Planet of the Daleks is a serial that looks good.  David Maloney is one of those directors who knows exactly how to shoot the types of sets Doctor Who works with to give a false sense of scale even if it is limited by the studio.  This is also his first serial shot in color and the colors are quite vibrant greens and blues throughout.  The image of pools of molten ice are the perfect kind of dumb contradiction that I love from science fiction like Doctor Who.  Likewise Jon Pertwee commands every scene he’s in, even in a first episode that sidelines the Doctor and puts Jo Grant front and center while writing her as a generic companion (Katy Manning trying her absolute best with the material).  Bernard Horsfall is also here with commanding screen presence.  The Daleks themselves are presented as truly menacing and that’s also great.

The trouble with Planet of the Daleks lies in the script itself.  Terry Nation was given first right of refusal on Dalek serials after Day of the Daleks entered production without his permission, and the story that he came up with is basically the greatest hits of The Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Chase, and the first half of The Daleks’ Master Plan.  Essentially we have a story made entirely of spare parts, The Daleks being the main basis for the story itself.  Now these weren’t bad stories, and in 1973 when there was no home media outside of Doctor Who and the Daleks being rereleased on paperback later that year, viewers likely didn’t notice, but watching it in a marathon in the age of streaming, you can tell how little this serial has to say.

It wants to be anti-war which is good but feels like an afterthought when Nation’s earlier work did it far better.  Not helping matters is a first installment that is the closest direct rewrite of “The Dead Planet” but keeping the lead in that the Doctor and Jo know the Daleks are behind things while the script refuses to acknowledge it.  The second episode then builds to a revelation that there are thousands of Daleks on the planet.  The planet also has other Nation tricks: deadly plague, deadly fungus, invisible creatures, etc.  It’s certainly not a bad serial, but it is a tedious one.

Let’s get the issues with Frontier in Space out of the way first: much of the story follows the many captures and escapes of the Doctor and Jo; there is a silly, last minute monster added into the final episode; and it’s technically only the first half of a 12 part epic that’s really two 6 part serials.  For some people that is enough to bring this serial down in their eyes, but they’re ignoring just how much writer Malcolm Hulke put into this serial.  This is one of those serials where the alien race of Draconians genuinely feels like a complete culture and the text places them on the same level as humanity, the costumes and makeup being among some of the show’s best creature design.  Hulke lays out a believable conflict exploring humanity’s general tendencies towards xenophobia and how we are manipulated into authoritarianism.

Each capture and escape for the Doctor and Jo serves a purpose, usually to push the pair of them forward to unraveling the mystery pitting two empires on the brink of war.  Hulke takes what he laid down in Colony in Space in terms of where humanity is at and just expands it to give this quite realistic but often depressing picture of how humanity changes but never quite enough.  Having a third party slowly go from Ogrons to the Master to the Daleks is also perfect setup for an all time classic Dalek story (even if this story wraps up all of the plot it needed to and what followed really is a completely unconnected story).  Roger Delgado gives such a great performance as the Master it only adds to the tragedy of his untimely death that this would be his last.  He certainly plays off the Daleks in a more interesting way than Pertwee (who actively disliked working against them).  Paul Bernard is in the director’s chair for the final time and it’s certainly his best looking serial, even if Bernard sometimes favors too many wide shots.  This one is great, often underrated for the overrated story that immediately follows.

Combat Rock is a book with a reputation.  That is for good reason.  The experience reading this novel can be described as unpleasant.  Author Mick Lewis had already contributed a similarly unpleasant Past Doctor Adventures novel in Rags, and Combat Rock seems to wish to outdo that.  That’s the point at the center of the novel, to be as unpleasant as one possibly can be while maintaining some sort of narrative.  Or author Mick Lewis simply watched Cannibal Holocaust and thought that would be a good basis for a Doctor Who story, at least in terms of how it gained cult status and the cruelty it put on-screen, both real and fictional.  That and other Italian horror films.  Lewis as a person is unhinged, claiming to have spent time among a cannibal tribe, having a girlfriend descended from cannibals, and other wild claims just short of partaking in cannibalism himself.  Talking about this novel is generally an odd thing to do.  It lacks narrative cohesion, Lewis using a generic plot of once again space marines fighting against native inhabitants, but this time there are zombies.  The jungle planet of Jenggel (get it?) was a post-colonial holiday planet, but the indigenous natives have begun to fight back after literally raising the dead and causing a series of gruesome murders.  To give Lewis the benefit of the doubt, there is potential for a story with an incredibly strong anti-colonialist message throughout, the team of space marines in the OPG are portrayed largely as bad people, but the natives are presented equally as gruesome.  This comes across as Lewis thinking he’s being complex about how different cultures interact, but then just making the natives literal savages who are doing things that are unnatural.

