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.
Here we are at the penultimate chapter of our novelisation, or novelization for us Americans. We needed two chapters last time to have two scenes not in the episode. I think this chapter is back to the actual episode.
Since I’m padding the intro…I wouldn’t mind having a TARDIS. I wouldn’t time travel because I fear so much about time travel. I’m not sure I’d go into space without assurances I could make it back to Earth. It would be cool to be able to take your house with you to the store. You could wheel the shopping cart into the kitchen and then bring it back to the store. When I was a kid I thought living in a mobile home (we call them RVs more often these days) would be cool because I could drive around and still be able to sleep in my own bed. I’m not sure where I’d park it, and while I do like watching RV shows that give us office space, storage space, and feel more like a luxury apartment than the ones I saw, I’d probably be too nervous to drive one of those things.
A TARDIS on the other hand practically drives itself…and somehow the Doctor still manages to have crash landings. I’m not sure it phases through objects live we’ve seen in this novel as an excuse to hold back the rescue ship…which the show didn’t need as it already had distance to travel as an excuse…but it holds more rooms. Provided you aren’t forced to eject rooms to be light enough, and I couldn’t tell you how that even works, it would be nice. No property taxes, no banks, and you could disguise it as a vending machine or something for some extra money. Yes, the most amazing vehicle in sci-fi and somehow I am the one who would very mundane in how I used it. Go figure? Anyway, let’s get back to the TARDIS because that’s where everyone who isn’t dead (I think) were headed for.
It’s really just the end of the episode, minus the silver people destroying the rescue beacon and the cliffhanger for the next serial, which is how the William Hartnell/First Doctor era operated at the time. I’m expecting at least the former in our final chapter and epilogue. Some of the dialog is different, hardly anything standing out. They’re minor changes at best for prose.
The Doctor awakens in the TARDIS. Ian and Barbara are confused how he got there, but Ian borrows the Doctor’s key to get in. (I guess they don’t have keys of their own. Actually, how many Companions have ever been shown to have their own key, even in the new eras? I think Clara had one to show she was leaving and giving it back, and I’m not even sure about that.) The problem is in the previous chapter we saw Ian, Barbara, and Vicki follow the silver people as they were carrying what they believe, and correctly so, to be the Doctor. They’re a lot more confused than if they found their way back to the TARDIS on their own and found him there, like the episode suggested happened.
The rest is what we saw in the episode. Ian and Barbara would like Vicki to join them, which the Doctor has also come up with on his own since Vicki doesn’t have anybody back on Earth. The Doctor tells Vicki the truth about Bennet being Koquillion and offers to take her along with them. While she thinks about it he goes back inside, confirming he had the same idea as the others, and then she comes in and accepts. Marter really sells the moment when she walks in. From her reaction to being inside the dimensionally transcendental space/time craft, realizing from their reaction that Ian and Barbara had the same reaction, and that here she’d be among people who had come to care about her, the text really sells the emotion of the scene without the visible acting cues that would be the same way the show would deliver these indications. It makes for a good scene as the TARDIS dematerializes from the cave. I liked this adaptation of the scene.
Next time we have one long chapter and a two page epilogue as we complete this adaptation of the episode. Do we need that much time, or is Marter just padding the novel out a bit more? Find out next time.
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