Everyone talks about how Linx is a reflection of the Doctor: El Sandifer describes him as ‘a specifically designed counterpart’ (3); Rob Shearman sees him as taking on ‘the role of the Doctor’, at least for the first episode (4); Tat Wood simply recaps his landing on Earth and allying with a local military group before archly asking ‘Sound familiar?’ (5). There’s certainly truth to this, and it’s a resonance the novelisation amplifies, UNIT’s sweaty wrestle with the Tardis (6) coming hot on the heels of Irongron’s men’s transportation of Linx’s ship (7) and the ‘eerie howling sound’ of the Sontaran ship (8) conveying a sinister, unsettling echo of the Tardis’s ‘familiar wheezing, groaning noise’ (9) that’s by now such a staple.

    In the context of a Terrance Dicks novelisation though, and especially in the context of what he’s been doing with the character of the Doctor for quite a few books now, what’s noticeable is how little mileage the story gets from these echoes. Dicks has frequently emphasised the Doctor’s British imperial traits, and these are certainly traits ‘The Time Warrior’ gives to Linx: he is, for example, introduced through a ‘strange ritual’ where, upon landing on Earth, his first act is to plant a flag and play the Sontaran anthem (10), a scene the novelisation nicely amps up through the onlookers’ complete ‘puzzlement’ and ignorance of the apparent fact ‘the Earth had just been taken over’ (11). However, it’s difficult to find any equivalent moment for the Doctor, any moment where he asserts his worldview over that of the local population. The closest might come with his description of the Time Lords as ‘galactic ticket inspectors’, and his inclusion of himself in that ‘us’ that decides what paths various civilisations are and aren’t allowed to go down (12), but, in this story at least, all that means is cauterising Linx’s influence from human development rather than insisting on any one path himself.

    That doesn’t mean the Doctor’s a completely non-imperial figure, but he isn’t the counterpart to Linx he might once have been. Where the Pertwee Doctor had previously been an alien stranded on Earth, desperate to escape, keen to use what scientific expertise and equipment he can get his hands on to repair his ship, he’s now a character who, post-exile, has ‘remained on Earth by choice rather than necessity’ and can disappear at will (13). This does allow a contrast between the relationships the Doctor and Linx have – the latter’s alliance simply a matter of mutual convenience, one which Irongron is happy to terminate via a ‘cunning plan’ the moment he has his promised weapons (14) and which the Sontaran, though giving the residents of the castle ‘fair warning’ in the novelisation (15), is unconcerned with bringing to a fatal end (16) once his ship is fit to fly, while the former’s association with UNIT has clearly led to actual friendship, the Brigadier opening the book ‘worried about his old friend’ (17) and, to an extent, only even involving him in this latest mystery in the hope of distracting him from Jo’s departure (18) – but it is one where the fact the Doctor has spent a considerable time stranded on Earth, and is no longer trapped there, feels more significant than the fact his personality is dissimilar to Linx’s.

    This could lean into the idea that the Doctor has perhaps gone too native, become old-fashioned and in need of a poke back in the direction of a more universal outlook. Indeed, the story’s concern with sexism, and the new companion’s strident identification of and opposition to sexism, could serve to reflect that, especially in light of Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen’s statement on the character’s view on equality last book (19). It’s certainly true that the novelisation keeps many of the broadcast episodes’ reflections on sexism (20), and it adds instances of sexism of its own, reinstating Rubeish’s rumination on ‘Typical female cunning’ and concession that ‘Some women can think almost as well as a man’ (21), having Lady Eleanor reinforce Meg’s view that women ‘have our place’ with the earlier line ‘It is a woman’s place to wait’ (22) and even, and let’s be generous here and say the prose is adopting Sir Edward’s point of view here, inserting out of nowhere the stereotype of the nagging wife, the put-upon husband shown ‘patiently waiting for his wife to run out of words’ (23). However, while El Sandifer sees the show contrive to make the Doctor ‘more sexist’ than usual on TV (24), the novelisation backs away from this – the moment, for example, when the Doctor states it’ll be handy to have Sarah around ‘to make the tea’ is clarified as an ‘unfortunate joke’ (25) rather than anything more deep-felt.

    All of which begs the question, if Dicks is eschewing his usual tics, what’s distracted him? Well, firstly, Irongron and his men now get some lovely background detail. It’s now clear that they had once ‘roamed the forest like wolves’ (26) before they ‘stumbled’ on their current home, defended by just a ‘handful’ of men’ (27). This is sort of covered on TV by Eleanor’s describing him as a ‘usurper’ (28), but that doesn’t allow for Irongron to reflect on his ‘old roving life’ (29) as a time when ‘they had been free’ (30), making him sound like Robin Hood gone wrong, both in the sense that he never gave to the poor but also in the way he fell into the ‘trap’ of the comfort and status offered by a castle.

