Alzarius is a much more richly painted place in prose, a ‘fog planet’, possibly ‘home of […] unimaginable horrors’ made all the more intimidating by the fact that’s actually a question not a statement and no one knows quite ‘how many’ horrors may live there (3). The few who ‘ever dared’ visit (4), such as ‘Governmental and academic survey teams’ (5), were never ‘seen or heard of again’ (6), their vessels seen to be ‘empty, lifeless’ and decayed from space (7) and even unmanned landers were ‘destroyed by whatever lurked under cover of the mists’ (8). Here is a planet not only hostile to all life but even to any useful observation. The prologue ends with an ominous poem, later detailed to be known by the inhabitants of the starliner, which describes ‘The planet’ itself as ‘unleashing terror’ and ‘Bringing death’ (9). This will later prove truer in terms of how the novelisation presents the Marshmen than the poem’s author First Decider Yanek Pitrus presumably knew.

   The prologue also describes the starliner’s crash-landing and subsequent week (10), and the sense of dread that shrouds Alzarius is merely heightened. There’s something of the Hinchcliffe about the wholesale employment off horror tropes like those who venture beyond the ship never returning (11), their last contact nothing but a ‘distress call’ (12). When the Marshmen finally come to the starliner, the reader is privy to few details – they appear ‘from nowhere’, ‘lumbering’ towards their target (13) and, when the killing begins, the time-honoured TV Who tradition, admittedly one not restricted to the Hammereque Hinchcliffe years, of only detailing the attackers’ extremities (14) rears its head.

    Once the Marshmen, later in the story, make a full appearance, Smith uses his freedom from the restrictions of 1980 BBC TV to do more than recreate the tics of 1970s Who. Though there’s still plenty of hands dragging people underwater (15), the Marshmen also demonstrate a ‘bestial ferocity’ (16) not clear onscreen, for example when Yenik is by the creatures ‘leaping up out of the water around him, screaming, landing on him and dragging him under’ (17). The marshfruit spiders are similarly more the-stuff-of-nightmares: Smith takes the opportunity to add the tactile horror of their ‘mossy-soft body pressed against [Romana’s] cheek (18) to the visuals; provides shock appearances, as when one crawls from K9’s severed neck onto the Doctor’s hand (19); and, mirroring Yenik’s being pulled into the marsh under the weight of three Marshmen, offers the image of Romana’s prone body disappearing under ‘an undulating mass of black animosity’ (18).

    Smith also uses the novelisation to double down on his and Bidmead’s theme, as spelt out by Shannon Sullivan, of ‘evolution’ (21) or, more precisely, adaptation to environment. The emergence of the Marshmen from the marsh is likened to ‘beetles coming out of pupation’, with them needing ‘time to acclimatise themselves, adjusting their physiology to fit into this new, gaseous environment’ (22), and there’s a later glimpse of them doing similar when they encounter the starliner, their feet flattening due to the smooth floors (23). A similar process is used to explain the Marshchild’s encounter with Dexeter, ‘developing […] animal strength’ (24) when it needs to free itself from its bonds.

    That last bit kind of highlights how bizarre the presentation of evolution is in Full Circle, what with the way the creatures seem to adapt not only to environment but to specific situations. John Toon, in the Black Archive that tackles this story, really goes to town on this absurdity, stating Jack Graham’s stance that that the Marshmen adapt to ‘the ecological niche of the Starliner’ (25) is ‘utterly baseless’ as they’re ‘already of a size and shape to live comfortably in the Starliner’ (26). The foot-flattening suggests Andrew Smith might not share John Toon’s view.

[To be fair, I’m also flummoxed by the details of the Marshmen in this novelisation. I’d always assumed that the spiders hatch from the marshfruit then enter the nearby marsh and sort of pupate into the Marshmen. I’d never really thought about it before but the presence of the Marshchild makes this clearly nonsense and actually, as the novelisation makes all the clearer by mentioning the Marshmen previously living ‘under the marsh’, the Marshmen have been merrily pottering about underwater, living their lives, before mistfall for some reason draws them up out of the depths. How they appear is exactly as they were in the liquid environment, hence at least one of them being a child. Quite what this means the role of the spiders is is beyond me.]

    The novelisation hints at several ways the starliner might have caused the Marshmen to adapt the way they have. The first is the simplest, and the one that I think John Toon is actually specifically dismissing, which is that the ‘sterile environment of the starliner’ (27), its isolation from the natural world of Alzarius, transforms the Marshmen into the things for which it has been designed. There’s even one strikingly bland sentence that I think serves to suggest this affects their manner as well as their physiognomy – ‘The three great men walked purposefully along the gleamingly immaculate starliner passageway’ (28); the almost indescribable blandness of the ‘three great men’ of Alzarius perfectly matches the almost indescribable blandness of ‘the gleamingly immaculate’ starliner.

