Without a glorious jungle to justify the story, Dicks focuses on improving the Morestrans. Salamar’s rise to the top is strongly implied to result from his ‘highly-placed friends in politics’ (3), echoing Prentis Hancock’s own performance decision (4), and his inadequacy in the role is something of which even the Morestran Space Service is acutely aware (5). This is a society drowning in nepotism, its rotten institutions recognising and trying to minimise the damage of its flawed structures whilst unable to actually break the habit. With this made explicit, lines from the broadcast episodes, such as Vishinsky’s warning that they should not antagonise Sorenson because he ‘has a lot of influence in high circles’ (6) and Salamar’s acknowledgement of Sorenson’s ‘high position on the Science Council’ (7), now serve such a reading.

    Accordingly, Dicks performs minor surgery on exchanges between De Haan and Morelli to cement the sense of a chasm between workers and commanders. This is most obvious when De Haan finds himself working in the dark and, on TV, complains to Morelli ‘Do you think the command area’s the only place anyone’s working?’ (8); in the novelisation, that’s changed to ‘Do they think Command Area’s the only place anyone’s working?’ (9), emphasising the estrangement of even the likes of Morelli, who works in the Command Area, from those in charge.

    On TV, De Haan is simply the charming moaner, muttering, for example, about how performing endless, contradictory tasks is such a feature of Space Service life, they should base their motto on it (10), and Morelli is his long-suffering sidekick/line manager, pleading, for example, with De Haan to just get on with such reasonable requests as ‘simply’ taking out some canisters without making too much fuss (11). In the novelisation, however, Morelli’s tone feels a little different, stressing not the fact that moving some canisters isn’t exactly much to ask but instead suggesting he’d be better off not making so much noise and simply following orders, hence his more forceful closing refrain, which carries a hint of fear more than exasperation: ‘So that’s what we do – right?’ (12).

    Dicks is capitalising on the whiff of ancien regime suggested in Louis Marks’s scripts. The Morestrans being ‘dependent on a dying sun’ (13) is evocative of an empire that’s outlived its era, too reliant on a centre of power that’s long been outgrown and can no longer manage the burden – in other words, they’re the British Empire in the only form most readers would remember it. Suddenly, all the talk of a ‘mighty […] super-civilisation’ (14) feels like hollow bluster, and it becomes noticeable that their ‘ornate uniform’ (15) doesn’t suggest much actual action. No wonder their civilisation’s in such a terrible state, they have to rely on the likes of Sorenson to save them, a scientist whose work is so flawed he’s not only set on a path that won’t save their Sun but one that verges on destroying the whole universe (16).

    And that pretty much sums up what’s so broken about Morestra – they’re not just passing over talent, they’re actively promoting, even cultivating, incompetence. Salamar, despite his ‘inexperience’, is so fixed upon his status that he won’t ‘take advice or criticism’ (17) and yet is so ‘conscious of his rank’ (18) that he genuinely believes he’s the man to ‘sort things out’ (19) when they get complicated. This is a man so in love with the power he wields that he relishes threatening the Doctor and Sarah with ‘a great deal of discomfort’ and yet is so uncomfortable with the actual execution of power that talk of ‘torture’ makes him wince (20). Once he’s actually placed in a situation where command is needed, he’s exposed as little more than a child, ‘biting his lip indecisively’ and conceding to the only available plan  with an ‘All right, then. Do it!’ (21) that’s much more petulant than his response in the broadcast episodes (22).

    Sorenson’s even worse, not just inadequate but warped. Faced with the loss of every other member of his expedition to Zeta Minor, he’s incapable of valuing the deaths of his fellow scientists as any more significant than ‘mislaid pieces of equipment’ (23) and yet does show some passion once the matter turns to his samples (24). Vishinsky charitably attributes this to shock (25), but slaughter of his entire expedition never seems to catch up with Sorenson. Instead, even as he insists his obsession is born of his desire to save his people, he clearly views everyone around him as ‘fools’, too beneath his ‘true greatness’ to merit his attention and ‘too wrapped up in their own petty concerns’ to properly devote theirs to him (26), whose only purpose is to facilitate his work (27).

    Dicks’s insights into Sorenson’s thoughts fight against the TV crew’s thoughts on the character – according to Shannon Sullivan, they saw the professor as ‘well-intentioned’ (28) – but fit in well with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as an inspiration for the story (29), with the anti-man (30) Sorenson’s Mr Hyde. In Stevenson’s tale, Hyde is not some external force that periodically possesses Jekyll, he is at best an expression of Jekyll’s desire to indulge activities that would damage his reputation and at worst little more than Jekyll in disguise. In The Planet of Evil, then, the anti-man’s murder spree should be read in the light of Sorenson’s contempt for everyone around him (31).

    If Sorenson’s deepest desire is to slaughter everyone around him, then Salamar’s right to suggest that the only real reason for his dogged research is to be ‘hailed as the saviour of the Morestran race’. In other words, this is a quest for personal glory, and not the first one the Target range has come down on like a ton of bricks. That would explain why he’s utterly incapable of seeing how he ‘might be mistaken in [his] theories’ (32); the theory is what’ll lead to his adulation, what actually happens in practice is irrelevant. That his plan to save Morestra is actually potentially disastrous isn’t some unfortunate accident befalling ‘well-intentioned’ research; it’s a flaw inherent in the fact Sorenson’s a bad scientist, irresponsible, blinkered by ambition and utterly unconcerned by the effect his work might have on others. No wonder he’s willing to seize on Salamar’s crumbling mental state to implicate the Doctor for all the deaths, not only covering his tracks but disposing of the one voice that suspects his research might not be cause for adulation (33).

    Against Salamar and Sorenson is placed Vishinsky, the man whose experience (34) those in charge on Morestra won’t acknowledge with promotion but recognise as essential, hence their placing him with Salamar. Though unimpressed by his commander (35), and clearly the man to whom the crew would rather turn in moments of crisis (36), Vishinsky is willing to serve under Salamar for much of the story despite the latter’s errors of judgement. It is only the unceasing loss of life, and the feeling that Salamar’s actions are now exacerbating that problem, that finally pushes Vishinsky to stage a coup (37). Just to make clear the contrasting motives of the two, Dicks emphasises how, even at that moment, Salamar ‘would have liked to seize control again’, only his lack of ‘nerve’ preventing the attempt (38), and later, when Salamar grabs a spare neutron accelerator and, in his head at least, reasserts his commander (39), Dicks reinforces Salamar’s wonky focus on rank over responsibility to his crew, italicising his assertion that ‘I’m Controller’ and adding in the seemingly noble pledge to those present that he’ll ‘save […] all your lives’ before gunning down one of his crewmen himself (40).

    For all Dicks might feed the Tory Who column, this is now at least the third time he’s taken a script either by Holmes or from the Holmes era and sharpened its attack on the ruling classes (Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars spring straight to my mind, but there are probably others I’ve already forgotten). It’s not perfect, but then there are limits to what can be done with a set of scripts built around a fundamental misunderstanding of Jekyll and Hyde, especially ones tweaked by a producer whose sympathies seem to lie with the repressed, murderous Victorian doctor, without totally rewriting them. None-the-less, it’s got to be promising for Dicks’s upcoming adaptation of ‘The Mutants’, a story with its eye on just about every unjust, crumbling regime a British eight-year-old in the late-70s might be expected to know or remember.