The native characters are hardly characters, Lewis taking inspiration from several horror films for their portrayal at the best of times.  This sadly isn’t a novel with many a best of times, as Combat Rock’s indigenous characters more often are presented as part of Mick Lewis’ general fetish for strong, black women.  Practically every female character in this novel, and there are many, is reduced to being a sex object, has some form of sexual assault perpetrated against them, or is at the very least threatened with it.  The treatment of Victoria Waterfield in particular is horrendous, in terms of contributions to the plot she is damseled and forced to watch horrific acts of torture and murder while also being threatened with sexual violence.  Outside of what happens to her Lewis makes a point to go into how conservative she is which you think is going to be a comment on what a character like Victoria would be in reality and not in universe, but he also has characters go on about how pure her white skin is coming dangerously close to white supremacist talking points that go completely unexamined.  While I want to give Lewis the benefit of the doubt, already there was so much racism and sexism in Combat Rock that you can only give so much before it becomes a problem.

Having any sort of focus is the biggest structural problem with Combat Rock, Lewis clearly going for shock value.  The title is taken from an album by The Clash, a band I am honestly not at all familiar with nor an album I have listened to.  Lewis alludes to it in the text by referring to combat rock as a type of music once or twice, but that’s about it.  Especially odd since Rags, his other Doctor Who novel, at least had a connection to music because this one really doesn’t.  The actual plot is paper thin, despite running the full 280 pages the BBC Books allow, there isn’t a whole lot that actually happens narratively.  There’s a lot of supporting characters that are almost entirely one-note and fitting into some bigoted stereotype.  The racism and sexism is clearly coming from a fetishistic place, but there’s also a character called Pretty Boy whose introduction quite literally reads “bisexual, deadly, always wore black lace over his shining black leather; eyes underscored with just a little touch of liner.  But call him effeminate and it would be the last thing you ever did.  And yes, he was pretty.  Dyed black hair thick and wavy, cheekbones raw but sleek, a sensuous mouth, and not a scar on him.” (43-44) The novel treats its one confirmed queer character as a complete freak and implied predator, though he is among a group of explicit predators.  Even Jamie McCrimmon is given the treatment, portrayed as impossibly horny for about the first 100 pages, right up until the moment Victoria is kidnapped and then he becomes violent and determined to find her.

Somehow, the Second Doctor makes it through the novel unscathed, Mick Lewis unironically capturing the character better than most other authors who have attempted to do so in prose.  Don’t ask me how.

When I reviewed Rags three years ago, I implied Mick Lewis didn’t put effort in, yet for Combat Rock there is effort.  It’s effort into almost entirely the wrong things except the Doctor’s characterization to make the novel a truly unpleasant reading experience that doesn’t have anything to say outside of violence.  Any commentary is undercut by just how uncomfortable everything about the novel is and how much it’s clear Lewis is enjoying what he’s writing here.  Yet, it’s also no worse than Rags which already was quite bad.  2/10.

Whenever Doctor Who indulges in a story with a historical setting there is always the chance the audience will have little to no familiarity with the setting, so a balance must be struck to explain and explore the setting along with the plot.  History 101 is one such tale where my own knowledge of the setting is severely lacking.  The Spanish Civil War is a period of history that I only know of in passing, the American education system not really ever finding it a significant event enough to teach around in my experience.  I understand the conflict was essentially between fascists and a left wing faction of communists and socialists, and that the fascists one, but even then that is fairly limited knowledge.  Author Mags L. Halliday in writing History 101 presents this in the form of a traditional narrative, however it is explicitly wrapped in the idea of being an account of events in an attempt to be “true”.  This is while examining exactly what it means to see the “true” history of anything, Halliday never quite coming to a conclusion and much of the science fiction conflict comes from not so much altering history (though that is part of the thrust of the novel) but of altering the perception of history.  Halliday includes a rather extensive amount of resources she clearly has used for her own research and in how the novel was written.  The bombing of Guernica is the center of the novel, as well as the involvement in the Spanish Civil War of Eric Blair aka George Orwell, eventually coming to the conclusion that there was something that created an impossible question of the bombing.  It’s used to explain the Picasso masterpiece means so much because of the perception that it causes to those who view it both in person and through photographs and reproductions.

Halliday as a writer is clearly inspired by Lawrence Miles’ The Adventuress of Henrietta Street in the structure of the novel, although as this is a first story her focus is never quite as direct or focused.  Once again the Eighth Doctor Adventures have a first time writer writing a good first novel before never being commissioned again (she did recently contribute to Big Finish Productions’ latest volume of Short Trips though).  History 101 is one of those novels that were it presented as a traditional novel without the pretense of preserving the “truth”, while losing some of the major thematic element might have actually flowed better because the presentation is a gimmick that only feels like lip service is played towards instead of actually integration into the novel.  Halliday’s prose, however, is actually quite easy to read, flowing quite well and keeping the cast of characters quite manageable.  The novel is only focusing on one aspect of the war after all, even if Halliday is clearly aware of how large the conflict is.  There’s also this sense that Halliday is a fan of the Hartnell historicals, at least in terms of pacing the novel because we cover quite a large timeframe which helps greatly with the immersion of the novel.

