Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter 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.
Christmas break is over and it’s time to get back to work. I just hope that as time goes on I don’t forget what was in the episode, since comparing it to the novelisation (that’s the British spelling and it’s a British book…in the US it’s a novelization) made years later and we’ve already seen has added moments is part of the point. It does seem strange to have these additions unless they were removed from the original episode or to pad out the book. There’s nothing about the changes in the novel and no explanations were at the TARDIS fandom wiki last time I looked at it.
Before the break, Vicki found Barbara while the Doctor and Ian were trying to find a way out. This is something that confuses me about the TARDIS beyond “we need the plot to happen a certain way”. A TARDIS doesn’t usually move like a regular ship. It CAN move in normal space (we see in the returned series that he once chased a car using it) but ordinarily it moves by dematerializing from one spot and rematerializing in another. It basically moves through the space/time vortex, the fifth and fourth dimensions respectively. In the first episode, Susan literally refers to space as the fifth dimension, so at least in the Whoniverse it kind of is. It’s never really clear if the TARDIS travels through space normally or not. How the ship moves is up for debate I guess.
My point is, even with the Doctor’s troubles piloting the ship, which he never admits too even in this incarnation, why can’t he just dematerialize out of the cave and rematerialize outside? Then they can go look for Barbara to make sure whatever it was they met didn’t kidnap, injure, or kill her? I know it’s because it helps find clues later to the villain’s plan, but we have seen the Doctor move the TARDIS short distances, even just turning it 30° around. Again, later version but this just seems like a waste of time trying to find a backdoor. Again, it’s so they can get clues to what’s really going on, which I won’t get into here for people just following the book. We also had an added scene of the TARDIS going through the rescue ship and ruining some dude’s chess game on the computer, so I really don’t follow what’s going on with how this thing gets from point A to point B. Anyway, enough of my own padding. Let’s get to the fifth chapter already.
As a reminder, the episode is not called “The Rescue”. That title went to episode 7 of “The Daleks”, the story that introduced…well, that should be obvious. These are the days when the episodes each had individual titles, before story arcs were how the serials were titled. This chapter bridges the gap between the cliffhanger (quite literally) ending of “The Powerful Enemy” and the resolution in “Desperate Measures”. There’s a part of me that would have liked to have seen the chapter end on a cliffhanger and continue the next chapter out of synergy, but the critic in me says that would have been really stupid. The story just stays with the Doctor and Ian between the end of “The Powerful Enemy” and the start of “Desperate Measures”, so from a reading perspective that would have been clunky and unnecessary. The critic is right. Either Ian Marter or the editor made the right decision.
So we have the complete scene of events. The Doctor and Ian are making their way along an ever shrinking ledge, the only way out of the cave at the moment. In the pit below is a creature who seems really hungry and our heroes are sure they’re on its menu. We know from the episode that it’s not the case, and Marter hides this fact pretty well without necessarily lying to the readers in the narration, but we’ll save that for a later chapter. Ian grabs a ring in the wall and accidentally sets off a trap. Two sets of blades block him off while the wall starts pushing him off the ledge. It doesn’t seem like a very tall ledge based on the episode, but there’s still the creature they think want to eat them. Using the Doctor’s coat over the blades, Ian manages to swing back over to the Doctor, and the two of them work to deactivate the trap so they can continue on their trip.
Marter takes advantage of not having the limits of the couch cushion budget the BBC gave classic Doctor Who. Not that a larger budget makes the show any better, as the Disney+ collaboration has shown. Instead of another set of blades, like in the episode, the actual wall moves Ian towards the edge of the pit. The description of the corroding path, with added darkness and the need of a flashlight (or “torch” if you’re British and this book is) sounds more scary than the set was able to give us, as is the monster at the bottom of the pit in how it’s described. The set and costume designs are now in the mind of the reader, and the author manages to describe things well enough for the atmosphere he’s going for that the show couldn’t match with the budget it had. The monster doesn’t come off as a dude in a costume dragging his legs behind him as he pulls himself by his arms.
So overall a good use of what he is and isn’t working with in setting up the scene, and bridging the two episodes was the right way to go. That puts us over the halfway mark of the arc, but just short of the halfway mark of the book. Next time we’ll see where that takes us.
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