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.
Last time the Doctor learned who the enemy is while the others did things that weren’t in the episode.
What to say about Barbara that I didn’t say in the last novel? As the history teacher she could cover information duties when the TARDIS landed at some point in Earth’s past. That’s how the group functioned. Each had their own job. Ian could do the science, Barbara the history, the Doctor the sci-fi stuff, and Susan could pinch hit in each of those areas for the audience. Even though by this point the show had moved away from teaching anything and were just adventures in time and space, there are benefits to that setup, and I’m not sure the show ever really used them that well. The Doctor basically knows everything and the teachers were becoming redundant. I don’t know for certain if that’s why Ian and Barbara left the show at the same time or if the actors, William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, just decided they wanted to do other things.
At least by going together they both got to return to Earth, even if the Doctor was two years off. As we saw with Rose many decades later, they probably had some serious explaining to do. Maybe because I was an American kid in the 1980s when I finally saw that final episode of theirs, but I don’t see why they couldn’t have been returned to 1963 proper. Nothing stood out to be as being out of place. At any rate, it’s time to see what the characters are up to.
If you were waiting to see what Bennett was going to do to the Doctor you’ll have to wait until at least the next chapter. That makes the chapter ending cliffhanger make more sense, but it’s more stuff that I don’t recall from the episode. First we see things from Barbara’s perspective. Our trio make their way across the walls that the Doctor and Ian travelled earlier, but after seeing “Koquillion” ahead go through a door they felt it best not to go that way. While figuring out their next move, they spot the silver people again. Vicki goes into a panic and runs off. I’m not sure why. If she thinks they’re the same people that killed the other crew as Bennett told her, they don’t look like Koquillion. Unless she knows that’s not his real head I’m not sure why she would make that connection. She doesn’t even tell us that she did. She just sees them, panics, and runs off. Apparently she hasn’t figured out Bennett is full of crap yet.
As she runs off, Ian follows but Barbara is still watching the silver people. When they disappear she goes to find her friends, only they seem to have vanished. At one point she does hear a scream and Ian trying to help Vicki with something and then the voices are gone. Barbara, and the readers, doesn’t know what’s happened. That’s what the other half of the chapter is for. Along with the description of the cave and the luminescent streaks in the wall it sets up quite the eerie scene. This used to be a sci-fi horror show for kids after all.
We pull back a bit to find out what Barbara heard. Vicki fell into some kind of hole and Ian was struggling to get her out and themselves back up the cliff. It’s there we hear the scream, but it wasn’t Vicki or Ian, though they’re worried it was Barbara. We know it wasn’t but they also see the source of a sound Barbara also hears, like something dragging a heavy weight. It was some kind of worm creature. Ian thinks that it might live in the hole, covering up behind it and pulling bones out of the ground. With that mystery solved they go to find Barbara, who had also seen the worm while some kind of shutters close to block her way. Not sure how that happened. Now that the worm has gone, she goes looking for the others, with Ian saving her from falling into the same hole.
Again, not a scene from the episode, but Marter could be padding out the book. This arc is one of the shorter in episode count, only two. It would be the shortest one except for “Mission To The Unknown” the following season, at one episode. That’s become a lost episode, but there is an officially recognized fan recreation that has shown up on Saturday Night Showcase. Not sure if it was ever novelized, but it would need a lot of padding if it did. Next time we check back in with the Doctor and how the book describes his escape.
BW Media Spotlight 