Halliday excels at writing the Doctor and Fitz in particular.  They are separated for much of the novel, Anji being paired with the Doctor and sadly being characterized as a touch generic.  With the Doctor there is this sense of ephemeral fascination with history but that underlying edge that makes the Eighth Doctor work so well as a character.  When he confronts Sabbath because he’s Sabbath is in the novel and actually moving the arc forward, there is this uncertain dynamic that makes it incredibly easy to imagine how Paul McGann would have played these scenes.  Sabbath as a character is also used sparingly, but when he does appear there is that spark that really makes him work.  I don’t know if flirtatious is the word I’m looking for but there’s this fantastic connection with and parallel to who the Doctor is.  Fitz’s plot also slots very nicely into Sabbath’s plot, with the reveal that the man Fitz has been traveling with is Sabbath’s own agent in Spain, here to see the perception of history change.  Fitz is the lovable idiot, pretending to be an impartial observer even if that is something that’s an impossibility.  There’s a moment where he sings a version of “Climb Ev’ry Mountian” because he thinks that’ll work and the changes to history involved be damned.  The Absolute as a concept is also brilliant, being portrayed as almost an element of cosmic horror in terms of what it does for history and how it attempts to establish itself.  Halliday writes it almost as something that doesn’t exist, only the Doctor being able to see it for what it is, perhaps in a commentary on how people easily see what they want to see when it comes to history.

Overall, History 101 is a novel that only really suffers because there are points where the author is trying too hard to do what a very different author excelled at.  It excels when it is being an examination of the perception of history through the lens of the Spanish Civil War, even if there is a lot to be packed in its pages.  There’s also a sense of direction with this and the immediate precious installment that feels as if the Eighth Doctor Adventures have somewhere to go.  7/10.

I don’t think I’ve ever quite appreciated what Robert Holmes is doing with Carnival of Monsters.  This is a serial that’s set its sights squarely on taking down the medium of television and the BBC, the two things that allow Doctor Who to exist.  Taking essentially the American A-plot/B-plot structure which shouldn’t work nearly as well for a serial, Holmes puts the Doctor and Jo in a machine that makes them eventually gain the awareness of being watched and in the position of being in a television show.  Inter Minor as a planet is one ruled by bureaucracy and stagnancy, with a ruling class that approves decisions and a working class completely under their thumb.  It’s the setup for what at this point is a standard Doctor Who space story complete with Doctor Who and companion stand in played with beautiful James Acheson costumes and hilarious performances from Leslie Dwyer and Cheryl Hall.  They’re both the showmen and steal every scene they’re in.  Michael Wisher as essentially the main villain is this great slimy performance that just screams television executive, playing off Peter Halliday and Terence Lodge, all actors who have been in Doctor Who before.

Inside the miniscope we start with a historical setting with Tenniel Evans, Jenny McKracken, and Ian Marter rounding out the cast.  Despite the audience knowing there is an alien planet involved, that first episode is great at building the tension, breaking the trope of the end of episode monster reveal by showing us a dinosaur in the middle, instead having the TARDIS picked up and taken out of the machine.  Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning are at the top of their game, Holmes giving Jo some of the best material by having her save the day in the first half while the Doctor gets to be obstinate about not being on Earth (he’s sadly right).  Barry Letts got greedy and put himself in the director’s chair, so the serial also looks great.  The location work is really good at giving the impression of being on the open seas and integrating both the plesiosaur and the Drashigs into the footage (the Drashigs are also a great little meta commentary on Doctor Who monsters).  The only thing this serial falls flat is a little bit of the resolution being a touch too easy.  One of Holmes’ best.

This past weekend when the latest finale of Doctor Who aired I was worried that it would retroactively weaken The Three Doctors as a story, luckily it doesn’t.  This is the best of the anniversary stories because at its heart it is a story.  People like to say that the original series didn’t do character arcs, but this is yet another example of why they are wrong.  For Jon Pertwee as the Doctor this is the moment where his arc completely turns back to the willing hero once again.  The end of this serial sees the Doctor freed from his exile to Earth and able to travel among the stars again, Katy Manning as Jo getting this amazing single moment of sadness that the Doctor might be leaving her which of course would never happen.

The story itself is one that has fairly large stakes: Gallifrey (unnamed for another year) is having its energy drained and anti-matter is seeping into Earth, all the work of our first mythic Time Lord, Omega, a legendary figure who travelled through the black hole to give Gallifrey the ability to time travel.  Future stories would flesh out the mythology but writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin give another script with complete ambition and intrigue.

