As far as I can tell, this is purely an insertion by Dicks: ‘In certain times, and in certain places, magic worked’. Now, this isn’t hugely different to what happens on TV, where a time fissure such as the one in Fetchborough wood allows the natives ‘telepathy and precognition’ (3), but the broadcast episodes hint that it’s necessary to bring together the Fendahl skull, the time scanner and the fissure to start getting odd effects (4), hence Mrs Tyler’s visions begin to come true only once this has been achieved (5). In Dicks’s novelisations, it seems those visions always ‘invariably came true’ (6).

    What makes this stick out all the more is the fact that ‘Image of the Fendahl’ is such a, as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood put it, ‘von Daniken / Nigel Kneale’ confection (10) – a story in which early extraterrestrial contact is revealed to have been significant in humanity’s development with a superstition or two explained as ancient wisdom made murky through generations of Chinese whispers (such practices then turning out useful in countering the resurgent alien menace). In ‘Image of the Fendahl’, this pattern plays out through the skull’s presence on Earth explaining ‘the darker side of man’s nature’ (11) and ‘the origin of throwing salt over your shoulder’ hypothesised as deriving from its destructive effect on the Fendahleen (12). It’s a story type which absolutely doesn’t fit with the suggestion, on top of all this, there’s also actual magic to contend with.

    To explain why, it helps to pick apart something else Miles and Wood write. They describe von Daniken/Kneale-type stories as typically exposing ‘all the shamans and astrologers [as] charlatans’ and show the scientists to have been ‘on the right track’ all along (13), which seems an odd thing to say about a genre which typically reveals all the shamans’ and astrologers’ practices to have had a perfectly reasonable and useful origin which had been ignored by the scientists until almost too late. Scientists, however, have the right way of interpreting the world – the Fendahl, for example, might well seem mystical, little more than a ‘darkness’, ‘a cloud of evil’ (14), a personification of death itself (15), but it is a simple product of evolution just like every other creature (16). The purpose of these stories is to emphasise that superstitious worldviews are fundamentally misguided and that anything right they may have picked up, like, say, the protective qualities of salt, will have a scientific(-style) explanation involving, say, ‘electrical balance’ and ‘osmotic pressures’. If magic exists, that whole purpose is gone.

    Now, Miles and Wood also say there’s ‘an unusual level of doubt in the script’ when it comes to how scientifically explicable the events of the story are, so it might be that Dicks is just amping up something that was already in the air on TV. Specifically, they view the Doctor as giving ‘three different explanations’ for the Fendahl, ‘one quasi-mystical, one using modern scientific terminology and one putting everything down to […] coincidence’ (17). This refers to the attribution of humanity’s darker nature to the Fendahl, the idea that the Fendahl influenced specific individuals whose descendants then carried ‘the instincts and compulsions’ to help it (18) and the resigned suggestion that it ‘all be coincidence’ (19). If we’re looking for suggestions that the scripts are actually embracing the mystical, it’s telling that the second option doesn’t sound especially more scientific than the first. The key though is Miles and Wood’s specification of ‘scientific terminology’ instead of science – it might be a bollocks vision of how inheritance works, but it’s still using the idea of genetics to ground it in the scientific rather than the magical world. Thing is, that applies just as well to the Doctor’s first explanation, which explicitly references humanity’s ‘evolution’.

    And it’s not just the broadcast episodes that offer little scope for the embrace of magic in ‘Image of the Fendahl’. The beefed-up background the novelisation gives Max Stael suggests Dicks is heading in a different direction too. He chooses the ‘occult’ (20) as his path to ‘personal power’ (21) because the other available routes, ‘politics […] science or business’ (22), are beyond him. This could suggest that magic is as solid a pursuit as these other fields, his study of it no different to his ‘medical qualification’ or ‘other degrees’ (23), in no way an odd fit with his ‘stiff’ and starchy military demeanour (24). Trouble is, Stael is just as much a tool for the Fendahl’s return as anyone else (25), which means his actions, including his study of the occult and pursuit of power through magic, are nothing but the already pseudo-scientifically explained manipulations of the alien power which lead not to Stael’s dominion over the rest of humanity but, were it not for the Doctor giving him the gun he can’t reach himself (26), Stael becoming Fendahleen-fodder along with the rest of his coven (27).

