Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial states this is the first Target novelisation to be labelled a ‘TV Tie-in’ rather than simply a ‘Children/Fiction’ book (3) and, presumably coincidentally, that does show through in the text. For a start, Saward, following, to be fair, a trend apparent in earlier novelisations, assumes the readers know the regulars well, making, as Jim Sangster puts it, ‘no attempt to describe them’ (4). Even though ‘followers of the book range might know Adric’ (5) and Nyssa, though not yet how the latter came aboard the Tardis, Tegan and the fifth Doctor are new to Target and get little introduction. We do learn that Tegan is ‘the Doctor's air-hostess companion’ (6) and, in place of a recap of ‘Kinda’ and the Mara, that she her aunt Vanessa had died in presumably her first story (7). That aside, however, the only characterisation she and Nyssa get through the whole novelisation is that they’re prone to becoming rapidly overwrought and melodramatic: when the Doctor disappears behind a brick wall for a bit and everyone’s looking for him, Nyssa very quickly becomes ‘too distraught to go on’ (8); Tegan, quite soon after she’s captured, feels ‘exhausted, a hundred years old’, ‘more scared than she had ever been before’ and as if ‘she might die’ (9); and Nyssa again, this time when confronting the Terileptil android, reflects that this is the moment she ‘will be triumphant...or die’ (10).

   The fifth Doctor fares a little better, Davison’s Brideshead Revisited (11) interpretation captured in the description of him as an ‘intrepid explorer’ (12), his jaunty veneer (13) and his air of comical ‘pomposity’ (14). Saward also does a good job of capturing the character’s Season 19 frustrated petulance: fuming, after his initial argument with Tegan ‘How dare she talk to me like that!’ (15) before Nyssa and Adric cajole him into apologising; grabbing Mace ‘angrily’ by the collar when he won’t help Tegan and Adric before quickly apologising (16) and trying a more reasonable approach; and confronting the Terileptil leader by ‘wagging his finger […] like an angry schoolteacher’ before realising how ‘silly’ and ‘ridiculous’ the ‘gesture’ is (17). Of the more positive aspects of Davison’s portrayal, sadly, there’s less sign.

    None of this would be a huge surprise to anyone familiar with the TV serial though as it bore a similar lack of characterisation, Miles and Wood in About Time summing up its approach with the observation that ‘the man with the scythe is called ‘scytheman’ even by his fellow villagers’ (18). There is, however, ‘one proper character’ as The Discontinuity Guide sees it (19) and that’s Richard Mace, perhaps unsurprisingly as he was a previous, independent creation Saward had already used three times previously (20). He actually transfers effectively to the page, and even benefits from a little extra attention, as when his bold, ‘swaggering’ attitude towards the Doctor quickly dissipates when he thinks he might be confronted by the owners of the manor house, seeming to become smaller and paler (21). More oddly, he attributes his ‘uneasiness’ about the Tardis crew to their being ‘Foreigners’ (22) – whether this should make him foolish, endearing or dangerous is unclear.

    The only other character of any note is the Terileptil Leader, who I think is supposed to be an urbane villain of the James Bond-during-the-Roger Moore-heyday ilk. Though he insists that he’s resisted the temptation to ‘delight in coping with the Doctor's interference’ (23), he does explain his plan to his potential thwarter (24) and leave the Doctor in a easily escapable death-trap and then leave without maintaining any oversight (25).  He later also awaits his adversary ‘Seated at a desk in the middle of the room’ and, in the middle of ‘writing’ (26), stops, places down his pen and greets him pleasantly (27) as if not at all surprised (28). He also, as far as I could tell, has mute henchmen, despite the limitations of TV no longer being a factor, who do things like wait in the shadows for his arrival to then appear as if by magic (29) and just wait casually behind doors, who knows how long for, ready to grab people (30) – that last one might not be quite such a Bond standard. He even gets one final story beat to realise that his plans have come to nought and he himself is doomed before death (31).