At the center of it all are the first three Doctors United with Pertwee and Patrick Troughton having this amazing dynamic of utter hatred of one another.  Nicholas Courtney and John Levene also make a great double act and there are two significant outsider supporting characters that have a role to play.  Future anniversaries would lose so much of this element which is what makes The Three Doctors work.  Lennie Mayne’s direction is slick, the performances just bounce off each other (Stephen Thorne gets his one Doctor Who role where he can give depth to the character), and the only thing holding it back are the occasional laughable effect.  It’s a stone cold classic.

Often regarded as one of the weaker Pertwee serials, like The Mutants before it there is actually a lot to like about The Time Monster.  The Doctor’s story about the daisiest daisy in Episode Six is the highlight, it’s a fascinating little examination of who the Doctor is and is worth half a star on its own.  The big scale ideas at play are interesting and an extension of what Robert Sloman and Barry Letts were examining in The Daemons the year before.  Roger Delgado gets to have some of his most charming moments and where the Master ends the story is equally fascinating for the character.  It feels like one last hurrah for the UNIT family because it’s so clear that the production team is ready to go all in with time travel.

The problem is that there’s a lot of messy ideas in the six episodes of the serial, mainly because Sloman and Letts were writing the serial on the fly after The Daleks in London fell through.  Splitting the plot into thirds is a good idea on paper, yet each of the plots, especially the final two episodes on Atlantis, are particularly stretched to their limits.  The depiction of Kronos is also something that works on paper, but Paul Bernard tries to obscure it instead of fully leaning into the silly white costume so it doesn’t really work.  Sloman and Letts wanted to make an epic finale with a larger scale but then it just doesn’t quite come together.  Heck they barely give Jo Grant much to do except banter, so much of the story is carried by the banter of Pertwee, Manning, Delgado, Courtney, and oddly John Levene and it just leaves it kind of meh.

This is a serial that by all accounts, it has a lot of what I love about Doctor Who and this era in particular.  Yet, The Mutants is one of those serials with a lot of elements that just don’t click.  It’s a serial with a handful of supporting cast performances that just do not work, Rick James being generally the worst (his delivery is almost entirely stilted).  The cast generally feels almost entirely miscast: Paul Whitson-Jones as the Marshal is the one supporting cast member that I think works well, Garrick Hagen is trying but the material for his character Ky really does dry up in the back half of the serial, and both George Pravda and John Hollis are competing with each other for most ridiculous accent (Pravda wins).

Bob Baker and Dave Martin also genuinely struggle, perhaps the most, with the pacing of a six part serial.  The Mutants has enough material for six but the script struggles with getting from plot point to plot point.  Structuring the inciting incident of the Doctor having to deliver a message for the Time Lords always keeps him as an outsider even though he supports the people of Solos in overcoming their oppressive, apartheid overlords.  Doing active commentary on South Africa during apartheid is also bold and actually quite good for what it’s doing, it’s just keeping the Doctor in the story naturally that doesn’t work (pulling the trick from Colony in Space and The Curse of Peladon would have worked much better).  The costumes of the story are brilliant, especially the futuristic designs, same with the general sets and the Mutants themselves.  Christopher Barry as a director also excels at the psychedelic sequences and making the sets feel both futuristic and the location feel like an alien planet.  I’d like this a lot more if there were just some minor changes to the structure and keeping the Doctor not feel like an observer who could easily leave whenever he wanted to.

Did I intend to immediately watch The Sea Devils after The Curse of Peladon? No.  Yet there’s something quite cozy about Doctor Who under Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning that’s quite hard to resist.  The Sea Devils is Malcolm Hulke’s script for the ninth season and largely it’s a retread of Doctor Who and the Silurians in the form of a sequel with the added weight of Roger Delgado as the Master.  What holds this serial back is that Hulke despite clearly wanting to reckon with the character choices made at the end of Doctor Who and the Silurians, isn’t writing a serial with the UNIT team.  Instead there are characters from the Royal Navy and the government to criticize and Jon Pertwee as the Doctor does criticize them but a lot of this feels like a retread.

Now for a retread, it’s a very good retread.  Michael E Briant as a director once again does great with the location work, getting a far better location to work with than Colony in Space’s dull quarry, getting to set up plenty of action shots.  Delgado as the Master being included means we get some deepening of the Doctor/Master dynamic as old friends turned enemies, and a great sword fight at the end of Episode Two.  And of course Pertwee and Manning are at the top of their game together, so this is a serial that’s a good time.  The Sea Devils themselves also have a cool enough design, even if things really play out so much like Doctor Who and the Silurians with less personality.

Reading Doctor Who and the State of Decay is honestly a bit of a trip but it really shouldn’t have been.  State of Decay on television while in the back half of the hardline science fiction Season 18 overseen by John Nathan-Turner and Christopher H. Bidmead, Terrance Dicks had actually had the story in his back pocket for a number of years.  Originally it was to be the opening serial to Season 15, but the BBC was adapting Dracula and did not want a second vampire story to conflict, so it was replaced with Horror of Fang Rock.  When reading Doctor Who and the State of Decay it becomes apparent that Terrance Dicks is adapting almost a combination of versions of his story because this is a novelization that feels tonally unlike everything that Season 18 was.  This is honestly for the best, it means that Doctor Who and the State of Decay feels like a classic adventure.  Dicks clearly was a fan of Dracula because almost all of the vampire tropes that are associated with Dracula adaptations, especially the Universal and Hammer adaptations, are here and played up.  They were there during the original serial but largely pushed to the background with the serious tone and rather bleak direction.

