So, how gleeful is Dicks to be killing Pertwee off? Not that gleeful to be honest. If anything, it’s quite portentous and dignified. ‘I’ve got a feeling I’m about to be faced with the worst threat, the greatest danger, of my entire life’ he says, about a third of the way through, and so it turns out. But it doesn’t feel like it. There’s certainly some nice details, such as the fact his responsibility for the death of Clegg early on is what forces him into the adventure or, towards the end, when he knows it’s all over for both the story and him and ‘stumbled away’, weakened but keen not ‘to spend whatever time was left to him’ watching the villain of the piece die.

 

The problem is that the reasons why this is such a terrible threat and danger are really rather sketchy. There’s a moment, approaching the final confrontation, that hints it might bring everything into focus – ‘What is it that you most fear?’ K’anpo asks, and the Doctor sighs, seemingly understanding what it is he must do thanks to this question. What he does is return the crystal to the cave of the Great One, which is odd when a moment before he viewed the suggestion of returning it as a test, as if it was the most clearly unthinkable thing to do in both his and K’anpo’s opinions.

 

Assuming the Doctor’s just wrong about K’anpo’s intent, or that I’ve misread the implication of the ‘test’, that still doesn’t explain why returning it is the solution. There’s no hint that anyone knows he’s wrong to predict that giving the Great One the crystal will firm up the spiders’ tyrannical rule on Metebelis Three and allow them to extend it to other worlds.

 

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In this case, the novelisation has made murky something that was, if not quite clear, clearer on TV. Paul Cornell seizes on the Doctor’s ‘greed for knowledge’ (a line absent from the book) to read the Doctor’s demise as a verdict on this incarnation’s ego. Phil Sandifer concurs, citing the same line and the same Pertwee tics as evidence that his ego’s the problem, and explains the ‘worst fear’ through the scene where the Great One makes the Doctor ‘march like a puppet on a string’ (a sequence absent from the book).

 

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Where does this leave the book-reader trying to fathom why it is the right move to give the Great One the crystal? There are still hints that it’s about greed and ego. The crystal seems to exert some power over the owner – Tommy for example seems loathe to give it up once it gets to work on his mind – and the suggestion might be that the Doctor has fallen to some similar selfish instinct. Willingly relinquishing his ownership sets him free. Thing is, far from being possessive, the Doctor ‘never really investigated [the crystal] properly’ and then fobbed it off on Jo.

 

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Which leaves ego. Maybe that failure to properly engage with the crystal is the important point, a sign that the Doctor has become intellectually lazy, too old and set in his ways. Going back to the moment when he decides to return the crystal, it’s shortly preceded by K’anpo describing ‘The moment of death’ as ‘The moment I have been waiting for’. As a Time Lord, it is not actual death K’anpo embraces but regeneration, the act of becoming ‘a new man’, and the Doctor’s unwillingness to give up his current self is the problem. Unfortunately, the Doctor is very much not on a journey to renew himself; Dicks makes a point of emphasising how much he holds on to his old self even in his last moments: ‘the Doctor’s scientific curiosity […] had been a dominant characteristic all his life and it did not abandon him at the end’. Yes, he does willingly walk into a fatal situation, die and become a new man but he’s not in any way striving to become that new man.

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drwhonovels talks about how the novelisations could vary from the TV episodes because they were based on ‘pre-rehearsal scripts’ and it might be simply that, where other adaptations have gained, Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders is just based on one too early a draft. However, the themes Cornell and Sandifer identified are well-defined here, they’re just not focused on the Doctor.

 

The dangers of greed, not exactly for knowledge but for mental capacity, are outlined right at the start when Clegg, appalled at the Brigadier’s suggestion he should use his powers in his show, bemoans that it would cause him to ‘lose [his] sanity’ and he sees that as ‘a poor exchange’. This trade-off is exactly the trap into which the Great One is later seen to have fallen, her ‘powers’ and ‘towering intelligence’ leaving her mad. And as her greed to be ‘Ruler of the entire Universe’ ultimately leads her to ‘explode [her] mind’, so does her ego, unable to heed the Doctor’s warning because she can ‘do no wrong’.

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Lupton shares this arrogance. His ambition led him to ignore ‘the warnings’ around ‘the Rituals of Power’ and his self-belief eventually leads him to lose ‘all sense of self-preservation’, overestimating his position until he, like the Great One, is reduced to nothing but babble followed by an avoidable death. Pleasingly, his desire for power is rather more sympathetic than hers – discarded by his firm after 25 years and then flattened by his former employers when he sought to manage on his own. But this simply serves to highlight how he will not accept another, better path, instead returning first to the job he’d lost and, after that failed, to the people who ‘broke’ him.

 

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In this, he’s contrasted with Tommy, reborn by the crystal and now with a mind ‘as new and fresh as a child’s’, and Mike Yates, who is looking to rebuild himself after the personal and professional crisis of ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’. Both sought ‘peace of mind’ rather than ‘power’ and both ‘protected’ from the spiders’ blue crystal-derived power. Meanwhile Lupton is destroyed by it, ‘a shattered lump’. His repeated refusal to be reborn leads him to be figuratively consumed by ‘hatred and bitterness’.

 

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There are even hints of these themes on Metebelis Three. The spiders are religious in their deference to the Great One, indeed Lupton even labels them ‘superstitious’, so much so that they basically surrender to the Doctor when he’s at their mercy. This allows him to return the crystal and destroys them. The elders of the human-descendants, meanwhile, at least if Sabor is anything to go by, resist such deference. He recognises that his age and experience has strangled his capacity to bring change and sees his people’s ‘only hope’ in his son. To be fair, it does sound like his son is already effectively leader anyway but then the same was true of the queens of the spiders and they still submitted to the will of the Great One.

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It seems unlikely to me that whatever scripts Dicks was working from were sufficiently developed to have all these parallels with the Doctor’s spiritual journey but too underdeveloped to actually feature the Doctor’s spiritual journey. That would almost suggest that, for Pertwee’s final tale, Sloman accidentally came up with a script that was all about the need to cast the self off and submit to rebirth and then saw the opportunity to tie the dying Doctor into those themes only come the third or fourth draft.

 

Which means, to an extent at least, Dicks has chosen to discard the lines and scenes Cornell and Sandifer cite. Why? I guess it’s possible he thought they were a bit too on the nose and he seized the chance to tune down Letts’s pursuit of thematic resonance and character development. It could be that he dislikes the idea of articulating any criticism of the Pertwee Doctor for fear it’ll rub off on all the other Doctors, especially in an out-of-sequence prose adaptation. Perhaps more plausibly, he could have viewed the strength of those lines and scenes as lying in Pertwee’s performance and not seen the point in reproducing them on the page.

 

A more interesting take would be to go back to the assumption I opened with here, coming off the back of a tenuous reading of Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons. What if Dicks is just sticking the knife into Pertwee’s Doctor? The novelisation keeps all the ways that the TV episodes stress the need for rebirth bar the Doctor’s own appreciation of the fact. Understanding, that’s for the next guy. Instead, Pertwee resolutely remains himself to the end. Maybe that is more dignified but it looks more like a man who’s clung on too long and been left behind by his surroundings.

 

Or maybe Dicks just did think reproducing the entire multi-vehicle chase in prose was more important.