It’s book number one! It’s the first out-of-time Doctor in the novelisations (perhaps in any form), building up nicely to the TV show shedding the trappings of the last five years! And, disappointingly, there’s not a lot to be said about it. Dicks is as usual immaculately clear and pacy, but he doesn’t seem to be making any special effort for this special occasion.

    One possible exception to this, based entirely on my reading of one line in Running Through Corridors, is that, where the TV serial throws suspicion around the monastery a bit about who is the Great Intelligence’s agent (3), the novelisation makes it clear from the start that Padmasambvha is the inside man. This might be because Dicks feels there is greater tension in the reader being ahead of the characters, but there’s quite a bit of evidence, thanks the way the book’s many Jackanory-style moments are employed to make sure the reader is definitely up to speed and absolutely clear on what’s happening, that he views the alternative as too complicated for his readers.

    The sphere’s journey across the monastery in search of the deactivated Yeti gives the longest running example of this - it starts with an assurance that it will ‘get there in the end’ (4); includes reminders, such as ‘“That sphere couldn’t have moved off on its own” […] the little silver sphere was doing exactly that’ (5); and provides a final reinforcement after it’s happened - ‘the catastrophe they feared had already happened’ (6) – but see also anything involving hypnosis (7). It would appear that Dicks’s special effort for this special occasion solely comprises of decluttering the stories of the past.

    What’s thrown into greatest relief, then, by this first step outside the Pertwee era, and therefore the Letts/Dicks, era, is Dicks himself. It’s easy on TV to pass over the way he has a very particular view of the Doctor, partly because of how the character is so filtered through the actor and other creative figures and partly because he won. It feels more obvious in the books, partly because he’s the only writer so far to not call him Doctor Who. In fact he stresses that the character’s ‘known only as the Doctor’ (8).

    Like Barry Letts in Doctor Who and the Dæmons, Dicks seems to want a Time Lord in the Tom Baker mould (probably unsurprisingly since he’s the actor they actually cast in the role), combining the clearly superhuman traits Pertwee brought to the fore, such as sensing ‘alien evil’ (9), displaying ‘amazing strength’ (10) and proving able ‘to tamper with the mind’ (11) with a personality that swings between acting ‘like a small boy’ (12) and radiating ‘something of the serenity of the holy ones’ (13), plus the ability to assume authority only when he chooses (14). This is also a Doctor less didactic than Pertwee, influencing attitudes rather than teaching specific behaviours (15), and rather more worldly, coming across as genuinely ‘amazed’ rather than just patronising when reacting to Jamie and Victoria’s ignorance of the ghanta (16).

   More than the Doctor, though, Dicks creates the role of the companion. This has some problems. The most obvious is that, as El Sandifer observes, ‘He’s crap with women’ (17). And, just to make sure you don’t think she’s being harsh, here’s Terry himself: ‘Somewhat to my disgust, there was the onset of feminism’ (18). Even as a joke, and it must be said he does look like he’s barely concealing a wry smile as he says it, it does suggest he’s not overly concerned with how female characters might translate as role models. And there are many passages in Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen that make you think he wasn’t joking, from the Doctor’s unspoken collusion with Jamie to keep his fear of danger from Victoria at the beginning (19) to the Doctor’s internal assessment of Victoria’s uselessness at the end (20). And Dicks definitely isn’t just setting the Doctor up as overbearing, what with Victoria’s expressions of fear (21), her childlike tugging at and clutching of Jamie whenever faced with danger (22) and her assessment of her situation at the Yeti cave entrance which so closely mirrors the Doctor’s verdict on her uselessness at the end (23).