This is a novelization that really wants everything to be fun: it’s a fantasy adventure where the Doctor and Romana are trading banter so delightfully throughout.  Dicks is sure to maintain that relationship between the Doctor and Romana as two very close friends where the Doctor is clearly the inferior.  It’s Romana who puts a lot of things together and has to roll her eyes when the Doctor eventually catches up to where she was several paragraphs ago.  Adding Adric to that dynamic makes this one of his stronger stories in terms of characterization, especially in the novelization where Dicks clearly frames it that when he betrays the Doctor and Romana, the reader is supposed to hate him.  Adric is treated very much like the young teenager that he is, and it works so well in prose because Dicks adds just enough to make you understand where Adric was coming from and not put Matthew Waterhouse’s performance at the feet of directors who often struggled in giving him proper direction.  With the lightness in tone it makes the sequences when the Three Who Rule go full vampire feel like a Hammer film version of gothic horror, you can imagine in your head the color of Hammer blood which is particularly fun.  It means when Aukon is summoning his servants it feels far more grand than it did on television and everything just slots in quite nicely.

Overall, Doctor Who and the State of Decay is a novelization that works because it doesn’t try to emulate the tone of the television story, letting what Terrance Dicks clearly intended for the serial to really shine through.  It’s a quick little novelization with a lot of fun behind it.  8/10.

This is the first time Doctor Who directly takes a plot idea from Star Trek, Brian Hayles clearly being inspired to write The Curse of Peladon as homage to the episode “Journey to Babel”.  That’s okay, Hayles having four episodes to fill means outside of the setup, King Peladon’s half-human heritage, and the commentary about global unity (this is all a metaphor for the UK joining the EU) there’s a lot here to make it just as original and engaging as the Star Trek episode that it takes its ideas from.  Peladon as a planet while depicted entirely in studio, this serial being made out of transmission order which is a massive milestone.  It feels alive and director Lennie Mayne makes it look great even with the fact that the tapes have had a lot of work done to restore them, the serial looks great.

Katy Manning as Jo Grant feigning royalty and being essentially an ambassador with the Doctor is in one of her absolute best appearances.  Hayles has pushed her characterization forward for the other writers to follow.  Manning plays off David Troughton’s King Peladon incredibly well as well, Manning completely selling by the end that she is considering leaving the Doctor.  Had Manning left the show at this point it’d be a great exit.  Troughton also plays the uncertainty of the king and the betrayal as this twisting of a knife throughout.  Pertwee is also just on top form, really engaging with the alien environment of the planet, and selling the Doctor’s own prejudice when it comes to the Ice Warriors.  When it’s revealed the Ice Warriors are trustworthy Pertwee and Alan Bennion have this great face off where Pertwee breaks.  Alpha Centauri is also the first explicitly non-binary character in Doctor Who which just adds to this sense of surprising progressivism.  It and Aggedor are iconic.

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.

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.

Ten Little Aliens is a strange little book. The title is taken from the original title of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and in the 2013 introduction Stephen Cole wrote for the reprint, it’s made quite explicit that at the forefront of his mind was Christie’s general body of work.  That, combining it with Starship Troopers, and adding the gimmick of an extensive Choose Your Own Adventure section in the middle.  That’s three very different things that Stephen Cole is pulling from for what Ten Little Aliens is trying to do, this is a novel that is an identity crisis wrapped up in about 300 pages.  It’s also a novel featuring the First Doctor, Ben, and Polly set between The Smugglers and The Tenth Planet because Stephen Cole rightly wanted to use a TARDIS team that hadn’t been used in novel format before.  Tonally Ten Little Aliens is weird, although the novel is taking its name from one of the most famous murder mysteries of all time it only vaguely resembles a murder mystery that Agatha Christie would have written: there are already ten bodies, specifically of terrorists, and they start disappearing one by one.  Sure, Christie wrote stories where the murder has already happened and there has to be a reason to solve it, but And Then There Were None isn’t one of those.  And Then There Were None is one of Christie’s focused on class and British imperialism through the lens of ten well off British people who have all gotten away with murder and are picked off one by one as the veneer of well-bred British respectability is eroded away.  It’s a masterpiece.

