BW Media Spotlight

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.

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