    There’s another factor that also pulls away from Stael’s belief in magic having any narrative weight – he’s mad. Now, it’s one thing to get called mad by Colby (28), it’s another to get called mad by Fendelman (29), but it’s of a whole different order when the prose itself gets in on the act (30). What’s more, he doesn’t even get the dignity of it being a personality trait peculiar to him, Colby merrily labelling Fendelman mad for much of the story (31) – clearly madness is just a sign that you’re part of the Fendahl’s plans (32). On top of this, the revelation of ‘a distinguished Austrian scientist’ for a father (33) brings up echoes of Hitler and the Nazi’s interest in the occult, which doesn’t exactly tilt the scales back in favour of Stael’s sanity (34).

    So where does that leave magic? Well, it should be acknowledged that the statement that magic can, in the right context, work was in Stael’s head, and he goes on to dismiss his use of word (35). His clarifications, though, don’t really fit the von Daniken/ Kneale model: harnessing ‘the psychic energy of the mind’ isn’t pseudo-scientific in the same way as explanations elsewhere in the book as ‘psychic energy’ isn’t scientific terminology and harnessing ‘the powers that ruled the entire cosmos’ is frankly as mystical a turn of phrase as magic. Rather than sharpening the ‘doubt’ that Miles and Wood sensed in the script, Dick’s choice of vocabulary seems designed to eliminate it. Stael’s identification of what he’s engaged in as magic, and even more his instinctive retreat from the word only to substitute it with meaningless twaddle, works to diminish him and to shut down any hint that there’s anything inexplicable going on here. As such, the book’s ten mentions of magic where the broadcast episodes made none starts to look a bit mean-spirited, an attempt to stamp out the entertainment of ‘different perspectives’ with which Miles and Wood felt Boucher was dallying (36).

    Predictably, one of the upshots of Dicks’s slamming of magic is a dismissal of Leela’s role in the series. It’s not so much the fact she still believes in magic, but that she does so ‘despite all the Doctor’s efforts’ (37) that’s significant. This could be read as an assertion of her identity despite the Doctor’s overbearing tutelage, were it not for the way her life as a hunter also gets sent up, doing ‘a little scouting around’ simply because she’s ‘too restless to settle’ (38) and because, since ‘She enjoyed that sort of thing’, the Doctor felt it would be ‘a pity to deprive her’ (39). To cap it all, there’s the bit where, remembering the Doctor’s dislike for killing, she knocks out a guard instead of knifing him a feels ‘rather proud of herself’, reflecting, and Dicks ensures a comical tone with his twin modifiers and an exclamation mark, how ‘she was really getting quite civilised!’ (40). To be fair on Dicks, Leela, as Rob Shearman observes, isn’t best handled by Boucher either, her character regressing to the state of her first few stories (41), but at least the TV episodes left Shearman with the feeling that both Leela and the Doctor had been oddly served (42).

    Which, tortuously, might just bring us to the point of all this. Shearman also comments on how the Doctor is ‘sidelined from the adventure’ for much of its duration, ‘punished […] for his irrelevance’ to this dark, mystical tale (43). Dicks’s repeated evocation and ridicule of magic and those who credit it, and the accordant increased emphasis on how explicable everything is if just viewed by the right scientific mind, serves to shore up the Doctor’s position, to double down on the need for his presence in the story. It seems, in the long gap between seasons 16 and 17, that Dicks has finally resigned himself to idea that the audience now shares Tom Baker’s view that there’s only one reason they keep coming back to Doctor Who.