Doctor Who - The Krotons by Terrance Dicks

Published: November 1985

Edition read: Target first, 1985

Coolest Cover: Andrew Skilleter’s "just the monster" approach, although I’m curious as to why the hexagons stop three-quarters of the way down.

Purple Prose: "The Krotons never had any worries about stating the obvious. Indeed their whole conversation consisted of a series of such statements." (p.95) Very nicely put...

Crimes Against Literature: "Somehow, her outstanding beauty made it hard to believe that she was among the most gifted of her generation of students". (p.8) Terrance Dicks striking a blow for male chauvinism...

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

...and dematerialises with... "a faint, wheezing, groaning sound".

Childhood Recollections: As with ‘The Invasion’, I think I had a hardback of this at a fairly early stage so may never have read the paperback.

Ramblings: You might think that after the ambitious re-tellings of Doctor Who’s past represented by Donald Cotton’s ‘Myth Makers’ and Ian Marter’s ‘Invasion’ that a Terrance Dicks adaptation of a story which had been repeated only four years before its novelisation might seem weak by comparison. And in certain lights, it’s true that Robert Holmes’s Who career is a case of third time lucky, however by the same token the two main criticisms levelled at the televised story tend to be with the realisation of the Krotons themselves and with the supporting performances. The novelisation is therefore an opportunity for Dicks to do the job he’d done so well with previous Robert Holmes scripts- to bring out the strengths and intentions of the original story without the necessary compromises of production for television.

Regardless of how much one believes the stories about ‘The Krotons’ and its apparent origin as a single play, there are some good ideas at work here. The idea of a society being shaped by unseen alien invaders to serve their requirements has distinct potential and feels as if it belongs in a more profound work of science-fiction. Where Holmes’s scripts become slightly unstuck and really feel like a first attempt at writing for the series comes with the supporting cast, who aren’t particularly strong or differentiated characters and rely on an internal squabble to generate some additional drama, and the Krotons themselves- Holmes clearly hadn’t yet learned to write for monsters, so it’s unsurprising that Dicks should include the aside quoted above given that the Krotons as written are the Sybil Fawltys of the universe, bellowing the plainly obvious at each other. The ideas suit the printed page and do lift the story up above Dicks’s less inspired adaptations, and Dicks’s usual faithful style works best when describing the Second Doctor and his companions- there’s a clear warmth when the regulars are being described which Dicks communicates very well.

Unfortunately the down side of the Dicks approach is that at least some of the weaknesses come through as well as the strengths. Yes, the story is better without unwieldy Krotons swaying around in skirts and Selris stumbling over his lines as if he’d only just been passed the script, but in many (unsurprising) ways the story feels like a first submission- textbook Doctor Who, in fact. There’s a promising central idea, exciting new monsters, an oppressed native population, enough plot strands to keep three regulars busy and exteriors which can be done in a gravel quarry, however the whole is in the end less than the sum of its parts and held together largely by the performances of Troughton, Hines and Padbury- and that can’t translate to the printed page. The number of blank pages out of the numbered 121 is disappointing, and although in some ways Terrance Dicks’s style is refreshing after the embellishments of Cotton and Marter, the story itself isn’t disctinctive enough in the right areas for this to be one of Dicks’s very best.