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Doctor Who - The Space Museum by Glyn Jones Published: June 1987 Edition read: Target first, 1987Coolest Cover: David McAllister furnishes us with an almost marble-like Hartnell and a blind Dalek.Purple Prose: "Good grief! Ian thought, his dialogue’s worse than mine. I’m in a western and he’s in a soap opera! He frowned at these ridiculous random thoughts: the lack of oxygen must be affecting his brain. " (p.91)Childhood Recollections: I can vaguely remember reading this on a train with my dad- certainly the finger marks on the pages strongly suggest that I read it all the way through.Ramblings: It’s difficult not to have some sympathy with Glyn Jones when the time came to adapt his scripts for ‘The Space Museum’ for Target. There you are, one minute feeling very pleased with yourself for being one of only two people (at the time) to have both appeared in Doctor Who and written a story for the series as well, relishing the prospect of equalling Victor Pemberton’s achievement in also adapting said story for the printed page, and then you get your video or copy of the scripts out- only to discover what you wrote was actually one unnerving and suspenseful episode, followed by three episodes of unimaginative hogwash. Not the best start. This makes it all the more interesting that Jones should have pulled off a rather good free adaptation of his story, which evens out the events of the last three episodes without sacrificing the wonderful dramatic hook of the first episode’s mystery. Jones’s take on the second season TARDIS crew seems slightly odd- he doesn’t quite "get" the Doctor, I don’t think, and when brought together the regulars seem to have an almost neurotic ability to set each other off and start arguments over nothing. He’s more comfortable with his own characters; Lobos is fleshed out into something approaching a three-dimensional character although given to fits of sudden irritation during which things are liable to be disintegrated (and it’s curious that Jones also seems to have thought that the one thing ‘The Space Museum’ was really missing on television was a cute robot) and a running joke where he queries the decidedly Earthbound turns of phrase which occasionally come to him. Similarly the Morok subordinate (here named as Ogrek) has rather more of a personality and Jones makes a particular effort to fill his story out with named characters, so we have a Xeron called Bo and a Morok called Pluton as well as the one-eyed mercenary Mort from Kreme (it feels as if there should be a joke there but I can’t quite find it). While the adaptation is generally faithful and the same things happen to the same people in roughly the same order, the adaptation is fairly free and the dialogue has been improved considerably, although the line about Morok arms falling into Xeron hands is retained, perhaps because of its outstanding absurdity. The overall impression the book leaves is that Jones realised at an early stage that he’d never be able to make a suspenseful adventure out of his original story and decided to concentrate on making the book as enjoyable a read as possible. While the mystery of the first section of the book reflects a particularly eerie first episode on television, it’s difficult not to feel that Jones understood just how much work the remainder of the story needed, and that what had been transmitted on television couldn’t realistically be salvaged and made into a readable novel. What he did, then, was to add a certain amount of humour (although not so much as to be incongruous) and plenty of character detail to flesh things out. It’s ambitious in several ways- not only are the Moroks as ridiculous as they appeared on screen, other characters see them as ridiculous and the Moroks know it- only the Xerons take them seriously- and does try to push a few boundaries- and in the end, you have to concede that for his only entry in the Target range, Glyn Jones gets the balance just about right.
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