DOCTOR WHO AND THE ARMAGEDDON FACTOR
by Terrance Dicks

First published 26 June 1980 (1), between The Horns of Nimon and The Leisure Hive (2)

I know I’m forever trying to portray Dicks as some sort of closet or subconscious leftie, and I know such a portrait flies in the face of all sense, but just have a look at how the scene where Merak and Shapp discover the truth about Astra (3). It starts off with Merak saying ‘Astra's just the same as anyone else’ and Shapp responding, almost as if he can’t resist in the face of such an absurd statement, ‘Apart from the fact that she happens to have been born a Royal Princess!’. The one detail that’s a bit odd here Shapp’s joke being described as ‘ponderous’ , when it feels more like a sharp or even snide aside, but that in itself highlights how banal an observation the princess’s royal heritage is. Shapp then repeats Merak’s statement back at him, now sounding even more ridiculous after her lofty birthright’s been remarked on, and Merak repeats Shapp’s, now in italics, as if that ponderous quip was the most staggeringly leftfield insight ever. Merak’s follow-up, that ‘It's been staring us in the face!’, is almost a commentary on how blatant this revelation is, especially alongside his ‘blazing […] excitement’ at having seen it, but Shapp still doesn’t get it, leading to yet another effective repetition – ‘Astra belongs to the Royal House of Atrios’ simply restating her being ‘born a Royal Princess’. Dicks then rubs in the amount of page this has all taken up and the excessively startled excitement the characters experience, Merak  checking something on a computer for ‘a very long time’ with ‘fierce intensity’.

    The pay-off for all this is twofold. First, having realised that being a princess might make Astra different to ‘everyone else’, Merak suddenly leaps to the idea that ‘Astra may be more different than any of us could have imagined’. This is effectively a return of the joke from Doctor Who and the War Games where every one of the ruling classes is revealed to be an alien, a book by card-carrying communist Malcolm Hulke based on scripts co-written by him and Dicks (which means the idea might even have been Dicks’s in the first place). Second, ‘There's a molecular anomaly buried in the structure of the House of Atrios, transmitted from one generation to the next’, which feels like a gag about the inbred European royals fermenting hereditary illnesses down the centuries – Czar Nicholas II’s son’s haemophilia springs immediately to my mind. On TV, all but the end of this conversation is absent (4). That does mean that at least the second pay-off comes directly from Dave Martin and Bob Baker, but it also suggests that, faced with that pay-off, Dicks couldn’t resist implying that something not being quite right with the genes of a royal family is the most obvious thing in the world.

    A slightly longer good bit comes towards the conclusion. I’d always read Tom Baker’s performance when he talks about the Key’s power with Romana as the Doctor acting to make his point, but was never sure if this was the intention or just how I interpret someone rolling their eyes back and fluttering their eyelids. Turns out I’m not alone – Toby Hadoke sees the Doctor ‘making a […] point’ (5) and Tom Roll-Pickering, reviewing the novelisation on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, sees ‘the Doctor pretending to get delusions of grandeur’ (6). By contrast, the moment of ‘sudden menace in the Doctor's voice’ (7) in the book is, as Roll-Pickering writes, the Doctor actually ‘succumbing to the influence of the Key’, and it takes a ‘mighty effort’ for him ‘to control himself’ (8).

    Dicks also takes the chance to clear up a few details. It’s established that, at least in the Doctor’s opinion, ‘the real White Guardian has had all the time he needs’ to tinker with the universe in the time the Key to Time’s been whole (9), and that the sixth segment transforming back into Astra is a specific demand by the Doctor (10), making clear all the segments haven’t just reverted similarly to what and where they were, which would have made reassembly of the Key again by the Black Guardian rather easy.

    The best bits of the novelisation, though, come with its descriptions of the Shadow and his planet. Now

a ‘black asteroid’ rather than,

I assume, a space station, it

resembles ‘some fantastic

castle in space’ (11), riddled

with ‘twisted tunnels’,

‘passageways’ and ‘caves’,

populated with ‘bats’ and

‘rat-like creatures’  and

decorated with ‘carved

gargoyle faces’ (12). Its ‘strange organic feel’ (13) comes to reflect the seeming symbiosis between the asteroid and the Shadow, his voice sounding ‘as though the asteroid itself was speaking’ (14), and ‘The whole place’, as the Doctor reflects, ‘no more than an expression of the Shadow's will’ (15), making escape impossible. This makes it sound like Omega’s domain from ‘The Three Doctors’, elevating the Shadow to a godlike status.