    Luckily, that Dicks quote from the Time Warrior DVD can be extended - his disgust at feminism is apparently due simply to not being able to get away with just strapping the heroine to circular saws and railway tracks any more (24), not any deeply held antipathy to gender inequality. In other words, he’s just annoyed at having to do more with the female companion than simply use her as ‘a plot device’ (25), a tendency seldom more obvious than when Victoria escapes her cell, is then ‘uncertain what to do with herself once she was free’ (26) and ends up stumbling on Padmasambvha. Yes, she’s a peril-monkey who does things simply because the plot needs them to happen (an idea inserted into the series’ DNA by Sydney Newman before it had even started (27)) but, importantly, she does things rather than just having them done to her – even the most transparent example of her lack of agency, when hypnotised by the Great Intelligence to keep begging to leave the monastery (28), only came about because she’d conspired to be ‘the first in many hundred years to look upon the face of Padmasambvha’ (29), surely a remarkable achievement even if it doesn’t go well for her (he is, admittedly, responsible for drawing her into the Inner Sanctum but only once Victoria’s escaped and wandered that far herself).

   Even if she does end up falling prey to the villain, she’s a character motivated by curiosity (30), thrill-seeking (31) - she actually jumps up and down with excitement (32) - and such a sense of ‘mischief’ (33) that the monks dub her a ‘devil-girl’ (34). Ideally she would tread a constant tightrope, ‘half-fearful, half-fascinated’ (35); sadly, she manically bounces between the extremes. However, this is a massive improvement on Hulke and Letts’s treatments of the female lead - both featured strong female characters in their books (Miss Dawson, and indeed Miss Travis, got an improved presence in Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters; Doctor Who and the Dæmons made Miss Hawthorne the alter-Doctor) but both also obliterated the female companion (completely in Hulke’s case; Letts, meanwhile, simply reduced Jo to a simpering lump of loyalty).

    El Sandifer’s defence of Dicks is that, despite the issues in his worldview, his ‘tendency to shy away from the definitive’ allows a ‘pragmatic ambivalence’ that ‘lets him change his mind and move forward’ (36), which I interpret as her basically saying that Dicks’s instinct is to always keep his options open, never committing to fully projecting his own attitudes and so able to adjust to his audience (I say interpret; I mean rephrase). I’d go further. Dicks won’t allow anything to compromise a story and here, stepping outside the Pertwee era for the first time and finding himself confronted with a female companion who must act of her own accord in ways which drive the plot forwards, he accepts that and embraces it. If Victoria’s going to do adventurous things, she’s going to be an adventurous character.

    And so, despite a pair of opening descriptions which very much get the companions the wrong way round (37), Dicks can’t help but make Victoria a contrast Jamie; it’s Jamie who loyally hunts for the ghanta as the Doctor instructed but it’s Victoria who actually allows the story to move forwards by finding it (38) and it’s Victoria who’s ‘entranced’ to find herself in the Himalayas whilst Jamie parochially asserts the patent untruth that ‘there were bigger and better mountains at home in Scotland’ (39). Yes, Jamie gets his moment to shine, leading a group of monks in capturing a Yeti (40), but he only does it because the Doctor requests it, never actually engaging in the situation except at his friend’s prompting. Victoria, meanwhile, can’t help but keep engaging with her surroundings just to keep at bay the seemingly constant threat of encroaching boredom that comes from within her (41).

    This isn’t such a surprise if we consider Dicks’s views on companions instead of his views on heroines: ‘the companions have a practical use in that it enables you to split the story from time to time’ (42). This makes the companion a second protagonist when they are separated from the Doctor, and it is Victoria, not Jamie (who I don’t think ever leaves his side), who enjoys that privilege. Accordingly, since she is performing the same function as the Doctor in her plot-strand, she has moments which mirror him: playing on Jamie’s wish to not appear afraid when she wants to explore, much as the Doctor later does with the Great Intelligence when he wishes to confront it (43); or needing to be talked into a more sensible course of action when her enthusiasm inclines another way (44).

    Whatever Dicks may say (and, indeed, whatever he might do, as there are some horrible bits around Victoria in here), by making the leap that the second protagonist should be a mini-Doctor (one that shares his characteristics, just not his knowledge and experience) he rewrites Newman’s ‘kid’ into the most frequently reoccurring future companion-type, maybe a bit low in the mix with Sarah and Leela, but more obvious in K9 and Romana and then as an actual character arc for Ace (if plans for Season 27 are to be believed – they probably aren’t – or if you followed the New Adventures), Rose and Clara (45), characters where their becoming increasingly like the Doctor is actively highlighted.