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Doctor Who - The Mysterious Planet by Terrance Dicks Published: April 1988 Edition read: Target first, 1987Coolest Cover: Tony Masero cleverly hides the shape of Ravolox’s continents but fails to appreciate that it’s a stylised 3 on Drathro’s chest. Childhood Recollections: Are mainly of reading this from the hardback...and being faintly amused by the appearance of Broken Nose partway through. Ramblings: I’m starting to wonder whether the makers of the film Memento weren’t inspired by reading the Target adaptations of the Trial stories in a mis-spent youth absorbing Uncle Terrance’s output. It is, after all, a story which begins (in ‘Terror of the Vervoids’) with a Doctor who doesn’t know how his female companion died, and who with the aid of an ambiguous dark-haired woman and an alter ego, finally unearths the truth. And I can see Lynda Bellingham in the Carrie-Anne Moss role, but that’s probably just me. It’s hardly surprising that Dicks should have taken the opportunity to adapt Robert Holmes’s last completed script for Doctor Who, and at the same time taken care to ensure that what comes across is given a Terrance Dicks makeover, so motivations are made clear and skulduggery clearly signposted. In fact, what comes out particularly well from the adaptation is that there was nothing particularly wrong with the original scripts- without some of the artificial theatricality, the courtroom interludes become an astute commentary on the act of writing and watching Doctor Who and the very structure of a story, and although Humker and Tandrell still feel like a punchline searching for a joke (you can tell that something humorous or satirical is intended, just not exactly what), there’s more than enough wit in the scripts to keep Holmes’s enthusiasts happy. It’s also spread far and wide, so characters like Glitz and Dibber do come alive through their criminal cant, while Balazar’s description of Marb Station’s book collection is if anything more amusing in print. The execution of the book is however classic Dicks, relying on a straightforward elucidation of the action of the story and leading to a typically entertaining and undemanding read. The plot is straightforward (although Glitz is somewhat darker and edgier without Tony Selby’s charisma) but this has its pitfalls- when dealing with the likes of Katryca and Drathro, it’s difficult not to feel that Holmes in his original scripts was writing cliched characters to order and the lack of enthusiasm does tend to transfer to Dicks’s prose- Drathro in particular lacks much of the menace he had on television and simply becomes a reductive and narrow-minded robot. The end result, then, isn’t representative of either writer’s best work- Holmes’s dialogue is fine, but then it’s the kind of Doctor Who dialogue he could write in his sleep, and Dicks’s linking prose is equally assured and level-headed, but only with Glitz does he really get much of a chance to expand on the scripted character- although having said that, in his one adaptation for the Sixth Doctor, Colin Baker’s portrayal comes across well, with no incongruous . It’s by no means one of the top drawer of the Target adaptations, but then again any Terrance Dicks take on a Robert Holmes original is always going to be worthwhile and faithful to the strengths of the original story.
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