    In the novelisation, however, and not just because John Toon finds the idea baseless, this can’t be enough. Survey teams have come to the planet before, died and left space vessels lying about for any old Marshman to adapt to. They’ve simply been ignored to the point of decay. The starliner is described as both a ‘colony-class ship’ (29), exactly as on TV, as a ‘commercial pleasure-liner’ (30), with the presence on board in the prologue of ‘a lawyer’ (31) suggesting the latter is at least its current use. It is also, judging by its ‘staggeringly large nose’ (32), ‘large [..] boarding door’ (33) and ‘Large emergency escape portals’ (34), quite large, like an environment to itself designed to be lived in for longer periods of time.

    Even that, though, doesn’t have to be the whole of what’s caused the Marshmen’s transformation. There’s also the hint the ship itself has forced the transformation through its computer – the three Deciders are said to each have ‘a bio-link with the computer’ which monitors their ‘heart beat [sic], respiration and other vital functions’ (35), which might mean they had to become something the computer could recognise in order to take over the starliner. And then there are the manuals about which they’re so obsessed. John Toon describes this as the ‘genetic code’ (36) left behind by the starliner’s earlier inhabitants – it is at least part of the base for the Marshmen’s metamorphosis once aboard. In fact as society build from obeisance to a computer and some technical manuals could be reason equal to the sterility of life aboard the starliner for the staggeringly bland sentence quoted in the paragraph two above – both people and environment are so bland because both reflect the sterility of their guiding influence.

    Finally, there’s the manner in which the Alzarians have honed life aboard the starliner. Though the computer has seemingly dictated the choice of three leaders, the crew in the prologue feature a commander, sub-commander and pilot (37) rather than Deciders. There’s also no evidence of an Elite or Norms in the prologue. It seems reasonable then that the whole ‘classification of citizens at birth’ by ‘Encephalographic scans’ which dictate the education accessible to different strata of the population (38) is an Alzarian rather than a Terradonian invention, one by which they have ossified their development, which might explain just as well as the sterility of life aboard the starliner or the centrality of a computer and some technical manuals to their culture the staggeringly bland sentence &c, &c.

    Furthermore, the purpose of classification, possibly according to the omniscient narrator, more likely from the perspective of the outlers, is stated as making ‘things identifiable, […] tangible and thus less frightening’ (39), with the implication that, without it, more people would reject the rule of the Deciders. Similar, therefore, are the legends around mistfall, explicitly perpetuated ‘to maintain control’ (40) and labelled by the Doctor as ‘Government by myth-management’ (41). John Toon likens the situation to that of ‘the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm’ (42), not just corrupted by their newfound trappings but also destined to do nothing more than become what they’ve replaced. Full Circle presents history as a repeating cycle.

    There’s a memorable moment when Keara, attacked by the Marshmen, ‘almost exactly [mimics] the Marshchild when faced with Omril and the other citizens earlier’ (43), and it’s tempting to read this as a comment on how little the Alzarians have changed. However, while watching that earlier attack, the Doctor is ‘reminded of the time he […] witnessed the murder of a 'witch' in England on seventeenth-century Earth’ (44). That could be read as an even more thorough reiteration of the cycle of history, of how nothing ever changes anywhere throughout all of history but, what with this not even taking place in the same universe, it seems likely this is meant more as a commentary on the universality of becoming the victim of a mob.

    The novelisation, in fact, hints that, though it’s taken four thousand generations (45), the starliner’s society might be breaking the cycle even under its own steam. Varsh’s group of outlers are the first ‘to have survived for so long’ (46), suggesting the Alzarians, having adapted so fully to life aboard the starliner, are becoming more versatile. Similar is the oddly ‘legendary’ nature of Decider Draith’s ‘fitness’ (47) while he chases Adric through the forest. Is he, like the outlers, better adapted to life beyond the ship than his predecessors? Was his, at least to Decider Nefred’s eyes, overly close connection with the scientist Dexeter also a sign he was hoping to take Alzarian society beyond the confines they had stuck within for so many generations?

    How significant any of this might be is massively complicated by another addition Smith makes. After the Marshmen have been expelled from the starliner, it becomes suddenly apparent that there’s an awful lot more going on in their heads than had been apparent both onscreen and up to that point in the novelisation. Not only are they all ‘joined in mental empathy’ (45), explaining how they act in concert, but they’re pursuing a ‘philosophy’ (46), to maintain the planet’s ‘purity from off-world corruption’ (47). It’s all a bit BNP and great replacement theory – they think of themselves as ‘the real people of Alzarius’ and those in the starliner as ‘non-people’ (48), infected by off-world ‘corruption’ (49), ‘Like, but unlike’, who’ll ‘spread across Alzarius’ and make it foreign (50).