Ten Little Aliens aesthetically resembles Starship Troopers, though it’s far closer to the Heinlein novel than Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation.  The supporting cast is entirely space troopers who are all introduced early in the book literally through little character blurbs that tell the reader the stock soldier that they represent.  Cole doesn’t take any time in this book to explore the military mind or what the expansion of military force throughout the galaxy means.  He’s just drawing on the aesthetics of Starship Troopers because they are cool and they have worked for Doctor Who in the past, while the stock characters are just that, stock characters.  They don’t actively matter in the long run and could have been an interesting foil to the aspects of the Earth Empire to actually use an Agatha Christie style commentary at the very least, if Cole wasn’t able to go down the Verhoeven route.  Because it’s aesthetics of the military mind and expansion of empire it feels like Cole tacitly agreeing more with Heinlein over Verhoeven.  The Schirr rebels called the Ten-Strong are an interesting idea and indicate Cole almost had plans to go through Verhoeven over Heinlein, they believe themselves to be physically perfect though to human eyes they are grotesque and disgusting (Cole playing on some honestly ableist tropes throughout Ten Little Aliens in a lot of ways that I think are meant to make the reader uncomfortable but again Cole very much is a writer who likes his aesthetic references over examining them).

The biggest gimmick of the book is the Choose Your Own Adventure segment is actually the gimmick that is the most interesting: it’s presented as a neural net and its where you get glimmers that the stock characters have a little more than the stock they are given and you get insights into Ben and Polly.  Polly is a character Cole really wants to explore but sadly he reduces Ben to a stock Cockney sailor character.  Part of me gets why, this is 2002 and the only stories to really feature Ben and Polly that were readily available were The War Machines and in incomplete form The Tenth Planet (with the surviving episodes of The Underwater Menace and The Moonbase on VHS compilations while The Faceless Ones would not be released for a year).  Cole does characterize the Doctor well and gets the dynamic between the First Doctor specifically to Ben and Polly, though again that dynamic had the most material and it does reflect the two stories closest to completion.  Polly is a character who while occasionally reduced to a screamer does get to be more proactive than Ben who feels in a lot of ways dead weight.  It is nice to have this as an example of this TARDIS team, some of it does form the basis for what Big Finish Productions would develop years later with Anneke Wills on board.

Overall, Ten Little Aliens is certainly a novel with potential and Cole has definitely experienced everything that the novel goes out of its way to reference.  The biggest problem is that there are several gimmicks at the heart of the novel that are generally making it difficult to really flesh out, Cole needing to focus on one exact thing to really bring the novel to work.  Cole can be a great storyteller, but here he doesn’t seem to have the guiding hand to make this anything more than average.  5/10.

The Macra Terror is a bit weird.  It’s one of the later Target novelizations, being published in late 1987 so right on the border between novelizations as simple adaptation and novelization as early pitches for original Doctor Who fiction.  It’s also a novelization of a completely missing serial, the soundtrack being one of the early releases in 1992, however like Marco Polo and The Massacre, it has its original author coming back to novelize it based on his scripts.  Ian Stuart Black would actually novelize all three of the stories he wrote for the series, The Macra Terror being the second of the three to be novelized.  Despite this, the novelization remains quite close to the soundtrack of the television story, the dialogue is especially similar throughout with a lot of the lines that would be best remembered in the animated version remaining intact.  Black actually works quite well as a novelist, making it surprising that he never actually pitched anything for Virgin Books because he’d have made something good out of it.  The Macra Terror is a novelization that while keeping everything intact outside of making the structurally weak decision to let Medok live thus making the Macra less deadly a threat, feels quite a bit deeper in the way it characterizes the regulars.

The character dynamics of Ben, Polly, and Jamie as a TARDIS team were always a bit rough, since Jamie was quite literally a last minute addition causing last minute rewrites to The Underwater Menace and The Moonbase.  The Macra Terror was the serial where they actually clicked the most as a team, Ben being the working class everyman who succumbs to the influence of the Macra.  The novelization takes it one further, Black really wanting to delve into how Polly and Jamie react differently to Ben’s betrayal.  Jamie in particular holds a grudge which while not explored too much, this is a shorter novelization after all, what is explored is fascinating.  The trust is broken and Polly is the one worrying that Ben will be hurt by Jamie because of it, it adds this tiny little layer of drama that elevates this from simple novelization.  There’s some slight reordering of the events of Episode 1 in particular that add to this, the business with Jamie carrying a big stick actually feels more comedic in the novelization which works pretty well.  The Doctor in general is also emphasized as the total mythic trickster figure that was what Patrick Troughton excelled at especially.

Overall, The Macra Terror despite being a later novelization is mostly a match in terms of quality and engaging storytelling when compared to what remains of the television counterpart.  Black’s prose is quite slick and emphasizes the size and cunning of the Macra which was difficult to really portray on television and to get some actual deeper characterization in a way only prose really can do.  8/10.

