Doctor Who And The Doomsday Weapon/Colony In Space
First Broadcast: 10th April 1971 – 15th May 1971
First Published: 18th April 1974
Doctor Who And The Day Of The Daleks
First Broadcast: 1st January 1972 – 22nd January 1972
First Published: 18th April 1974
The third and fourth books in the Target range jumped ahead more than a season than their predecessors for their releases, which had the potential to confuse new readers, although they could just regard it as training for the release patter for the later books in the series…
The Doomsday Weapon was originally broadcast as Colony In Space and was the fourth story in the eighth season. Day Of The Daleks was the opening story of the ninth season.
As we did last time, let’s look at them in broadcast order.
The Doomsday Weapon is, frankly, a high-water mark for the series. It would be nearly fifteen years before the series started to regain the heights of characterisation and setting and just plain old literary prowess that Malcolm Hulke achieved here.
Yeah. I went there.
Adapting his own script, he added quite a lot of details to flesh out the 30th Century that his guest characters were living in. Most of it comes from the two dissatisfied settlers who are quickly despatched in Chapter 4, but it’s added to by the backstories of some other characters who appear later on.
None of it is terribly original, and the central idea was already beginning to feel dated as science fiction at the time of writing, but it just makes the story less of a backdrop for the Doctor’s adventures and more of a story in its own right.
The story of Doomsday Weapon/Colony In Space features the Doctor and his companion Jo Grant (on whom more later) who are sent to an unnamed planet to thwart a scheme by the Doctor’s nemesis, The Master (another renegade Time Lord). They also get involved in a dispute between some colonists and a powerful mining company who plan to strip the planet of its valuable resources. There’s also a once-great race known only as Primitives who are concealing a powerful weapon that the Master wants to get his hands on.
It feels fairly bog-standard but Hulke manages to make it feel relevant and interesting even now, fifty years after it was first aired.
For one thing, the fact that the planet doesn’t have a name feels more like a deliberate choice rather than an oversight and lends a real, torn-from-the-headlines immediacy to the story; this story could happen anywhere (especially if you live in Western Australia where we have mining companies who have desecrated sacred sites in the name of profit – and not in the distant past, either).
The assumptions made by the mining company staff that they can do pretty much anything they like in the pursuit of their goals and have it covered up by their superiors if successful has an unpleasant ring of familiarity, too…
And there’s more than an occasional glimpse at the humanity that the colonists are slowly regaining by starting their lives over on a new planet that touches the reader as well. We are frequently told about the crowded Earth that has been left behind, and of the bland, sterile environment the colonists were forced to live in, making their struggle to survive on a potentially hostile world all the more gripping.
It’s really driven home by the scene where the colony leader, John Ashe, must deal with the deaths of the two colonists:
Now Ashe remembered reading an old audiobook about burying dead people, back in the time when Earth still had open land. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we must dig holes.’
‘Graves,’ said the Doctor, so quietly that no one else could hear.
And then, later at the side of the graves,
‘You must stand here and say some nice things about them both,’ said the Doctor, still in no more than a whisper. ‘You must say that they did not die for nothing.’
‘Why?’ asked Ashe.
I never really had much time for Colony In Space whenever I watched it: it felt like a fairly boring adventure, especially once the Master turns up and turns it into a fairly standard adventure, of which Season 8 had plenty, what with the Master being the villain in each of the stories there.
This novelisation is superior to it in nearly every way… except for Jo Grant, the Doctor’s companion. This story is fourth in the season, but Jo is written here as though it is her first adventure with the Doctor. She gets the job with UNIT (the military organisation tasked with dealing with extra-terrestrial issues that the Doctor is the scientific advisor of) by appealing to her influential uncle for a job that would be best-suited for her ambitions to be a spy.
I have to admit that the beloved character of Jo Grant being revealed as a “nepo-baby” does not paint her in a good light.
She is then assigned to work with the Doctor as his assistant but it becomes boring until he invites to take a look inside his TARDIS, after which she behaves as she normally does within the story.