    One possible reason for the added detail may be due to, according to Tat Wood, Holmes’s resistance to writing a historical story (31), Shannon Sullivan suggesting Holmes felt they were ‘relics’ and (and I imagine this should be said with a sneer) ‘educational’ (32). Sullivan adds that the idea of ‘a story with an historical setting’ came from Letts and Dicks (33) and, though I’ve no idea whether Dicks’s take in the novelisation is historically accurate or based on any research, it does suggest a greater investment in painting the period setting.

    Another reason perhaps is that Irongron’s troupe simply lend themselves better to prose than TV. Sly asides pepper the book, undermining the captain, his decision to take Linx captive, for example, immediately giving way to the actual truth of the matter: ‘Fortunately, the alien had seemed willing enough to accompany them back to the castle’ (34). Similarly, the presence of such a small force to greet Linx is revealed to have less to do with TV budgets and more to do with the men’s drunkenness and Irongron’s inability to stir them (35). There’s even the odd darker insight into their reasoning – when they flee the Doctors stink bombs, it’s no longer simply a result of a belief in witchcraft but also a recognition that, with ‘plenty of sins on their consciences’, they’re wary of going straight to Hell should they be killed in the siege (36).

    The second thing Dicks works on is the introduction of Sarah as the new companion. El Sandifer judges Holmes ‘truly awful to her in this story’ (37), taking the commission to replace Jo with a stronger female lead and cynically playing Sarah’s feminism ‘for laughs’ (38), most particularly in her confrontation with Irongron in part two (39). A bit of interior monologue dispels much of the unpleasantness of that scene, revealing that a lot of Sarah’s chatter is actually a tactic to ‘dispel her own fears’ (40) and that, despite her brave front, she has quickly realised this is all very ‘real’ (41), perhaps even from the first moment she stepped out of the Tardis and took ‘a deep breath’ of the uncontaminated air (42).

    Alongside his fix of Holmes’s worst excesses, Dicks also introduces a bit of magic to Sarah’s induction. Now, she not only hides unseen in the Tardis while the Doctor takes it to medieval England, she specifically does so ‘in a wardrobe!’ (43). Combined with Sarah’s thoughts of ‘childhood games’ (44) and her surprise when emerging in a forest (45), the novelisation evokes the tales of Narnia and so the idea that Sarah has now crossed the threshold into a land of adventure.

    The most dramatic addition to the novelisation, however, has little to do with Dicks. David J Howe recounts how the prologue to Doctor Who and the Time Warrior resulted from Robert Holmes’s own attempt to novelise the story, handing the three pages he had managed to Dicks when he gave up on the idea (46). According to Howe, Dicks, referring to Holmes’s work, ‘often said he wished he could write like that’ (47), and it’s easy to see why he repeatedly offered up the compliment. The prologue’s full of lovely, seemingly easy (though clearly not) turns of phrase, describing space as a ‘sterile black infinity’ (48), the Sontaran’s ship’s progress through it as ‘silent as a whisper in the night’ (49) and the vortex as ‘terrible regions where even light itself faded and died’ (50). Maybe reading the prologue was Dicks's biggest distraction.

    Anyway, taking his lead, I presume, from Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s ‘The Sontaran Experiment’ (51), Holmes adds the Sontaran ‘burn’ in the prologue. He introduces it with the loveliest turn of phrase of all, Linx reflecting that it symbolises the Sontarans’ willing ‘sublimation of self to the greater end of military efficiency’ (52) and gives rather a lot of detail about it. Little can be said that would improve on the passage itself:

He always dreaded taking a burn. His hand moved on the switch and

immediately the almost-pain came screaming up into his skull, bursting

inside his brain in a searing silver convulsion. He had spoken with other

fliers who claimed to be totally oblivious throughout the period of a

burn. If only it were so with him. The flood of power through his tissues

was like a roaring madness, a chaotic maelstrom of colour and sound

depriving him of all sentient knowledge of the outside world. He felt

himself clinging like a limpet within some solitary crevice of consciousness,

aware only that he still existed... still existed... still...

plus

as always after a burn, he had an urge to remain connected to the feeder,

free from the necessity of making decisions, drifting warmly in a gentle

euphoria.