    In this light, the novelisation’s sympathies feel worryingly as if they lie with the Marshmen. When Romana joined the big ‘mindshare’, she ‘had understood’ the ‘cause’, judging those who pursued it ‘not evil’ and ‘not monsters’ (51). There’d be good reason to doubt that verdict – the information comes via the Marshleader and Romana was clearly under substantial influence at the time – but her feeling at the end that she’s forgotten something important (52), something that ‘she should explain […] to her friends’ [italics mine], suggests she truly did, and even in her right mind would, sympathise. On top of this, there’s the Marshleader’s regret that ‘maintaining […] beauty always’ requires ‘the taking of lives’ (53). Admittedly, its climax in the hollow-sounding lament ‘It is so very sad’ suggests a degree of insincerity. However, it’s reminiscent of the Marshchild’s earlier ‘fighting the animal […] inside it’ (54) after it grew stronger to free itself and save its life. As with the child, the novelisation is clarifying that the Marshmen don’t ‘want to act this way’ but are forced to by the threat they face. All those attacks, all that violence and killing, it’s all the fault of those non-people who didn’t start it.

    Before deciding that’s all Full Circle has to say, whether Andrew Smith intended it or not, there’s a little hope. Rather than view all this as a sorry excuse for the Marshmen’s actions, it’s just possible to read their actions as involuntary. The Marshchild only goes feral when trapped and at specific threat of death – and doesn’t do so when attacked by a mob in a corridor – and it only seems to be exercising its own will when it tries to calm down, an aim it fails to achieve; maybe all the Marshmen suffer a similar compulsion? Maybe, whatever goes through their heads, they have no choice but to act as they do and their ‘philosophy’ is just post-rationalising behaviour they could not control? Maybe Romana’s glimpsed understanding was in fact that the Marshmen are powerless but to attack?

    John Toon, who I’ve been very unfair to so far, offers the option of a ‘Gaian’ reading (55) backed up by the serial’s working title and an interview with Smith himself. This would make the Marshmen ‘antibodies’ (56) who are nothing more than a ‘tool’ used and orchestrated by the planet (57). It allows a less sinister reading of all the talk of ‘corruption’ and ‘purity’ and fits perfectly with their thoughts of serving the planet because ‘all should be nature’. It also explains why the Marshmen seeming only emerge on ‘this continent of Alzarius’ (58) – that’s where the infection is so that’s the only part of the planet that needs activate any antibodies.

    This all feels a long way now from the cycles of history the title Full Circle points toward, but, according to Based on the Popular Television Serial, Smith had a plan for that in a John Nathan-Turner-vetoed epilogue (59) – the starliner would eventually return to Alzarius. Would that have suggested, however far the Alzarians travel, they cannot escape their origins? Would it have suggested, however much the Marshmen fight corruption, they will always eventually be subsumed? Either’s pretty bleak. Besides which, I suspect the distinction’s meaningless. John Toon’s right to label this Animal Farm – the details of exactly what’s going on don’t really matter so much as the fact that every seeming conclusion ‘is doomed to’ lead back to ‘more of the same’ (60).

    Except possibly one. The book ends with Adric hiding in the Tardis until the possibility of being returned to the starliner seems well and truly impossible (61). For someone who’s spent the whole story trying to find a freer life – he’s introduced trying to escape the starliner by joining his brother Varsh’s outlers – this seems to be the one little triumph. As Romana puts it, Adric can look forward to a life of ‘not just freedom’ but ‘adventure’, ‘wonderment’ and ‘ultimately, a new and deeper wisdom’ (62).

    But Smith undermines that little ray of sunshine too. Romana’s reflections on life with the Doctor are spurred by her recall to Gallifrey, a summons that apparently cannot be ignored. Having served her apprenticeship with the Doctor, as Doctor Who and Warriors’ Gate put it, or done her duty then served her time, as it’s put here (63), she’s now doomed to ‘never again be able to experience the freedom she had so much enjoyed’ (64). Of course, Target readers already know she found a way to cheat that fate, by leaving behind the life she loved and her home universe. Mind you, as Target readers also already know, Adric’ll be leaving his universe soon enough so maybe the parallel being drawn is that he will escape the cycle just as Romana will.

    Except, and I promise this is my very last paragraph, that glimmer of light also gets undermined. As he and Romana discuss the inevitability of obeying Gallifrey’s recall, the Doctor reflects that ‘His days as a fugitive from the Time Lords were long behind him now’, that he lost his fight for freedom (65). There’s no way I can see for this to relate directly with Adric’s future, and it can’t erase Romana’s positive feelings about life on the Tardis, but it does cast a shadow. Even the Doctor’s life on board the Tardis is lived on a leash, presumably since his pat caught up with him at the end of Doctor Who and the War Games. Like Varsh’s outlers, who ran back to the starliner when mistfall came, Adric’s newfound freedom is painted from all sides as destined to end. Of course, Varsh found a different, even more doom-laden end to that problem (66)…