I give this novelisation a bit of a bashing but it's perhaps worth mentioning that I'm actually quite partial to 'Death to the Daleks'. I would ascribe it to the nostalgia of the early video releases - I also rather like 'Revenge of the Cybermen' - but then I'm not so keen as you average fan seems to be on 'Day of the Daleks'.
Perhaps El Sandifer's on to something:
Up until the third episode, what stands out most about Death to the Daleks is how visual most of the storytelling is, with numerous sections in which the plot is advanced by what we see on screen instead of what we're told. It's not until episode three that the story even begins to explain the nature of Exxilon. Prior to that the plot is mostly people doing things instead of saying things. This is an odd register for Doctor Who to be in. It's more cinematic than the series usually is
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/poor-pathetic-creatures-death-to-the-daleks
That has the immediate advantage of suggesting why the novelisation's quite so poor. It's not so much that it couldn't have translated that visual storytelling into something literary, or indeed that Terrance Dicks couldn't, but this does come in the middle of a veritable flurry of Dicks adaptations, when you can imagine he's just getting through the scripts as efficiently as possible. On top of that, as his involvement in the TV story was possibly quite minimal, he might not even have realised how the script functioned, instead concluding that it simply didn't.
Whatever the reason, I just wanted to point out that the ire I pour in the direction of this one here isn't actually a verdict on what I know is generally a quite poorly regarded TV entry.
Comentários