    The characters aren’t the only aspect of this novelisation to be quite hard-going. Saward opens the book through the eyes of ‘Small furry animals’ in a paragraph where one adjective is never enough: their eyes are ‘bright’ and ‘shiny’, the snake is ‘warm and refreshed’, its tongue makes ‘short, sharp’ movements and an owl stares ‘fixedly’ and ‘saucer-eyed’ (32). He returns to the animal point-of-view to introduce the Terileptil escape pod, taking the reader on a ‘nightly patrol’ with a fox (33) who sniffs something’s wrong (34), ‘definitely wrong’ (35) in fact in a nice bit of dramatic emphasis on the part of the fox. It finally decides a bit of ‘purple light’ is ‘too much’ for it and leaves the scene (36). That oddly mannered assessment isn’t a complete surprise as a little earlier the fox had already, because of some smoke, ‘sneezed hard and shook his head’ (37) which might well be a fair description of a fox’s actions but is an odd phrase for Saward to put in a fox’s head.

    That sort of gets to the heart of the problem. Saward later decides to present a bracelet-controlled Mace and Tegan’s loading of a cart through the eyes of ‘the miller's horse’ and ‘An early evening badger’ (38). Each is too concerned with their food to pay much attention, which ties in with the Terileptil leader’s insistence his own plan is merely the pursuit of survival (39) and with the opening paragraph’s ‘first kill of the evening’ (40) by the owl preluding the slaughter of the manor house residents. Thing is, this thematic resonance and reflection of the cruel battles for survival in the natural world, of which the fight between humanity and the Terileptils is just another, doesn’t quite work because the tone with which the horse ‘munching a pile of hay’ and the badger ‘setting off in search of supper’ are described captures the everyday mundanity of this ceaseless struggle for survival all too well. Maybe that was Saward’s precise aim, but exciting action adventure fare it does not make.

    This all reminded me of El Sandifer’s view that Saward’s Who writing was inspired by exactly the right predecessors, whether Robert Holmes (41) or Douglas Adams (42), but never managed to ‘quite live up to’ their examples. In the case of this novelisation and its periodic animal point-of-view moments, Malcolm Hulke’s novelisations sprang to mind. Though a nice idea, it seems unlikely. Jason A Miller, writing on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, describes Saward as nuking the ‘Target house style’ (43), with a specific example being how ‘The cliffhangers are all buried in mid-chapter’ with the first even ‘stuck blandly in mid-paragraph’ (44). What Saward seems to have chosen in its place is more like ponderous literariness, a gentility of pace and a wordiness not needed by and not benefitting his story. After spending a paragraph with the ‘Small furry animals’, Saward continues his opening chapter through Elizabeth, one of those who live in the manor house, and the tone and pace remain resolutely the same. She picks up her quill, dips it in ink, writes (seemingly a record of watching the owl kill a mouse), dips again, writes again (45). This might be an attempt to capture the frustrating experience of writing with a quill but, especially considering that has no later significance, feels more like flannel. Similarly the paragraph devoted to the woods in the ‘late afternoon sun’ which shows nature ‘at her best’ but concludes is at best irrelevant to, at worst not even noticed by the characters the story’s actually following.

    Let’s take the most generous reading. Let’s say that Saward is correct at this stage to assume the Target audience doesn’t need characters that have been on TV introduced to them all over again, that he’s taking a run-of-the-mill Who story (his own, but still…) and placing it against a backdrop of the constant fights for survival in nature to provide solid motive not just for this but every alien invasion of Earth, that he’s using the untroubled natural world to emphasise the futility of the violence the Terileptils and the villagers wreak, that characterising more than a few characters would bog the tale down, that children need to know and feel how tiresome it was to write with a quill. In that case Saward is at least pushing towards a new style for a new Doctor and nuking what went before to refresh it, albeit not wholly successfully in this initial effort. Even then, there’s a harsh contrast with just one book ago. Fisher presented a vision of Who for the 80s; this offers a far less rich, fun and, frankly, literary vision. Sadly, written as it is by the script editor of a good chunk of Who for that decade, it’s also a far more prescient one.