First published 17 February 1977*, between The Robots of Death Parts Three and Four

 *http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Seeds_of_Doom_(novelisation) 

[Best start off with a disclaimer: I’m one of those people who finds the violence in ‘The Seeds of Doom’ problematic and, as the book goes further on that front than the TV episodes, a lot of my reaction to the novelisation is reflective of that. Should you be one of the many who is perfectly comfortable with that aspect of the story, a lot of what I pick on can just as easily be read as Hinchcliffe improving on the tone of the story. Substitute positivity as you see fit.]

In trying to tease out the specific contribution of Hinchcliffe in the Hinchcliffe/Holmes partnership, Phil Sandifer turns to the Big Finish audio 'The Valley of Death' for answers. His verdict is that the producer brings ‘a reliance on standard tropes’, that he’s responsible for the tendency towards ‘skillful imitation’ as a starting point for so many of his era’s scripts. Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom offers a different answer.

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The TV episodes are already pretty grim. This, after all, is a story which sees the Doctor merrily declare, when told the odds are against him, that it’s alright because ‘I’ve got a gun’. Phil Sandifer observes in it ‘a genuinely shocking level of brutality’, and About Time 4 feels it makes ‘Everything […] more brutal than usual’. Hinchcliffe’s main concern in adapting it, though, seems to be to make sure this brutality really comes to the fore.

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Part of this is just, at first glance, a result of the prose style. This is bare bones stuff. Short sentences, lots of speech, very focused on telling the tale – in many ways, Hinchcliffe is outDicksing Dicks. That economy of words, though, always seems to result in a harsher world. When Sarah is recaptured in the woods around Harrison Chase’s house, for example, the guard on TV warns her: ‘One word out of you and you’re a dead little girl, understand? So near yet so far’. In the book, this becomes the rather more abrupt: ‘Make a sound, little girl, and you’re dead’. I’d argue the former is a lot less grim than the latter – the warning against uttering a word is rather less absolute than demanding no sound, the guard checks her understanding, putting the emphasis on his desire she follow his instructions over the threat of death, and his little gloat at the end makes him more cartoonish than the more brusque prose version. Even the detail on TV that he has a fellow guard with him is slightly less sinister than a solitary man grabbing and threatening a ‘little girl’ in the woods. And it’s not just the villains who get a harder edge to them. Take, for example, the moment when Stevenson, a sympathetic character, shoots ‘point blank at Scorby’s chest’. On TV, Stevenson does it from across the room and after delivering a warning; in the book, it’s a ‘lightning’ reaction to a ‘lowered’ pistol.

But the increased grimness goes beyond prose style. Like many a Target author, Hinchcliffe has to cut material in order to make a short book out of the TV episodes. The most notorious example of this, it seems, is the loss of much of Amelia Ducat’s involvement but more telling, I think, is how he handles events in the Antarctic. Winlett’s transformation into a Krynoid is raced over in favour of making space for the incidents that follow his transformation, which in practice means that the horror bits are raced over to get to the thriller bits, basically Scorby being a thug and there being a generic monster on the prowl.

The result is something quite unusual for a Doctor Who novelisation – lots of fight scenes. This doesn’t always go terribly well. For example, one of the Doctor and Sarah’s many escapes has Sarah pounce ‘like a tigress’ (she grabs Scorby’s arm) and gives the Doctor a ‘mule-like kick’ (he very precisely kicks a gun out of Scorby’s hand). Now, I’m no animal expert, but I associate a tigress with dominance and savagery rather than using all your strength to slightly change the angle at which a gun is aimed, nor do I associate a mule with skill and precision of purpose. I suppose the latter does at least convey a sense of muscular power.

Now, fight scenes don’t necessarily have to be grim, and there’s a hint of that as the Doctor employs a fantastical ‘Venusian neck lock’ to incapacitate Scorby. Unfortunately, this is accompanied by the plainer brutality of ‘a short, sharp twist’ to Scorby’s neck that results in ‘a nasty click’. Toby Hadoke, expressing surprise at his own acceptance of the violence in the TV episodes, asks whether ‘a thump delivered by Baker [is] any different to Pertwee hurling Terry Walsh about’ – I’d argue that that’s the difference right there, the detail of wrenching apart someone’s vertebrae.

It’s not, to be clear, that he’s especially concerned about being grim or gritty or even especially lurid, otherwise why would he include cartoonish Venusian fight moves, it’s just that he has a fascination with the physical experience of adventure stories, of giving the audience a feeling where Letts would have gone for a spectacle. Phil Sandifer explains this combination of the tangible and the fantastic better than I’m going to here, and finds himself continually circling back to the word ‘visceral’, easily the best word to describe it, but he attributes it to the Hinchcliffe era, and so as the result of the collaboration between Hinchcliffe, Robert Holmes, Tom Baker and, predominantly, Elisabeth Sladen – I think Hinchcliffe’s prose points to the ‘visceral’ as the ingredient he specifically brings to the table [I was going to make a joke about his visceral special sauce here because of the viscous connotations of visceral but I’ve not quoted the bit from Tardis Eruditorum 4 that would allow that to make sense].

