I do like the way they scheduled Doctor Who and the Space War and Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks back-to-back. It’s a shame no one told Malcolm Hulke the plan, though, as he ended his book with a perfectly healthy Doctor popping into the Tardis to pursue the Daleks. Or that no one told Terrance Dicks what Hulke had done, so he merrily opens with an injured Doctor and perplexed Jo just like on TV. Actually, that’s not entirely true because the recap at the start suggests the Doctor was injured by Daleks (3) rather than the Master, as had happened on screen, which means both writers have changed events and not thought to tell the other.

    The stories still share the same concern with war though, Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks ending on a tidied-up version of the Doctor’s plea to the Thals not to ‘glamorise [their] adventures’ but relate ‘the fear and the danger’ and ensure they remain ‘a peace-loving people’ (4). This is the coda to a lot of stuff about what it means to be courageous. Codal, ‘the youngest and least experienced’ Thal, takes this theme most to heart (5). A reluctant member of the party, who seems to have signed up because there was no one else (6), he is ‘pre-occupied […] constantly’ with ‘the question of his own courage’ until the Doctor declares he’s ‘a very brave man’ and teaches him that ‘Courage isn’t a matter of not feeling frightened […] It’s being afraid, but doing what you have to do anyway’ (7). So that’s that.

    Well, not quite. The battle between Taron and Vaber, with the former cautiously waiting until he thinks they have the best chance and the latter eager to act before they ‘all get killed’ (8), isn’t really about courage at all but about what to do when it’s not exactly clear what you should do. I think Taron is supposed to come out of this best – he does essentially get the Doctor’s blessing (9) – but he only swings into action when a whole new bunch of Thals turn up out of the blue (10) and it really did look like he was going to be struggling for a new plan until he and Vaber were dead (11). Maybe the moral is that something will always turn up...?

    Actually, there’s a few things that don’t quite add up in this novelisation. Dicks tries valiantly to explain why the Doctor’s in danger of suffocating in the Tardis when it gets caked in gloop but really he just provokes more questions. As far as I can work out, whenever in an inhabitable environment, the Tardis draws on air from outside (12), and whenever there is no ‘breathable atmosphere outside’, it resorts to ‘its automatic air-supply’ (13). On top of this, and this is the bit it took me a while to fathom, when it is relying on the outside environment, it doesn’t use this to top up the automatic air supply (because, when that runs out and the Doctor discovers he’s also got barely any ‘emergency supply’ (14), he castigates himself for not just ‘letting one back-up system run low, but two’ (15)). Presumably, then, the automatic air supply is just a big tanks somewhere that just happens to have reached empty here but could just as easily have done so on an uninhabitable moon or mid-vortex journey, which would have been even more unfortunate, and doesn’t give any warning about its supply levels until it’s ‘EXHAUSTED’ (16). Fine, but that doesn’t explain why, in so voluminous a ship, the interior becomes ‘UNABLE TO SUSTAIN LIFE’ (17) almost instantly the moment the system stops pumping in fresh air. Even if the Tardis extended no further than the ‘CABIN’, that’s very quick. Did it evacuate all the air from the perfectly inhabitable Ogron planet on the journey to Spiradon?

    Then there are strange missteps that just seem a bit absent-minded. When Vaber fumes that Taron’s usurped ‘the command that was rightfully his own’ (18), it implies that he’s less genuine in his fears that they’ll fail in their mission and all die and simply using the difficulties he’s faced as a stick to beat his rival. It’s forgivable because it feels like Dicks just can’t help throwing in a bit of characterisation, but that’s the one thing that absolutely won’t fit comfortably into ‘Planet of the Daleks’. Even more awkward is Rebec’s arrival. The broadcast episodes seem to condone Taron’s poor treatment of her, heaping all the blame for their perspective failure on her shoulders, but Dicks strives to make the scene worse, Taron just walking away once he’s spewed his bile and leaving Rebec ‘sobbing quietly to herself. The Doctor then just waves Jo in her direction because she ‘might appreciate a feminine shoulder at the moment’, as if this is just some over-emotional fault on the Thal’s part that just requires a bit of comforting (a job his masculinity clearly precludes him from doing himself) rather than a perfectly reasonable reaction to the fact it turns out Taron’s a complete git (19).

