Doctor Who - Mindwarp by Philip Martin

Published: June 1989

Edition read: Target first, 1989

Coolest Cover: There are some good ideas in Alistair Pearson’s cover, but it’s all rather ruined by the boggle-eyed Sil.

The TARDIS materialises with..."a sudden trumpeting sound"

Childhood Recollections: This is another one where to be honest I don’t think I’ve ever read it until now.

Ramblings: And so, with a completely different logo, spine colour and Trial banner, Tagret completed their adaptations of the Trial season (and indeed their adaptations of the Sixth Doctor’s adventures) with Philip Martin’s ‘Mindwarp’. With memories of the Key to Timne fiasco lingering long in many fans’ memories, Target should still be congratulated for completing the sequence- albeit in a slightly eccentric order- and it’s probably fair to say that Philip Martin’s adaptation of his own scripts may well be the best of the four books. What carries over particularly well from his prose version of ‘Vengeance on Varos’ is Martin’s professionalism as a storyteller- by which I mean that he comes across as an experienced and disciplined hand who can tell a story with a beginning, middle and end but also with the occasional wink to the reader such as Sil "endeavouring to maintain continuity". ‘Mindwarp’ is a story which has suffered over the years and particularly at the time of its original transmission from a reputation for incomprehensibility, which as far as I can see is undeserved- at the time the issue was that the cast and crew involved weren’t able to see beyond the story they were making at the time and so couldn’t have understood that the four episodes they were recording weren’t meant to be an accurate version of events on Thoros Beta but a distortion of a story we never get to see.

It’s quite telling that Martin’s approach to adapting his scripts isn’t a million miles away from Eric Saward’s adaptations; there’s a similarly strong sense of the bizarre and outlandish universe in which the Sixth Doctor’s adventures in particular seem to take place. Martin’s notes on the life cycle of the Mentors are interesting- as their creator, he makes them a spontaneous mutation of the swamp life of Thoros Beta, with a limited lifespan and therefore only a limited period in which to make money and push their race forward. Kiv’s skull capacity is therefore something which affects all the Mentors in time, as their bodies are simply not designed for intelligence. When it comes to the setting of the Trial itself, however, Martin is on less stable ground- naming the Keeper of the Matrix as Zon, he also seems to be under the impression that the events of ‘Terror of the Vervoids’ will constitute more evidence for the prosecution rather than the defence. But when it’s called for, Martin’s writing can be very potent indeed- not least when the Doctor is interrogating Peri on the Rock of Sorrows and comes very near to physical violence- it’s understandable why the 1980s production team would have shied away from that, but it’s still disturbing to read. But the sense of humour is there intact, as are all Yrcanos’s oaths, and while the book does give the game away with a somewhat unlikely resolution of Peri’s adventures (rather than assuming that anybody would read the Trial books through in transmission order), as with ‘Vengeance on Varos’ there’s a certain polish on the finished product which reflects the general quality of Philip Martin’s writing and a certain empathy with the way that Doctor Who needed to be written in the mid-1980s.

And so the adaptations of yet another Doctor’s era come to an end- ‘Revelation of the Daleks’, for all its literary inspiration, would never be novelised for the Target range, although as a whole Colin Baker’s stories have a very high proportion being adapted by their own script writers, and only two of the Target books being adapted by Eric Saward in the absence of the original writers. ‘Mindwarp’ is however the one of the four which most feels as if it’s been written by a professional writer who understands his material and how it needs to be presented, and so it’s with some interest that I look forward to the possibility of covering ‘Mission to Magnus’ at some point in the future.