Published: March 1987

Edition read: Target first, 1987

Coolest Cover: David McAllister gives us a strangely baby-faced Hartnell, a ginger Monoid, a gazelle and a puma-type thing.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: The totally extravagant series of escapades where the Doctor and Rhos tour the various environments on board the Ark dishing out the vaccine for Dodo’s cold virus. Also Dodo’s game of tennis with an invisible Refusian opponent.

The TARDIS materialises with..."a whirring, mechanical noise"

...and dematerialises with...a whine, a whir and a clank

Childhood Recollections: This is another one of those where I can definitely remember sitting down and reading the hardback in one sitting.

Ramblings: In the mid- to late- 1980s, the more obscure corners of the Hartnell era became quite a productive hunting ground for the Target range, particularly when the original script writers could be persuaded to adapt their episodes for the printed page. It’s pleasing, then, that ‘The Ark’, one of the more thoughtful if not exactly compelling black and white stories, should benefit from this treatment and Paul Erickson’s adaptation and more than does justice to his original story. There’s always a slight uncertainty about picking up one of the adaptations by one-shot writers, who are after all returning to something they wrote twenty years previously and inevitably aware of how the series developed after their story was transmitted, but it’s fair to say that Erickson certainly captures the regulars well. Strangely enough, it’s Dodo who comes off best- for a character conceived with the best of intentions but hopelessly out of date from her first appearance, here she comes across as bright, chirpy and having a gently mocking relationship with the Doctor which belies the fact that this is her second televised adventure. There’s also a certain amount of gentle humour for the Doctor which isn’t in the televised story but adds a certain geniality which is completely in character with William Hartnell’s performances at the time.

Erickson’s characters come across less well, unfortunately; few if any of them really come alive and most seem to be there to express points of view and push the drama forward than exist as characters in their own right. Things become slightly more interesting in the second half of the story as both humans and Monoids have shifting allegiances, and Monoid Four probably comes across best in this respect, however there’s a slight attempt at fleshing things out when we discover that Monoid One is in fact Number One the Seventeenth and the Monoids have in fact exchanged benevolent human exploitation for a hereditary dictatorship. If ‘The Ark’ as a story has a problem, it’s that for one of the more cerebral Hartnell era stories, its point tends to be muddled at times- there are a series of thinly-veiled allusions to imperialism and the patronising way in which the Guardians initially see the Monoids as unable to fend for themselves and lacking purpose without human intervention, while at the same time Erickson inserts a couple of short scenes which suggest at an early stage that the Monoids are capable of turning. Unfortunately the book then undermines this by showing that in a position of power, the Monoids are if anything more cruel than the Guardians, and it takes a rebellion by the more enlightened and compassionate Monoids to bring about a resolution. In the end, perhaps the point is that the story isn’t meant to be a specific allusion to one set of circumstances in particular but about the way in which any relationship between different races can become exploitative for the best of reasons.

To concentrate on the novel, however, Erickson’s return to the story is filled with small but significant additions to the story as transmitted which do make reading the book a rather more rewarding experience than watching the televised story, even if for its time ‘The Ark’ was phenomenally ambitious in terms of storytelling and realisation. Clearly the book can’t hope to pull off the shock at the end of the second episode, the presence of the second half of the book being something of a giveaway, but it more than makes up for this by adding to the visual aspects of the story and the landscapes in particular- polar scenes, fertile valleys and waterfalls which Doctor Who simply couldn’t have attempted in 1966, but which don’t feel out of place here either. And without those necessary limitations, in book form ‘The Ark’ is an enjoyable and well-paced read, which doesn’t demand too much or hammer its point home but tells its story without feeling padded, compressed or forced.