Planet of Giants by: Terrance Dicks

 

Planet of Giants was written by: Terrance Dicks, based on the story of the same name by Louis Marks.  It was the 151^st story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The publishers behind the Doctor Who novelizations left Planet of Giants as the final novelization for the First Doctor as they thought there was not engaging enough when the possibility of novelizing it came up before.  This is ironic as the televised serial was originally commissioned and filmed as four episodes before being edited down to three episodes before broadcast.  This novelization was written essentially to fill in one of the last remaining gaps in the novelizations in 1990, after Doctor Who had been cancelled and giving it to Terrance Dicks was the default.  Despite only working on four serials of the 1960s (all 1968-1969), Dicks had become the default for novelizing these stories and at this point in his career he is just going through the motions of adapting the television story to the page.  As Planet of Giants is a serial that remains entirely in the BBC’s archive, there is no real imagination from Dicks having to fill in potential gaps.  He did have access to the original four part scripts and there are a few minor scenes reinstated to the novelization that do help the flow of the story slightly more than the version seen on television.  Outside of this and adding the occasional name to flesh out a character, Planet of Giants is incredibly faithful to the televised script.

 

The stronger points of Louis Marks’ original script do come through, as it is Dicks novelizing he is true to the characterizations of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Susan.  The First Doctor is especially warm under Dicks’ pen, despite being a Doctor he only wrote for in The Five Doctors and in that leaned on a fan perception of the character.  This is likely changed due to having access to the original scripts, and possibly copies of the original episodes at his disposal when novelizing this story.  He also does not resist the temptation to do an effective lead in to The Dalek Invasion of Earth which means the novel ends on a subtle cliffhanger.  There also isn’t a temptation of shying away from the environmental message of the original story, especially since the problems of pesticides hadn’t actually gotten better by the time Planet of Giants was published in 1990.

 

Overall, Planet of Giants has little to differentiate itself from the televised story and as such falls into many of the same trappings of being a bit of a slow story, despite a short page count.  The couple of reinsertions are nice, but the story is best in the early chapters where the TARDIS team are discovering their predicament.  Barbara is still secretive of being poisoned for no real reason and the back half is still quite a bit of a drag as the TARDIS team lack a lot of the conflicts necessary to work.  6/10.