Published: July 1983

Edition read: Target first reprint, 1984

Coolest Cover: It may be perverse of me, but again I prefer the photographic cover; I do find Monarch very evocative visually and clearly the Doctor has just teleported off the Liberator.

The TARDIS materialises with..."a strange wheezing and groaning sound"

Childhood Recollections: I was reading this just before I started secondary school in September 1983.

Ramblings: With a story as visual as ‘Four to Doomsday’ was on television, there’s a distinct challenge facing Terrance Dicks in producing an effective adaptation. So much of the story’s impact depended on the look of Monarch’s ship, the Urbankans themselves and the spectacle of the Recreationals that recounting the story in prose risked turning out rather drab. By the same token, however, Terence Dudley’s story itself was not one of the strongest, so in recounting the story for the Target range, Dicks has a very precise course to steer.

What emerges is a version of the televised story which is generally faithful to the original, although in one or two passages it’s clear that what Dicks was adapting was a script at one or two removes from the shooting scripts. Nyssa’s collapse at the end of Part Four doesn’t happen, but Bigon’s character seems to come from an earlier version of the story as much is made of his philosophical conviction that he must always speak the truth. Much of the impact of ‘Four to Doomsday’ is made in the early episodes- the sheer concept of a massive alien spaceship heading for contemporary Earth, filled with representatives of ancient cultures and watched over by froglike alien masters still carries the first half of the story along much as it did on television in 1982. The problem- and there’s a suggestion in Dicks’s prose that he is only too well aware of this- is that Terence Dudley’s rationale simply isn’t good enough. It turns out to be an incredibly elaborate ego trip on Monarch’s part, and it’s either lazy or unimaginative writing to just write him off as mad rather than investigate the reasons for his obsession. Dicks, I believe, is only too wise to this weakness in the story and although he doesn’t comment on it, neither does he develop it- and the silence speaks for itself. Otherwise, Dicks’s first attempt at writing for the Fifth Doctor doesn’t particularly come across as particularly insightful; one of the structural problems with the story is that Tegan and Nyssa are in their own ways isolated from much of the action, while Adric is unreliable, which leads to a situation where there isn’t always a convenient point of view for Dicks to use. On the positive side, it does recreate something of the excitement and atmosphere of Peter Davison’s second story, but at the same time without the visual gloss of the televised story it also lacks the ability to distract the reader’s attention from its more obvious weaknesses.