Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter (or possibly multiple chapters for this one) of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

And we just finished reading the previous book. I wasn’t expecting it take almost a year to finish. That was a very long book and so is the next one in the series. I plan to return to it someday, but not for a while. It’s time to break out a new, much shorter book. And since we’re in licenced mode there are really only three short but still decent length series I can go with.

I do have the novelisations of the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, but they’re the junior novelizations because I didn’t know there was a full-sized one for both movies. You know, the good ones from the 1990s. I also have a novelisation of the game Ninja Gaiden, though I don’t know how accurate it is because I never finished the game. Maybe someday we’ll get to those, but no ninjas this round. Instead, we’re talking Time Lords.

I only have handful of Doctor Who episode novelisations. Having reviewed the lone standalone novel I own in a previous Chapter By Chapter, The Time Travellers, it’s time to go through the novelisations, but which episode should I chose? Most of mine are the Target produced books, not the US store but the UK book publisher. I do have one that was made by an American publisher as Tom Baker’s Doctor was gaining popularity in the US. That might be fun and it’s an episode I have yet to check out. Or I could go chronologically with the next episode after the standalone. Target didn’t release them in that order, so I could go the numbered order, or whatever book I’m in the mood for like I do with the Star Trek novels, or stay chronological like I do with the Star Wars novels. (Star Trek and chronology is something hard to pin down. Stardates are BS.) So I wasn’t really sure what to do next.

And then the official Classic YouTube channel gave me the answer. As if they knew what I was planning they dropped a combined arc that is the next book chronologically in my collection, which I was kind of hoping they would. I could have pointed to Tubi, but that would only work for my US readers as the UK readers would have to go to BBC’s I-Player and I don’t know what other countries needed to be pointed to. I’m not even sure the YouTube one works in multiple countries due to rights issues. Still, they dropped it and I can use it. The twenty-fifth book in the Chapter By Chapter review series is therefore….

Doctor Who: The Rescue

adapted by Ian Marter from the screenplay by David Whitaker

Yep, the show came up just in time for last Saturday night’s Showcase, This means we can compare the book to the original novel. The show was still giving each episode its own title, while “The Rescue” is the name of the arc consisting of two episodes: “The Powerful Enemy” and “Desperate Measures”. It features William Hartnell as the true First Doctor, with Ian and Barbara still his Companions. Carol Ann Ford had left the show, with Maureen O’Brien being introduced here as Vicki. As for the story, from the back of the book:

From his one previous visit the Doctor remembers the inhabitants of the planet Dido as a gentle, peace-loving people.

But when he returns, things have changed dramatically. It seems that the Didoi have brutally massacred the crew of the crashed spaceliner Astra. Even now they are threatening the lives of the sole survivors, Bennett and the orphan girl Vicki.

Why have the Didoi apparently turned against their peaceful natures? Can Bennett and Vicki survive until the rescue ship from Earth arrives? And who is the mysterious Koquillion?

I don’t know how the usual spoiler warning works for this one since I just posted the actual episode a couple of days ago. Plus it’s a very old episode, from the second season and the third serial of that season. There are some differences between the book and the episode, which is odd. Usually with novelizations they’re working from the last available version of the script. That means any changes between the latest and final drafts, or shooting the movie for whatever reason, or whatever ended up on the cutting room floor still being in the novel, are the result of necessity in getting the novel out in time to go along with the movie. If you can’t see the movie, the book might be cheaper or some people prefer the book. With no home video back then you could buy the book to recapture the story. There weren’t any home video releases until the 1990s according to the TARDIS Fan Wiki, but you’d think he could access the episode somehow or the final final script. It was still being rerun. It’s not one of the “lost episodes”. The episode aired in 1966 while the novelisation came out in 1988, the last Ian Marter would work on before his passing in 1986. I wonder why it took so long to get it out? Still, it will be interesting to note the changes and how well he describes what we already saw.

I don’t know if the book divides well between the two episodes, but I hope it does because the cliffhanger (quite literally if you remember with poor Ian) seems like a good place to stop. The book has fifteen chapters plus a prologue and epilogue. The epilogue is only a page and barely a quarter of a second page so I’ll review that with the final chapter, but the prologue is long enough to review on its own. That means we have sixteen installments so long as the chapters are all decent length. That will be a nice relief from the book I just read. It should take us into the new year, but only barely. I can handle that. So stop in next time for the prologue.