Going back to read John Peel’s novelization of The Chase is honestly a weird one after having experienced his novelizations of The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Power of the Daleks, because this is the first book the man wrote.  It’s also the only novelization that Peel has a story to work with and in the forward to the book he apparently used Terry Nation’s original scripts which Nation’s wife Kate just had, before being script edited and tightened up for television by Dennis Spooner.  Structurally The Chase follows the same plot beats and episodes with minimal deviations, the proper deviations are more in terms of not following the script dialogue which in many ways is better and worse than what we got on television.  The biggest disadvantage to the novelization is the handling of Barbara Wright as a character.  Peel already just doesn’t have a handle on how Barbara works.  Now this possibly Nation’s original scripts, as a writer he did have a tendency to put female characters into one category but there are several points throughout the novel where Barbara is just reduced to a gibbering, screaming wreck.  This is especially apparent in the adaptation of “Journey Into Terror”, Peel using this as an attempt to really get the horror element down.  This is one of those things where it’s reduced to just Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, still in their Universal film guises, but to make them scary Peel has Barbara become this nervous wreck.

Barbara does give more background on the Mary Celeste, that sequence actually being extended because Peel desperately wants to include the historical details and then a further discussion between Ian and Barbara about how they may or may not be responsible for the deaths on the Mary Celeste.  If I had to guess this wasn’t a Nation original, but a Peel, Nation as a writer never really thought about time travel mechanics even though he wrote (or co-wrote) three serials with major time travel implications that are almost certainly from other people, mainly Robert Holmes and Dennis Spooner.  It’s a discussion that is circular.  The only other thing that really feels like a misstep is again in the middle sections, this time in the Empire State Building sequence where Morton Dill is no longer just a comedy yokel, but is presented rather cruelly by Peel as a total idiot who is treated with heavy handed ableism by Peel.  He is committed to an asylum at the end of his sequence which is meant to be funny but just comes across terribly.

It's now weird that I’ve spent so much time discussing what went wrong with The Chase, but here’s the thing.  Peel does a lot right.  The bookends of the story, Aridius and Mechanus, are converted to be played completely straight.  The opening scenes in the TARDIS genuinely feel like this TARDIS team is a family, some of the dialogue is toned down so Ian and Barbara aren’t really annoyed at Vicki for being a bored teenager.  It creates his great sense of domesticity and family, meaning that the Daleks are actually more of a threat.  The comedy of the Daleks is really kept to the occasional wry line, they are a complete threat, immediately slaughtering the Aridians while they are collaborators.  Peel makes the collaboration utterly pathetic, and rightly so, it’s out of self-preservation and only needs one of them to actually stand up and fight.  On Mechanus they are also immediately ready to kill, the duplicate of the Doctor being somehow darker and the idea that if Vicki was found she wouldn’t even be captured, just exterminated.  Okay in the end there are some injected bits of continuity into Steven’s backstory, something that feels more like a reflection on the idea of the Earth Empire that mentions the Third Dalek War and the Draconians, but it’s genuinely these great bits.

Overall, The Chase is one of those novelizations that feels so completely different from the television production.  There are plenty of negative things that John Peel brings to the novelization, some of which might be Nation originals or might just be Peel’s general problematic tendencies.  Still, I find this novelization to be better than the original serial, it’s not a rambling comedy and somehow the exit of Ian and Barbara hits harder here because they have passed through fire with the Daleks being an actual threat.  7/10.

After the success of “Old Flames” and The Scarlet Empress, Paul Magrs closes More Short Trips with “Femme Fatale”, an adventure for the Doctor, Sam, and Iris meeting Andy Warhol.  Oddly enough this is one of the ‘weaker’ Magrs stories, it lacks a lot of the depth that his novels do.  It is just as fun as “Old Flames”, if not slightly more so with the 1930s and 1960s period settings and the use of Andy Warhol as a character, though not by much as while Magrs is certainly one of the better writers when it comes to the use of Sam Jones, she is still Sam Jones.  This is also a story about the assassination attempt on Warhol by Valerie Solanis which has the typical Magrs twist, though I’m not entirely sure on how much I like the way it’s presented here, it reeks of an inexperienced writer not quite thinking through the implications.  “Femme Fatale” is still a great little story because Paul Magrs is almost incapable of doing a bad story.  7/10.

Peter Anghelides’ “Good Companions” is honestly a weird little story, it’s the one that features an unspecified future Doctor traveling with a companion called Anna, his housekeeper.  This is a story that also is told through the framing of an older Tegan Jovanka, married and widowed, having written up this encounter in Good Companions.  A lot of the appeal of this short story is the future Doctor, an incarnation entirely down to Anghelides who sadly feels a bit generic.  Unlike say The Infinity Doctors or the Merlin Doctor, this Doctor is more a composite of other Doctor’s traits up to that point, though there’s certainly room for development since Anghelides does use this Doctor in multiple Short Trips.  The big problem for me is actually the characterization of Tegan: she’s a bit too mellow in her old age that makes her feel more a generic companion, Anghelides not really reflecting on her exit in Resurrection of the Daleks or Adric’s death in Earthshock or the death of her Aunt Vanessa in Logopolis.  It honestly feels like she could have been any female companion who was left on Earth, leaving “Good Companions” more “Meh Companions”.  5/10.

