Synopsis: The Doctor finally brings Ian and Barbara back to London but celebrations are short-lived when they realise they are two hundred years in the future and Earth is under the occupation of the Daleks. Separated and befriended by various groups of resistance fighters, the time travellers all come to the same conclusion – they must find out what the Daleks are doing and defeat them. But for one of them, life will never be the same again.

Chapter Titles

• 1. Return to Terror
• 2. The Roboman
• 3. The Freedom Fighters
• 4. Inside the Saucer
• 5. Attack the Daleks!
• 6. The Fugitives
• 7. Reunion with the Doctor
• 8. The Mine of the Daleks
• 9. Dangerous Journey
• 10. Trapped in the Depths
• 11. Action Underground
• 12. Rebellion!
• 13. Explosion!
• 14. The Farewell

Background: Terrance Dicks adapts Terry Nation’s 1964 scripts for the second Dalek serial. The title page says it’s adapted from Doctor Who and the World’s End, presumably taking the story title from the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary special, which used the titles of each first episode to represent the serial as a whole.

Notes: The first chapter features a recap of the schoolteachers and their first meeting with the Doctor, Susan and the TARDIS. The Doctor is a lot more tetchy than he was on telly; when Susan describes the TARDIS readings as ‘normal’, the Doctor corrects her with irritation: ‘Normal for where?’ Later, Susan tells David that she left her own planet when she was ‘very young’ – is this comparative for a teenager, or was she a young child?

Tyler’s first name is Jim, not Carl, and Jack Craddock becomes Bill, but David’s name is still Campbell [see The Crusaders for why this is interesting]. The events of the time travellers’ first meeting with the Daleks is put into perspective when the Doctor surmises that the city they attacked was just one on the planet Skaro (in the TV version, he guesses that their first meeting took place a million years in the future). The Black Dalek (also called the Dalek Supreme) is said to be larger than normal Daleks – maybe the standard Daleks don’t have the enlarged bumper in this version? There’s also a ‘second in command’, a ‘commander of the ground forces’ and an engineer without any descriptions – are these based on the movie Daleks?

The Doctor is dazed after escaping the robotisation process, but not unconscious as on TV. David calls the Dalek fire bomb a ‘blockbuster bomb’ – it destroys whole blocks in one go. Dortmun is buried under rubble (like in the movie), rather than just being exterminated, while Larry and his brother Phil don’t kill each other in combat; the rewrite is much more tragic: Roboman-Phil’s helmet comes off in the struggle, killing him and as Larry holds his brother’s body another Roboman guns him down. There are a few dialogue swaps, such as Barbara getting a second go at making the Robomen attack the Daleks – the Doctor merely adds that the slaves should join in. The Doctor’s party is celebrated for their part in overthrowing the Daleks, so there are a lot more people willing to help free the TARDIS (and Tyler says he doesn’t need to know why they want the police box). Ian doesn’t wedge the Dalek bomb to stop it, but diverts it off course (just like Tom does in the movie!). The Doctor’s goodbye to Susan is a little simpler than on TV, but it’s almost more emotional as a consequence. We then join the Doctor inside the TARDIS as he turns from the scanner and sniffs, daring the teachers to comment, before smiling and promising to get them home (and the schoolteachers agreeing he probably won’t).

Cover: Chris Achilleos presents one of my favourite covers ever, and it’s so weird. It depicts a scene that’s threatened but not actually delivered on screen – the burning of London to flush out the rebels, with a Dalek and roboman patrolling as Dalek spaceships set fire to the Houses of parliament. But the spaceships are from the second Dalek movie, the roboman is a mashup of a movie version and a Genesis of the Daleks soldier, while the Dalek looks like it’s from the first Dalek movie, but it’s red all over with black spots. Its gun is from one of the original TV props but that and its sucker arm are the wrong way round. Despite all this, it’s utterly stunning. The 1990 reprint cover by Alister Pearson also uses the Houses of Parliament as a backdrop but it’s much more understated, showing portraits of the Doctor and Susan alongside an accurate TV version of a silver and blue Dalek.

Final Analysis: There’s surely no better start to any of these books than the first page of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, particularly that opening line: ‘Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man.’ It sets up the tone of the book, which is a war story with Daleks, where each character has something to say about the life they’ve led up to this point. Of course, Dicks is working off the back of three other writers – Terry Nation, David Whittaker and Milton Subotsky – but it’s the stuff he adds to meld the work of the others together that makes this so perfect. 

One strange thing is that I recall Terrance Dicks claiming that he’d been sent the wrong photo for the Slyther, and what he described was the Mire Beast from The Chase, yet what he writes is pretty spot on and actually adds to the menace of the creature:

Ian saw a vast lumpy blob of a body, powerful flailing tentacles, two tiny deep-set eyes shining with malice… Moving incredibly fast, the creature lurched towards them.

and:

They heaved and kicked and punched at the Slyther’s flabby bulk, shoving it out of the bucket with maniacal fury, dodging the flailing blows from its enormous tentacles.

That the Slyther survives its fall at the end and crawls off means that even after the Daleks are defeated, there’s the problem of pest control still to deal with – unless the volcano sorted it out. Although, for all the little tweaks Dicks makes to improve on the scripts, he still has the Doctor leaving Susan behind with just one shoe!

Never mind – I might go as far as to say that it’s Dicks’s best adaptation, so I’ll be interested to see if anything can top this.