stunt_muppet

Because I have work I'm supposed to be doing, naturally.

So I did say I'd post about the Target novelization of The Three Doctors, as it's my first time reading a Target novelization and I found it interesting compared to watching the episode itself.

The review turned out somewhat longer than I expected.



1. While not in the same state as The Seeds of Death, this one could still use a copyedit; however, the errors here are limited to a few dropped or misplaced commas and a couple of words repeated too close to one another. Also, there may have been a few incorrect dialogue tags. I don’t really remember.

2. All in all, not too bad – the dialogue is a little clumsy, the prose is a little overblown (way overblown at times), but we are talking about a children’s pulp sci-fi serial at the bottom of it all. The novels allow the writers to bypass some of the budgetary limitations of the show itself and be a bit more impressive with landscapes and monster designs. In this particular story, for example, the unintentionally comic gel guards become shambling man-like figures instead of stop-motion blobs that look vaguely like strawberry preserves, and the Third Doctor’s kung fu showdown fight with Omega takes place in an empty arena against an eight-foot tall rock monster thingamajob with claws. Also, he swoons into Two’s arms faints onto Two after it’s over, which I find hilarious for some reason.

Additionally, the “Contact!” telepathy looks much less stupid when you don’t have to see the seizure-inducing camera effect that goes with it.

That said, some of the funniest, most memorable moments in this particular serial come from the bickering between Two and Three, and a lot of the spark that made it amusing gets lost from page to screen, as it relied on the actors. The dialogue in the book still made me laugh on occasion, but it was because it recalled something amusing from the episode itself; I’m not sure I would have found it as funny on its own merits, and frankly, once you see it on the page the exaggeration of the characters (especially the Brigadier) stands out rather unpleasantly.

Also, the “I’m fairly certain that’s Cromer” line, which was apparently an ad-lib from Nicholas Courtney, isn’t in the books, and as that’s the one line I’ll excuse the Brig’s mischaracterization for, that made me a bit sad.

3. While he seems to like Jo well enough, Terrance Dicks doesn’t do terribly well by her in this book. She spends a lot of time ducking behind things, being ineffectual, standing around, or crying, and the one time she actually gets an action scene (where she, Benton, and the Brig are charging Omega’s fortress), she gets knocked flat on her back by a rifle’s recoil and decides to sit out the battle. Granted, The Three Doctors isn’t a spectacular serial for Jo anyway, but there’s one specific change that skeeves me – on two occasions, she refuses to leave the Doctor when he’s about to do something dangerous; in the show, she either stays where she is or is persuaded to walk away. In the book, she’s picked up and carried out, once by the Doctor and once by Benton (although when the Doctor tries it, I think she starts kicking him). I find it creepy that Jo is so literally deprived of any choice in the matter; when she won’t do what the men say, she’s forced to by dint of being physically smaller than them. It’s subtly sexist in a really icky way, and I’m glad that wasn’t left in the show.

4. Jo and the Brig both note that Omega’s world looks suspiciously like a quarry. I am amused. (It’s handwaved away later by Omega noting that he tried to make his world beautiful at first, but creating anything living or colorful strains the will. I can’t remember if they did that in the episode itself or not.)

5. Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t take advantage of not having to work around actors by writing One into the plot. Of course, doing so would have required a massive rewrite, so I suppose it’s understandable, but having One actually do something in this version would have been nice, to say nothing of less depressing.

6. There’s an interesting bit in the beginning, when Three and Jo first meet Omega, and Jo states that it’s the first time she’s ever seen the Doctor afraid. Which is...interesting, given that she was there the first time the Keller Machine brainfucked him in The Mind of Evil; his shock upon seeing Omega is really not all that drastic in comparison.

...It just bugged me, that’s all.

7. I know, I know, I’ve already squeed about the ending, but the ending just makes me feel all warm and squishy on the inside and I love it so much and the Doctor thinks of UNIT and Jo as his family and his home and I WANT TO GO OUT AND HUG SOMETHING. I’m pretty sure I’ve already meta-blathered about the continual crisis and redefinition of ‘self’ that the Doctor goes through during the Three era, but this part of it – the fact that in some way he does come to peace with who and where he is, and relearns how to incorporate others into his concept of self and of home after that part of his personality almost literally got torn away at the end of The War Games, without sacrificing his difference or allowing his alien identity to be subsumed entirely into humanity – this is the satisfying part of it for me. And even though that particular sub-tier of the Doctor’s character arc more or less ends when he dies it’s just so damn uplifting in spite of itself and and and.

I’m so overinvested. *sinks*

8. Terrance Dicks remembers every line he ever wrote. I already figured as much from the commentaries (he quotes a line he wrote no less than four times in the Inferno commentary). What I hadn’t guessed is that he appears to remember every line he wrote from the Target novelizations.

An explanation: on the Inferno commentary, after the Doctor has just Venusian Aikido-ed someone, there’s some chitchat wherein Dicks quotes the line (which I presumed he wrote, at the time) “one of the rare two-armed beings to have mastered Venusian Aikido”.

This line, so far as I know, does not appear in any episode. It’s in the book of The Three Doctors. Please note that Dicks did not in fact write the episode itself.

Good. Lord.

9. On that note, I must track down a Terrance Dicks novelization of a Master story. Now is my chance to see if he picked up on the Doctor/Master subtext as much as he did the Doctor/Jo subtext. It would make me very happy if he did.

10. I love you lots, Benton. Lots and lots. “Sir...if anything is missing, where do we say it’s gone?”



That's all for the night; I have reading I should be doing now. Thoughts on my English classes to come tomorrow, possibly.