Published: January 1988

Edition read: W H Allen hardback, 1987. Yet another one that goes for silly prices online.

Coolest Cover: You really can’t take issue with Tony Clark’s cover, particularly the wonderfully detailed Sandy.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: For a start, Sandy is much bigger in the book- also lots of elegant Didonian ruins.

The TARDIS materialises with..."a hollow bellowing and scraping noise"

...and dematerialises with..."its customary noise of protest and indignation"

Ramblings: I wasn’t at the convention in Liverpool in 1986/7 where it was announced that Ian Marter had died and so didn’t witness a couple of hundred fans simultaneously trying to pay their respects while not overtly asking Nigel Robinson if he’d finished adapting ‘The Rescue’. Such are fans. As Marter’s last contribution to the world of Doctor Who, however, ‘The Rescue’ is an unusual choice; although most of Marter’s later books adapted stories from the 1960s, the majority of them tended to be longer stories with a strong action adventure content. ‘The Rescue’, by contrast, ran for two episodes and has five speaking parts, demanding a different approach from its adaptor. Then again, Marter was at the time one of only two writers with experience of adapting two-part stories to the required length- in either case, it’s an atypical story to conclude Marter’s contributions to the range, but that doesn’t mean by any standards that it’s a lesser work.

Key to Marter’s adaptation are the framing sequences set on board the Seeker, the rescue ship sent to find survivors of the crashed Astra mission. These chapters are presumably entirely Marter’s idea, and while they definitely add a sense of the wider environment to the story, there’s also something depressingly cynical but also unsubtle about his vision of the future, with money-oriented Americans on the lookout for Reaganium- and also what happens once the Seeker reaches Dido. Otherwise, the book is well-paced and structured, although it’s something of an oddity that it must be practically the only book in the Target range (so far at least) where the adaptation of the first episode is shorter than the second. In fact- going back to the point about pace and structure- what’s particularly interesting is that the length feels just about right- although the original story has been added to, it doesn’t feel padded, and yet it does feel sufficiently substantial to stand on its own.

Marter’s trademark hard-hitting approach to violence is somewhat toned down here; as there are only two deaths in the televised story, only the death of Sandy the sand creature allows him to indulge himself with "the enormous toffee-like blob that had been the creature’s head", however neither does he shy away from the time it takes Sandy to die and Barbara’s horrified reaction. Bennett’s death is of course revenge for his murder of the Didonians and their guests from the wrecked spaceship, and so he simply falls down a hidden trapdoor in the altar of the Didonian Hall of Judgement- which brings me to the one reservation I do have about the book. Although to an extent ‘The Rescue’ was always intended as a piece of filler to introduce Vicki, it does have one of the First Doctor’s finest moments in his unmasking of Bennett as the apparently malign Koquillion- a little like the way he tricks Kal into incriminating himself as the killer of Old Mother in the very first story, it’s one of those scenes where you suddenly realise that this doddery old buffer is seeing things that nobody else sees and making connections nobody else can. It’s slightly disappointing, then, that Marter has the Doctor as an expert on Didonian culture and rather more of the know-all of later years when it should surely be a feat of Holmesian deduction.

Nevertheless, for Marter’s final contribution to the range, it’s a very good adaptation which also shows signs of the Target style developing towards a more sophisticated and ambitious approach to the original material, with the cutaways to the Seeker not a million miles away from the way the New Adventures would be structured. Had Marter lived longer, he may well have found himself unable to resist the temptation if writing full-length Doctor Who novels and would surely in time have been drawn to recreate the Fourth Doctor, Sarah and Harry in print. But for all I wrote to begin with about ‘The Rescue’ not being your typical Ian Marter material, it’s perhaps equally appropriate to reflect that although his earliest adaptations for Target were based on the stories in which Marter himself acted, turning in an expansive and detailed adaptation of a story from the 1960s is as good an indication as any as to the growth of Marter’s skill and confidence as a writer during his years with Target. It’s also an equally good indication of what we may well have lost through his premature death.