“uPVC” is an unknown writer, Paul Farnsworth, who writes a near perfect examination of who the Doctor is through both the Second and Seventh Doctors and a window salesman.  That’s all I’m going to say because this is a story that nearly brought me to tears.  9/10.

Christopher Bulis writing for the Fifth Doctor and Peri already led to The Ultimate Treasure which is one of the early Past Doctor Adventures that is squarely a miss in terms of a story.  “Hot Ice” fares better, but doesn’t fare particularly well.  It’s a story that is just kind of there, the Doctor and Peri are actually quite well characterized but it’s also the second time Bulis has written a story that feels like the first time Peri is taking a trip in the TARDIS.  This is particularly messy of as tory and ends very much with a Warriors of the Deep style there should have been another way that feels somehow less earned.  5/10.

“Return of the Spiders” is Gareth Roberts’ love letter to Planet of the Spiders, doing a sequel set squarely within Season 17, the era of Doctor Who he is best at writing.  You’d think this makes for a brilliant story like the likes of The Romance of Crime, The English Way of Death, or The Well-Mannered War, but “Return of the Spiders” is fine.  Roberts is great at getting the Doctor and Romana’s characterization and banter down to an exact science which makes it bearable, but he is taking the piss out of the spiders too much meaning this feels like a reinvention that is disrespectful to the thematic end of the Third Doctor in a way bringing the story down.  It also takes way too long to reveal the spiders.  6/10.

I’d like to say it’s odd that David A. McIntee’s contribution to More Short Trips is quite literally a smallish piece exploring what happens to the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Vicki in between scenes of “The Slave Traders”, but seeing as “Romans Cutaway” is both a pure historical giving two little plot threads to the Doctor and Vicki and Ian and Barbara respectively while focusing on who these characters are at their core.  It’s a classic setup from McIntee with a TARDIS team he clearly adores to bits, giving so much insight into Vicki as a character immediately post-The Rescue.  On television while she was characterized well and particularly well performed by Maureen O’Brien, “Romans Cutaway” really wants to explore her emotions post-The Rescue with this understated fear of abandonment after the death of her father and her decision to travel in the TARDIS.  Ian also gets some particularly nice moments remembering people he knew on Earth who died tragically.  He also gets to fight a lion and McIntee keeps the tone of The Romans in tact despite going down some darker paths.  8/10.

Like “Moon Graffiti”, “Dead Time” had its initial release in an audio anthology, Earth and Beyond read by Paul McGann, though unlike “Moon Graffiti”, this isn’t one of those stories that suffers from being in prose and not read aloud.  It does suffer from having to use Sam Jones as a companion though, as the story while set in the TARDIS and in a void like setting so Andrew Miller really focuses in on the Doctor/companion dynamic.  Except the Doctor/companion dynamic between the Eighth Doctor and Sam is a particularly weak one.  “Dead Time” is a story that also focuses on the Doctor as a character, locking some cosmic entity in his own mind’s past that is straight out of Gallifrey’s past as well.  The story would work better had there not been a companion included in the proceedings and we could just focus on how the Eighth Doctor integrates with Gallifrey’s past, especially considering this collection came out post-Alien Bodies (and directly would be the first time using Gallifrey proper since Lungbarrow).  Still Miller writes a solid story.  7/10.

“Honest Living” is another story from a first time writer and like Ian Atkins before him, Jason Loborik actually tells a fairly engaging little Third Doctor romp.  Loborik, clearly a fan of Day of the Daleks uses the story to play around in that space with the original pitch idea of changing around history.  This becomes a story where there are two timelines, one where a man is killed in a car accident and one where he survives.  It’s quite surprising that there are some plot similarities to “Father’s Day”, though as this is not as good considering it’s just a side character dealing with changing history and not the companion, in this story that would be either Jo or the Brigadier.  Still it’s quite fun and Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor is captured quite well especially for the early Season 9 setting of the story.  7/10.

I’ve often said that Paul Leonard is a writer who does brilliant work until he has to get to an ending of a story, then the ball is dropped.  It’s always nice when he is able to prove me wrong as he did with “Special Weapons”.  Leonard placing the Seventh Doctor and Mel in the middle of World War II while the Nazi’s are working on several experiments on an alien being to isolate a small British town, holding the residents hostage and terrorizing them.  That’s just the surface level, for much of the story the Doctor and Mel are actually split up and Mel is paired with young Oliver, an adolescent who ends the story traumatized but determined to go off to war in the next year to kill Germans.  It’s difficult to describe just how tragic that ending feels, he is going off to kill Nazis after all, but even doing that means he will come back a changed man.  This is also a story that despite the reader knowing that the Doctor and Mel must make it out alright, the tension is some of the thickest I’ve ever seen in Doctor Who, making it a very nice companion piece to Lance Parkin’s Just War which was being adapted to audio around this time.  10/10.