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TARDIS Guide

Overview

Released

Thursday, January 9, 1986

Written by

Donald Cotton

Publisher

Target Books

Pages

152

Time Travel

Past

Tropes (Potential Spoilers!)

Celebrity Historical, Mistaken Identity, Pure Historical

Location (Potential Spoilers!)

Earth, Tombstone, USA

Synopsis

Back in the gun-totin', hard-hittin', fast-shootin' days of the Old Wild West, when outlaws ruled the land and the good guys stayed off the streets, a troupe of travelling players - Miss Dodo Dupont, Steven Regret and the mysterious Doctor Caligari - moseyed into the town of Tombstone one October afternoon.

Their method of transportation was a mite peculiar though. After all, a police box materialising out of thin air sure ain't the usual way to enter a sedate town like Tombstone...

And when the Doctor and his pardners meet up with Wyatt Earp and the notorious Clanton brothers, they soon find out that the scene is all set for high noon at the O.K. Corral...

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How to read Doctor Who: The Gunfighters:

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1 review

The Gunfighters is my least favorite Hartnell story on tv. It’s not bad, but I do consider it weaker than most of his other outings. So imagine my surprise when the randomizer landed on the novelization for it.

I would argue that this adaptation is better written than the episode it’s based off of. The plot is more or less the same, but the characterization is stronger, the tone is more consistent, and there’s no blasted song nor fake western accents to sit through.

The story is written almost like a parody of Mark Twain, if Mark Twain had a darker and more violent sense of humor. The book reads like how Revelation of the Daleks watches. It’s a black comedy through and through, where death is common, casual, and caviler.

Almost too caviler at times. I personally did not care for the additional scene of the Doctor accidentally shooting some bystanders, presumably killing them, and the story treating it as no big deal. The overall story is well written, but it suffers from being saddled to a preexisting, family friendly series where we have established characters that simply would not behave in the way that they do on the page.

While it was an interesting read, the actual filmed story, for all its faults, feels more like Doctor Who.


bethhigdon

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