to at least make it charming which for whatever reason Dicks just cannot recapture.  He recaptures it well in his other novelizations, even in many of those that came before like Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Mutants while not adapting one of the best serials from the Jon Pertwee era, struggles to even make what worked on television work in prose.  At least much of the social commentary remains intact.  4/10.