Tag Earth

Chapter 4. Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion (1974)

Jim Sangster 4 Comments

Synopsis: An alien intelligence lands on Earth and begins to establish a bridgehead for an invasion by creating an army of plastic dummies. The Doctor arrives in a new body, disoriented and without the ability to operate his TARDIS – but finds a job with the Brig’s UNIT (and usurps Liz Shaw as UNIT’s scientific adviser in the process).

Chapter Titles

  • 1. Prologue: Exiled to Earth
  • 2. The Mystery of the Meteorites
  • 3. The Man from Space
  • 4. The Faceless Kidnappers
  • 5. The Hunting Auton
  • 6. The Doctor Disappears
  • 7. The Horror in the Factory
  • 8. The Auton Attacks
  • 9. The Creatures in the Waxworks
  • 10. The Final Battle

Background: The first book written for Target and the first by Terrance Dicks, adapting Robert Holmes’ scripts for Spearhead from Space (1970). The book also introduces the Third Doctor (after a prologue recounting the final minutes of the second Doctor’s trial in The War Games), along with Liz Shaw – and reintroduces Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart as a regular (even down to having him appear on the cover!).

Notes: It’s Terrance Dicks’ first novel and straight off, he describes the materialisation noise of the TARDIS (which is now in full caps and no italics!) as ‘wheezing and groaning’, a description we’ll see again. The Brigadier is given the first name ‘Alastair’ (a detail not revealed on TV until Planet of the Spiders but it appeared in print in Piccolo’s 1972 edition of The Making of Doctor Who). A few characters gain a little extra detail (Dr Henderson and his colleague at the hospital are fierce rivals, Captain Munro is called Jimmy, Seeley and his wife play a bigger part) and a few details are changed (the Auton devices are green, not pink, Channing accompanies the facsimile to kidnap General Scobie). Channing acquires a repeated description of possessing ‘handsome, regular features’ (which is better than ‘a middle-aged man with an ill-fitting wig and one huge hair poking out of his left ear’, I suppose). We’re told by Captain Munro that Corporal Forbes is an expert driver, so it’s right that he survives the car crash – but is then chopped down and flung brutally into a ditch by the Auton. There’s also a lovely flashback as Hibbert recalls how he first found the glowing green sphere and felt it possess him and build the machine that created Channing.The biggest change is the final depiction of the Nestene, which improves upon the original’s wriggling rubber tentacles somewhat:

‘A huge, many tentacled monster something between spider, crab and octopus. The nutrient fluids from the tank were still streaming down its sides. At the front of its glistening body a single huge eye glared at them, blazing with alien intelligence and hatred.’

The Doctor considers ‘reversing the polarity of the neutron flow in the dematerialisation circuit’ – two phrases that we’ll see a lot of in the future, but that ‘neutron flow’ term popped up a lot less often on TV than we might think.

Cover & Illustrations: The first Target edition had a cover and illustrations by Chris Achilleos. The cover shows the Doctor and the Brigadier with a green octopus, but the final illustration has a go at capturing that lurid description of the Nestene creature. My first edition of this was the 1982 Andrew Skilleter cover with a colourful cuttlefish, while Alister Pearson’s 1991 reprint cover is a vision in pink, with the Doctor and an auton mannequin amid a meteor shower.

Final Analysis: Terrance hits the ground running with the efficiency he’ll become famous for. Episode one spans four chapters, but the rest are covered in two chapters each. It’s all the more impressiove considering this is Dicks’ first book ever and he takes the opportunity to tweak a few things here and there, solving problems from the broadcast episodes, such as making Hibbert explain that the shop window dummies they make are called Autons, after his company, Auto Plastics (as opposed to the Doctor somehow just knowing what they’re called in a later scene in the TV version). It’s a great start to this new range.

Chapter 3. Doctor Who and the Crusaders (1965)

Jim Sangster 4 Comments

Synopsis: The Doctor and his chums meet King Richard the Lionheart, his willful sister, Joanna, and his nemesis, Saladin.

Chapter Titles

  • Prologue
  • 1. Death in the Forest
  • 2. The Knight of Jaffa
  • 3. A New Scheherazade
  • 4. The Wheel of Fortune
  • 5. The Doctor in Disgrace
  • 6. The Triumph of El Akir
  • 7. The Will of Allah
  • 8. Demons and Sorcerers

Background: David Whitaker adapts his own scripts from a serial broadcast in March to April 1965, published by Frederick Muller Ltd in September 1965, first reprinted as a Target book in 1973. t followed The Web Planet on screen, so very early on, we have our first set of consecutive stories to be novelised.

Notes: The prologue gives us a short summary of what’s happened since the first book – and it is incredible. Apparently Susan had left the Tardis to live with David Cameron (!) and her place taken by Vicki, who we met in the previous volume. Ian and especially Barbara are now perfect physical specimens thanks to their travels and Barbara is now apparently ‘the admiration and desire of all who met her’ [see The Keys of Marinus and The Romans], but he’s foreshadowing future events too. Though it’s never explicit on screen, Ian and Barbara’s ‘destinies were bound up in each other’. There’s mention of an unseen adventure involving ‘the talking stones of the tiny planet Tyron in the seventeenth galaxy’ while Barbara and Vicki are playing Martian chess.

… and then Whitaker has the Doctor explain why they can explore all these alien worlds and interfere but they can’t change anything in Earth’s history. The examples he chooses from history – from Pompeii to John F Kennedy – are frank and somewhat surprising. And then, with some additional foreshadowing that really sets out Whitaker’s aims, we have this from the Doctor:

‘The next time we visit Earth,’ he said, ‘I hope we encounter a situation where two men are opposed to each other, each for the best reasons… ‘That is the only way to understand the folly, the stupidity and the horror of war. When both sides, in their own way, are totally right.’

Cover & Illustrations: Henry Fox’s original cover shows a raging crusader and the Tardis with a yellow background, while the Armada hardback by Mary Gernat shows the Doctor fleeing a crusader on a blue background. Chris Achilleos’s Target cover features the Doctor with a strong likeness of Julian Glover as King Richard. The 1975 White Lion hardback again pops Tom Baker in along and the one I first owned was the 1982 Andrew Skilleter cover shows the Tardis (I think it’s from an early Peter Davison photo). Henry Fox’s 15 illustrations are gorgeously melodramatic, in particular the image of Barbara about to be whipped.

Final Analysis: My surprise at the impressive prologue suggests that this is the first time I’ve read this book! As with the previous two volumes, this expands upon the scale of what could be achieved in Riverside Studio 1. In fact it’s hard to visualise a small studio set at all when there is such a sense of distance between each location. Whitaker develops the romance between Ian and Barbara, which gives the pair extra motivation to be reunited, although he also adds to the horror of Barbara’s experience by having El Akir whip her repeatedly, leaving her badly scarred (the death of El Akir is also more violent, strangled before his skull is dashed against a wall, rather than the more theatrically clean stabbing on telly). It’s a mature work, living up to the promise of the prologue by trying to present both sides of the war evenly and with Ian trying to explain how all religions have a basic central idea of a higher being.