The Sons of the Crab is a distinctly odd story.  It involves the 1st Doctor arriving on a planet in the Crab Nebula and finding weird mutated creatures all over the place and a group of scientists trying to solve the dilemma of their race's mutations, all holed up in lead-lined bunkers.

The most striking feature of this story is how 'out of character' the Doctor is.  He is very much on the back foot throughout this entire story and treated like a laboratory specimen for almost the entire length.  He is amusingly frustated by his impotence throughout.  He is also categorically human and from Earth!  This is mentioned by the story more than once in his interactions with the Yend, the race on this distant planet in the Crab Nebula.  As such he is seen as a figure of intense fascination for the Yend due to his ability to remain 'rigid', i.e. remain in his 'normal' form continually; something they cannot do without the aid of drugs.  It's always odd seeing these sort of assumptions made about the Doctor but we have to remember that in 1965, when this was published, very little was known about who the Doctor was or where he had come from.  This is also the era of TV Comic's outings where, again, the Doctor acts quite differently to the way he does on TV and is often assumed to be human in origin.  In this story, the Doctor also wears a monocle - not something seen on TV but something not unlike the pince-nez worn by Peter Cushing in the movie version of Dr Who and the Daleks which released three months before this annual hit the shelves.  It really is fascinating seeing how the character was interpreted in those early days.  It's also very, very odd to see the Doctor described as acting 'stupidly', not once but twice in the story (although I imagine it is being used in terms of its meaning of 'in a dazed way' rather than lacking in intelligence.

The story is little more than lengthy exposition, most significantly from Fomal, the Chief Yend, who explains to the Doctor what has befallen his people.  It seems they chose, as biologists, to meddle with nature but the arrival of intense radiation from a star, corrupted their experiments and now the entire race is incapable of holding its form and inflicted by rapid, constant mutations.  Some of the imagery given for the changes that overcome the Yend is very reminiscent from that seen in Wild Blue Yonder.

The Doctor does eventually agree, at the very last second, to transport a box of test tube babies to propagate the Yend away from the malign influence of their own planet.  But they all die in 'the transition'.  What's not made clear is what this transition is but I assumed it was the box crossing the threshold of the TARDIS (which ironically ties in a little with a couple of story elements in the Give-a-Show Projector series particularly The Prehistoric Monster).  It seems that the Doctor, or should I say Dr Who, is almost unique in his ability to travel in the TARDIS.  This story seems to have a lot to say about genetic engineering - and very little of it is good.

After reading this in the annual itself, I also listened to the narrated version read by Dan Starkey on the BBC release Timewake and Other Stories.  Starkey does an excellent job bringing a very wordy story to life and embues the Doctor with just the right amount of Hartnell's performance.

An odd but not unenjoyable experience.