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Hinchcliffe’s descriptions rely not on images but on sensation and movement. Moberly’s death, for instance, doesn’t just see him strangled but dwells on the ‘pressure’ on his neck, his ‘Gasping’ for breath and his vision first spinning, then blurring and finally going dark. Sarah gets several similar, if less severe, examples – when Scorby threatens her with a gun, she feels ‘her stomach turn over’; when Chase throttles her, ‘The blood pounded in her temples, her muscles began to tire, she couldn’t breathe’; and even when she’s rendered a ‘defenceless body’ tied up and headed for the composter, Hinchcliffe pens her passivity, not only ‘powerless to move’ but unable to ‘even scream’, in a way that focuses on the actions she’s prevented from taking. Beyond action scenes, he shows the same tendency when describing a Krynoid – it’s not just a plant that can ‘move […] and kill’ but also, somewhat superfluously but much more evocatively, ‘crush’.

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But this embrace of the visceral gets all too indiscriminate now Hinchcliffe is alone from his collaborators. Let’s look at how he handles the thump Toby Hadoke referred to. The novelisation actually cuts the punch itself, the Doctor’s dive on top of him having been enough to knock the chauffeur out, but the prose style still manages to render it more brutal than the atypically no-nonsense violence of the TV episode. Though it’s quite nice to learn that Tom Baker weighed ‘fifteen and a half stones’, it’s less nice to read how he ‘slammed’ it into someone, making them crumple ‘like a rag doll’.

Now, it’s admittedly harder to write a fight scene in prose than for TV without inadvertently appearing to relish in the grisly details, and it’s clear that that wasn’t actually Hinchcliffe’s aim from what he wouldn’t allow on TV, vetoing bone-crunching sounds and blood from the climax of this serial for example. However, he shows less sensitivity to attitudes towards violence with the Doctor’s plan to ‘administer a straight left’, which feels like a switch from narrative voice to internal thought. The ‘straight left’ makes the character seem far too practiced at fistfights while ‘administer’ makes him rather cold and sardonic about them, describing a punch as somehow medicinal or instructive – I guess the Doctor feels he’s teaching the chauffeur a lesson. Suddenly Hinchcliffe’s relish for the visceral has become the Doctor’s relish of violence.

This was a danger Tom Baker and Douglas Camfield had apparently seen coming. They decided, according to Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood, that the Doctor should be especially ‘scared and desperate’ in this story, which would explain his willingness to resort to more brutal methods than usual. Phil Sandifer essentially tells the same tale and actively attributes the decision to a concern about the level of violence. Whatever the specifics, they evidently sought a motive for the Doctor’s actions in this story, suggesting that they felt his actions here were unusual. Hinchcliffe, however, sees no problem writing the Doctor as an intergalactic Terry McCann, smart, good-hearted but more than happy to get a bit handy.

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Miles and Wood offer a different reason for Baker and Camfield’s little chat. They reckon it wasn’t so much the violence in the script that had exercised them as a concern that the Krynoid might be ‘potentially comical’. While the novelisation doesn’t have to deal with a repainted costume from 1971, it does reveal the concept to be not quite the perfect fit for gothic body horror the story assumes. Try as it might to present the plants as an ‘unearthly terror […] never to be forgotten’, the reliance on distinctly animal traits like ‘clawing tentacles’ rather gives the game away – plants, whether becoming one or being attacked by one, just aren’t a source of disquiet or disgust of a league with getting injected with insect larvae, infiltrated by shape-changing sucker-covered foetuses or used as parts to bring the dead back to life. ‘Where once a face had existed there was now a gnarled and twisted mass of bark’ is a frankly anticlimactic phrase in a horror story and ‘a solid mass of giant bamboo’ hardly constitutes a ‘nightmare’.

The gap between apparent and stated threat is even more pronounced when it comes to Harrison Chase. This is, let’s not forget, just a man who’s uncomfortable around others, likes plants and goes a bit nuts. Okay, it’s a bit stronger than that. He’s ‘physically repelled by people’ to the extent of wearing gloves whose ‘love of plant life’ extends to wishing to ‘commune with his beloved plants’, but basically he’s a rich, reclusive nutter who achieves his dream when he achieves his dream when the Krynoid’s ‘Prodding suckers explored his body and face’ and he begins ‘acting as a plant’ (though it’s never even clear whether this ‘communion’ is real or just in his head). None of that quite justifies the sense of ‘danger and evil’ the Doctor apparently picks up from him nor Sarah’s verdict that he ‘undoubtedly deserved to die’.

As I mentioned in the opening disclaimer, all these problems are easily strengths if you’re basically comfortable with ‘The Seeds of Doom’ on TV, and most people are. By extension, then, Hinchcliffe has actually crafted a rather good adaptation, one which accentuates the key thrills of the TV episodes, even down to the Doctor’s atypically brutal approach to matters. And it’s worth, at the end of this utterly uncalled attack on the novelisation for not being something it never aimed at, highlighting just how effective his prose is.

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At the end of chapter four, when the Antarctic base blows up, there’s a wonderful confluence of frenetic activity – the Doctor’s shouting at Sarah to get to safety and racing off back to the Base to rescue the already-dead Stevenson, Sarah’s crying out that he’s too late and sprinting for cover, the Krynoid’s pounding on the door of the Power Unit, desperate to get at the meat outside as the bomb ticks away behind it. Hinchcliffe throws the point of view around, first with Sarah, who is glancing in panic between the Doctor, who she knows is running towards an imminent explosion, the Power Unit right near her, which is rigged to explode any moment, and the ridge that offers the only chance of safety, and then to the Krynoid trapped inside the Unit, which is just starting to escape, back to Sarah still out in the open, and finally to the Doctor, who just has time to see his target before all his efforts become pointless, making the confusion even more frenetic. He doesn’t let the Doctor even finish saying Stevenson’s name, just to rub in his failure. It’s very simple and gloriously effective.

It’s just worryingly disproportionate when applied to an Avengers episode.