    Also like Omega, the Shadow is said to not ‘really belong in this universe at all’, coming ‘from some other, dark dimension’ (16). Unlike Omega, whose anti-matter universe made him the antithesis of reality, the Shadow seems to represent death, his voice sounding ‘as if coming from the depths of a tomb’ (17), his control of others making them like ‘a corpse’ (18) and his death leaving him momentarily hovering in ‘limbo between the dimensions’ (19), as if dying simply casts him back to from where he was summoned. He is the antithesis of life and light, radiating ‘darkness, so that light dimmed wherever he moved’ (20), unable to enter the Tardis because its bright light is like ‘a strong current’ pushing him away (21).

    Unfortunately, not everything about the Shadow builds on this eerie foundation. When he discovers that the Key is in his reach, for example, he gets so excited that he just forgets Romana and Astra, leaving them unrestrained (22) though admittedly with a guard at the door (23). He also, having got the Key, is later ‘too exultant’ to spot Merak join his rank of Mutes (24) and, in the same vein, gets carried away when ‘gloating’ of his success (25). All this, alongside the detail that his control cylinders are explicitly described as ‘easy to see’ (26), makes the Shadow look more like a sloppy idiot than a malevolent spectral agent of death. What’s more, this sinister, macabre agent of chaos seems to think the height of terror might be provoked by just chucking a ‘giant spider’ at his opponent (27). Similarly, the novelisation recounts how a Mute ‘crumpled and fell’ when bashed on the head by Merak (28), an incident that happens offscreen on TV (so to speak) and which undermines any suggestion of wraithlike incorporeal ghostly other-dimensionliness more than any close-up on their sensible shoes that occurs in the broadcast episodes.

    As Tim Roll-Pickering observes in his Ratings Guide review, there are quite a few occasions where ‘onscreen subtle mysteries’ become, in Dicks’s hands, ‘incredibly pronounced’ (29) or, to put it another way, more banal. Roll-Pickering identifies the novelisation spelling out Astra and Merak’s peace efforts (30) and the telegraphing the Marshal’s ulterior motives (31), Dicks even articulating the suspicion that he may be ‘a dummy, a puppet of some mysterious force’ (32) a bit too early. There’s a scene that I think acts as a handy microcosm of the issue, when K9, under the control of the Shadow, goes to give a message to the Doctor. Now, we as the reader already know K9’s been turned, and it becomes clear very quickly in the scene on TV that the Doctor immediately twigged the same. However, the way the novelisation, at the earliest opportunity, spells out that the Doctor is thinking ‘He's never called me Doctor before’ (33) somehow reduces the scene. I’m not saying the tension would have been immense or anything, but the fact that we immediately know that the Doctor immediately knows something’s up undermines the uncanniness of K9’s behaviour, something that’s quite a nice, if admittedly fleeting, moment onscreen. It’s as if Dicks is refusing to play, even for just for one line, with any of the looser ideas enjoyed by the scripts, favouring clarity over ambiguity even at the expense of effect.

    You see, the strange thing about ‘The Armageddon Factor’ is that, despite various issues, it does sort of work, managing, as Robert Shearman puts it, ‘an epic weight’ (34), one that derives from more than just its length. Somehow, despite actually improving many details of the televised story, Dicks’s adaptation loses this weight. It would be tempting to put this down to the sheer number of novelisations he’s been producing (35), but there have very recently been at least two examples of quite poorly received TV adventures coming out relatively well via Dicks’s prose (36).

    To find the answer, it’s helpful to look at another aspect of Doctor Who and the Armageddon Factor that stuck out for me. Through the Key to Time adaptations, I’ve commented on how having one writer behind most of the books has strengthened the connections between them. Here, Romana believes they’ll be taking the completed Key to Gallifrey (37), despite having been told of the White Guardian’s ruse in Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, and much is made of the Doctor assembling the Key, Romana watching ‘in reverent silence’ (38), despite the fact that, in a running joke, she’s been the one putting the pieces together before now because the Doctor’s not quite up to it. These feel like taking the recreation of what was onscreen, a stated objective of Dicks’s novelisations (39), a little too far.

    Alongside the overclarification identified by Tim Roll-Pickering, the novelisations have become less of a proto-DVD range and more something that resembles long-form Programme Guide entries, describing rather than recreating the adventures. Tying in with this is the roaring back in regularity of the ‘Are You Sitting Comfortable…?’ section of this blog, devoted to the most Jackanory moments of the Who books. Instead of being a faithful prose recreation of viewing ‘The Armageddon Factor’, Doctor Who and the Armageddon Factor sometimes feels like someone telling you about watching ‘The Armageddon Factor’. It’s a step too removed.

    And this ties right back into the passage I waxed so lyrical about at the start. One of the joys of Dicks is the way he chucks in what are almost little commentaries on the story as it progresses. I suspect it’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed his adaptations of the Williams-era stories, because they often operate in more-or-less the same way. Here, despite ‘The Armageddon Factor’ being basically fine, Dicks meets a story that just can’t sustain that approach.