It’s a quick piece of shorthand for those readers who haven’t seen Terror Of The Autons (Jo’s introductory story) since it aired three years prior to publication. For modern readers, it’s frustrating because she gets her proper introduction written up in the novelisation of the story. It’s something that happened a fair bit to readers, since the novels had to be reasonably self-contained and explain who the characters were if they hadn’t appeared in book form before.
But that’s really the only flaw I can level at a book that is decidedly brilliant in every other way.
The Day Of The Daleks is an equally exciting story, but it lacks a lot of the ambition and reach of The Doomsday Weapon. Novelised by Terrance Dicks from a script by Louis Marks, it was the first time that the Third Doctor (as played by Jon Pertwee) faced off against the Daleks, who were now the first monster/villain in the series to make a return appearance in the books.
On screen, it’s quite an ambitious adventure let down by shoddy production values: there are only three daleks in the story; there’s the slowest chase you’ll see for many years; there’s a time loop raised in the first episode that doesn’t resolve itself in the story, probably because the entire story overshadows a lot of background details.
But there’s a lot of entertainment to be had. There’s also a lot of time taken to set up the premise and to build the tension and excitement.
The plot runs like this: Sir Reginald Styles is a diplomat who is set to host a peace conference at his manor house. However, he sees ghosts. UNIT are called in and the Doctor and Jo investigate with some help from their colleagues, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Captain Mike Yates and Sergeant Benton. Our heroes discover that the ghosts are in fact time travellers from the future who have come back to kill Styles who they believe to be responsible for the state of their world: nearly destroyed by war and ruled by the daleks. The Doctor and Jo inevitably find their way to the future and foment rebellion before returning to their present and preventing the murder of Styles which was, in fact, the catalyst of the future conflict starting.
It’s a strong time travel story, one of only a few in a show that features a character known as a “Time Lord.” Honestly, this sort of paradox story is far more common in the revived version of the show (2005 onwards) than in the Classic Series, but when it is tackled it is usually quite successful, thankfully.
Terrance Dicks proves again to be a master at adapting other people’s scripts: he takes Louis Marks’s story and makes it tighter, irons out a few loose ends and turns it into an impeccable big budget movie for our minds. He also takes the rather bland portrayal of Styles from that script and turns him into a more dynamic character that you might believe could start a war… or stop one.
But I want to bring up my pet theory: I mentioned it in the last instalment: “The Terrance Dicks Prologue Theory.”
I originally gave it an airing in my Stuff Ian Likes post about Underworld, a Fourth Doctor story. The theory goes something like this:
For some of the weaker stories he might spend more time fleshing out the story in the earlier part of the book so that the rest of the story flows better and makes more sense. For some stories that did not work terribly well on the screen he might also include a prologue to explain some backstory to what the Doctor is about to experience.
The copy of The Day Of The Daleks shown in the photo that goes with this post has 120 pages of text. 40 pages take up the content of the first episode. That’s exactly a third of the book. Episodes 2, 3 and 4 take up 25, 23 and 32 pages respectively.
However, the retelling of Episode 1 features a chapter entitled “Terror in the Twenty-Second Century” which was not based on broadcast material but sets up a lot of the plot and background detail of the characters. This makes the details given out as the story progresses, mostly by the Dalek Controller, a human who works as a liaison between the humans and the Daleks (an idea so neat that it was re-used in the revived show’s first season finale, “Bad Wolf”/”The Parting Of The Ways”) who explains the history of the future to the Doctor who is confused as to why this Twenty-Second Century has such a radically different appearance to the one he encountered in the First Doctor story, The Dalek Invasion Of Earth.
ANYWAY, that first chapter counts as a prologue; even without it, the first episode accounts for 32 pages, as much space as the final episode’s allocation of pages – and the final episode also gives a conclusion of sorts to the mystery posed in the first episode wherein the Doctor and Jo encounter future versions of themselves: here they encounter the same past versions of themselves, closing off a lost thread in the story neatly.
Regardless of the faults in the story, though, Dicks continues to prove that he is also a reliable pair of hands to have on board this series.
Coming Up Next: Doctor Who And the Daemons and Doctor Who And The Sea Devils.
