Doctor Who and the Web of Fear by: Terrance Dicks

 

Doctor Who and the Web of Fear was written by Terrance Dicks, based on The Web of Fear by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln.  It was the 24^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Terrance Dicks in novelizing Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen he largely wrote it to include Buddhist philosophy closer to actual beliefs than what made it on-screen in Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s scripts, as well as being able to generally improve the pace and depth of the story.  It very much showed that Dicks could novelize a story that he had no involvement with on television, something that would eventually cement him as the main novelist for the range through much of the 1970s and 1980s.  His second commission for a story he had nothing to do with was Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster early in 1976, but it was a no brainer that after Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen Dicks would be brought back to novelize The Web of Fear into Doctor Who and the Web of Fear.  Now, this is another one of those novelizations that only would have had the scripts to work off, until 2013 most of the serial was missing apart from the first episode and this was even before the audit of the archive to see what survived.  Now the tricky part about talking about Doctor Who and the Web of Fear is that adding depth was something Dicks set out to do with Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen because it was a serial that desperately needed it, but The Web of Fear on almost every level is a stronger serial.  Dicks very easily could have gotten the scripts into prose format and called it a day much like he would do with later novelizations mostly due to overwork, and 1976 was very much a busy year for Dicks, between Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster and this Dicks had done Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks.

 

Instead of phoning it in, Dicks actually approaches Doctor Who and the Web of Fear with the intent on making it work as a book, using the pacing of a film almost as a blueprint for the way things are paced.  The depth added here isn’t the same kind of depth as Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, outside of renaming the rather unfortunate Jewish stereotype in the first episode to be less so.  Some of the events in the first half of the story are rearranged to flow better into one another, the misunderstanding between Victoria and the Travers’ in particular is softened and from Victoria’s perspective so the audience knows just how nervous she has been in particular, and the Doctor actually has a part to play in the adaptation of the second episode.  This is the second novelization that Target had done that was adapting a story where a regular was missing from an episode, the first being Gerry Davis’ adaptation of Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet which was only hastily rewritten to accommodate William Hartnell’s illness. Dicks adds an in depth sequence of the Doctor meeting and coming to trust Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, complete with the omniscient narrator reflecting on how this will grow and what will become UNIT will become a bigger part of the Doctor’s life.  The novelization even ends with the suggestion being made off-handedly to form a sort of military organization to deal with alien threats.

 

Dicks as a novelist is also desperately having to compensate for the fact that he cannot emulate Douglas Camfield’s direction onto the page.  This isn’t without trying, Dicks is using the scripts after all and the first chapter is a great little horror story adapting the early scenes of the Yeti coming to life, and then that quickly spiraling out of control.  It wasn’t necessary to add the pieces on how long it took for the invasion to actually come in full force and brief touching on Travers being suspected in it, but it was very much appreciated.  Dicks knows when to compress and when to expand because he cannot emulate Camfield’s style in prose, he’s writing very much for the action and not the horror.  Dicks doesn’t really excel at horror, but the tension is there and the mystery while still probably the weakest aspect is there.  The exasperation of the story still comes through with how the characters behave.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear is an excellent novel, it would have been at least enjoyable if Terrance Dicks had phoned it in, but he doesn’t.  There aren’t really plot additions, but Dicks actually had the time and care to look at how he could translate the story from the screen to the page while capturing why this was one that stuck in people’s minds for so long even when it turned out to be nearly entirely missing.  9/10.