Chapter By Chapter> Doctor Who: The Rescue chapter 2

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.

In the previous chapter we met Vicki, whose last name is added in later stories, so for now we only know her as Vicki. We also met Bennett and learned of a mysterious person named Koquillion, who we know from the back of the book is the enemy of the story.

Now we turn our attention to the current travellers in the TARDIS. For those of you late to the party, the current team is:

• The Doctor, a mysterious man who owns the Time And Relative Dimensions In Space box that’s bigger on the inside and currently stuck in the form of an old British Police Call Box because of the show’s budget issues a faulty chameleon circuit. At the time the writers themselves hadn’t decided if he was a man from the future or another planet entirely. This is the very first incarnation of the Doctor, accept no retcons, and one of two times the Doctor made it to old age. Premature aging doesn’t count, Tennant fans!
• Barbara Wright, one of two school teachers who followed a mysterious student to a junkyard and got caught up space/time shenanigans. She’s a school teacher, and provided the show’s historical knowledge.
• Ian Chesterton, the other school teacher and basically the muscle of the group more or less. He’s a science teacher and provided the science info for the show. At least under the original plans. The teaching history and science stuff kind of went out the window early. You can read about the intended roles in the review of production notes for the early days of the show.

The final member is gone, and now the TARDIS is in a cave on the planet that Vicki and Bennett are on. We’re still in the first episode of the arc, “The Powerful Enemy”. Let’s see how our heroes are getting along.

We start by introducing the three members of the crew that are still here, mentioning later that Susan was on some farm with a boy named David. To people not aware of the old episodes that’s all that’s really needed to be known, that the Doctor’s granddaughter is no longer with them because she met someone special. They don’t have to go over the full events of “The Dalek Invasion Of Earth”, the previous story arc. That’s how you handle continuity.

Marter describes the TARDIS like it’s some mysterious temple, not just the insides (he literally compares the control console to an altar) but the police box exterior itself. He compares the dirty outside to the clean inside. One mistake, or at least that’s how I read it, is when he says the monitor is built into the wall. At that time the design of the console room had a big TV hanging off of a hanging spot on one wall. Putting it inside the wall wouldn’t happen until well into the Third Doctor’s period.

There are also artifacts of things that haven’t been set up by this time. The Doctor corrects Ian about the TARDIS “materializing” instead of “landing”, which wasn’t in the episode. He refers to them as humans, but as noted earlier the Doctor not being one hadn’t even been agreed to by the writers and also isn’t there. This at least could be hindsight for readers who already knew about the Doctor’s alien origins considering when this book came out. In 1987, we were already on the Sixth Doctor, and part of the Doctor’s attitude comes off like the Fourth Doctor or the Sixth in his questioning of why he liked humans so much. Now talking about them as young people, which he also does, is totally within the personality of the First Doctor.

Also, Marter adds a moment where Ian is upset they still aren’t back home on Earth. That’s not in the episode and by this point I’m not sure Ian and Barbara were unhappy being part of the crew. I’m sure they want to go home, and maybe he added the discussion as a reminder, but it wasn’t a factor in the episode.

Outside of discussing a hard landing/materialization, the chapter plays out like this scene from the episode. The Doctor is asleep as the TARDIS…shows up in the cave, the Doctor forgets that Susan is gone when he tells her to open the door, so Barbara gets him to show her how to do it…which by now you’d think both Ian and Barbara would know about at least. I don’t expect Ian to be able to fly the TARDIS through the space/time vortex or anything, but opening the door seems like something to let them in on. He sends them off to explore while he uses rock and soil samples to confirm if they’re were he thinks they are. As the confirmed Earthlings go out to have a look around the bug like alien on the cover makes his appearance. The episode was in black and white, so Marter and the cover artist have to guess on colors, but the choice isn’t too bad.

Who is he and what trouble does he bring the heroes? We’ll see as the story continues next time.