Doctor Who - Meglos by Terrance Dicks

Published: May 1983

Edition read: Target first, 1983

Coolest Cover: Andrew Skilleter wins this one by being dark and atmospheric.

Crimes Against Literature: "The Doctor, who loved a good tinker, was happily working away at K9’s innards..." (p.11) If anybody has a yearning to produce some Lovejoy crossover slash fiction, here’s your chance.

The TARDIS dematerialises with...: "a slow, laborious, wheezing, groaning sound"

Childhood Recollections: My first copy of this was bought in W H Smith in Kingston-upon-Thames and pretty much destroyed by spending a couple of months at the bottom of my school briefcase.

Ramblings: One of the occasional pleasures of these reviews is that from time to time you come across an adaptation which encourages you to revise your opinion of a story- or if not revise it, at least reconsider where the weaknesses occur. Such a story is ‘Meglos’, which must have seemed on paper to have an excellent collection of story elements- a villain who can impersonate the Doctor and give us the iconic image of Tom Baker covered with cactus spines, a society mired in an centuries-old conflict between science and religion, a quest for revenge postponed for thousands of years and some comedy gangsters. And yet it’s a story which tends to be reviled as a throwback to the previous season’s self-indulgence and invariably seen as the weakest of its season.

Terrance Dicks’s adaptation is by and large straightforward, although he does the "Earthling" character the courtesy of giving him a name and a life- down to borrowing the ending of ‘The Three Doctors’ on his return home- although in some ways this diminishes the idea of him being a random man of 1980 who just happened to be kidnapped by the Gaztaks. Another slight curiosity is that Grugger’s Lieutenant is called Brotodac throughout, thus neatly eliminating one of the jokes in the script, although much of the satirical humour surrounding the Gaztaks is intact. The Tigellans are perhaps not as distinctive as on television- although I must have seen the story half a dozen times I still couldn’t always remember which was Zastor and which was Deedrix. In prose, of course, we’re spared the most uncomfortable part of the televised story, namely Edward Underdown acting through serious illness, but we also lose Jacqueline Hill’s unsettling performance as Lexa. In retrospect, it’s difficult not to think of Gareth Roberts while reading Dicks’s adaptation, given the plot’s similarity to his Missing Adventures, which tend to set the Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 against dangerous criminals with unearthly powers, however this is probably in no small part down to deliberate homage on Roberts’s part. It is, however, an interesting read if only because it feels so much more purposeful and sensitive to the story’s need for changes of pace and emphasis than the televised production. I’d go so far as to say that if the television production team had been able to adapt Dicks’s book rather than Flanagan and McCulloch’s scripts, we would have had something to touch the coat-tails of ‘City of Death’.