    It does all look disturbingly like Dicks just doesn’t care and has switched straight to autopilot. The warning signs are there from the very start when he has Jo recount the whole of ‘Frontier in Space’ into a tape recorder just like she did on TV even though this really isn’t a necessary conceit in prose (20). No wonder Jason Miller sees Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks as ‘The beginning of the Terrance Dicks doldrums’ (21).  However, there is another perspective. In his Radio 4 documentary remembering the Target novelisations, Mark Gatiss specifies Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks as his childhood comfort blanket of choice (22) – so it must have something going for it.

    Let’s assume that Dicks is fully aware he’s adapting ‘an indifferent word salad from an author merely marking time until his US TV career took off’ and, rather than just copying it blindly, he’s decided he’s going to really capture its essence. In that case, it makes perfect sense that the Doctor’s suffocating in his Tardis for unfathomably convoluted reasons,  that the reasons for Vaber and Taron’s rivalry are irrelevant and so may as well contradict themselves and that the ridiculously clichéd machismo of the male leads should be pushed to the point of discomfort. And of course Jo painstakingly recounts ‘Frontier in Space’ because it’s frankly just as clumsy a method of exposition onscreen as it is in prose (23).

    The end of chapter two works as a nice pointer that this is in fact what he’s up to. This is a prose rendering of the Part One cliffhanger from TV, often ridiculed as the worst example of the shock-reveal-of-the-monster-in-the-title in the show’s history (24), what with the Daleks having turned up last week, the Doctor purposefully heading off to find the rest of them, there suddenly being Thals everywhere and the title of the story (25). In prose, the Doctor’s response to this high-tension moment, designed to keep children on the edge of their seats for a whole week: ‘If [Vaber] expected fear or horror, he was disappointed’ (26). Indeed, the Doctor goes on to deconstruct exactly why he’s so underwhelmed – he points out that he ‘himself had come to Spiridon in pursuit of the Daleks’, that he’d taken on board ‘the presence of Thals’ everywhere and that he was in no doubt about who their ‘‘special mission’’ must involve. It may not have been what Nation intended, but it does perfectly sum up the experience Wood, Miles and Neil Perryman relate of watching it.

    If Dicks is taking the piss, the Daleks suddenly make a lot more sense. In his mind, they’re basically bumper cars, ‘hurling [themselves] about the cell […] like a bee trapped in a bottle’ when imprisoned (27), ‘bumping gently against their neighbours’ when waking up (28) and using themselves ‘like battering rams’ when confronted with a closed door (29). That last one follows up a bit of comedy business when, trying to blast a door open, they succeed only in ‘melt[ing] the metal and weld[ing] it together more strongly’.

    The Daleks in general have trouble reacting to events. When running away, the Doctor and Codal only survive running slap bang into a Dalek because ‘it was as surprised as they were’ (30) and, later, they manage to escape from another one because ‘It took the astonished Dalek a moment to register their presence’ (31). Similarly, when a group of Daleks encounter Marat, they stop for a moment ‘As if astonished’ before blasting him (32).  The best example, though, is when one Dalek spots the Doctor and the Thals escaping up a chimney and lets out ‘an astonished squawk’ before it’s able to relay the information (33). ‘The astonishment of the Daleks was almost ludicrous’ indeed (34).

    It’s not just a matter of descriptive flourishes either. Before the chimney escape route is spotted, the Daleks are ‘in a state of utter confusion’ about where their prisoners might be (35). Their leader is so perplexed he speaks with ‘a note of hysteria’ and demands a full search for them despite there being ‘nowhere for the prisoners to hide, nowhere to search’. As the text points out, ‘The orders sounded logical but they were impossible to carry out’. These Daleks have all the rigour and cold calculation of, well, Cybermen.

    Unlike with the Cybermen, however, this isn’t a problem. Dicks makes a point of ensuring the Daleks aren’t the ‘machines’ Nation labels them on TV (36) but bubbling, emotional ‘creatures’ (37), so the fact they’re practically unhinged suits them perfectly. What’s more, their frenzied approach to any activity lends a genuine thrill to any section of the novelisation involving them, as they chase maniacally after the heroes with increasing fervour. So it seems, despite absolutely no collusion whatsoever, Dicks and Hulke have come to the same conclusion – the trick with adapting this 12-part epic is just to cut loose and have fun.