DOCTOR WHO
by David Whitaker
First published 12 November 1964*, which puts it between Dangerous Journey and Crisis (or parts 2 and 3 of Planet of Giants, if you're not mental).
*http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_in_an_Exciting_Adventure_with_the_Daleks
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"I felt happier with something in my hands. Puny though it was, it was better than nothing"
Ian on Susan: 'I wondered briefly what would
happen when she met a man she wanted to
marry and decided not to travel in the Tardis
with her grandfather any longer' - though, to be
fair, Whitaker's probably just been handling The
Dalek Invasion of Earth scripts
Ian feels Susan ‘had a healthy respect for [her]
relative’. What’s ‘healthy’ about respecting
such an aggressive and nasty old grandfather?
It's clearly inconceivable to Whitaker that even another planet might have different coupling norms: 'a young woman whose name was Dyoni. Susan told me she was to be married to Alydon'
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When Kristas suggests Barbara tell Ian how she feels, she explains that '"the man asks the woman if she is willing"'
Billy Fluffs
Ian: '"An atomic explosion of some sort."'
Doctor: '"Precisely. A gigantic one, too, and yet not an atomic or a hydrogen one as being experimented with on your planet.”'
So a non-atomic atomic explosion?
'I call them buildings for want of a better description but really the whole design was as if someone had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build a city'
images from Wikimedia
References I Didn't Get 2
References I Didn't Get 1
'we moved in this Indian file fashion'
According to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Indian_file: ‘Attested since the 1700s, because Native Americans traversed woods in this way’
Whitakerisms
'A warm fire and the supper my landlady would have waiting for me seemed as far away as New Zealand' Why New Zealand? Is this something from Ian’s past or just Whitaker's choice for the furthest away imaginable place?
'The first real shock was the immense size of the room [...] I was in a room about twenty feet in height and with the breadth and width of a middle-sized restaurant' Seems an oddly low-key analogy for the ‘immense’ room that caused such ‘shock’, especially the specification of its being ‘middle-sized’ – that’s almost deliberately underwhelming.
‘Concern and curiosity are valid feelings, but scepticism, my dear Chesterton [...] is a failing in your world’ Does that mean that his race has become so advanced through simply believing everything indiscriminately?
‘I offered her a cigarette. She refused and I lit one for myself’
‘I leant against the wall for a moment, wishing I had a cigarette’
‘I didn't have a cigarette and I was on my own’ - he seems unsure which is the worse predicament
‘I spent a little of my fury against one of the white trees and I hit it so hard my fist went deep into the trunk’ - disconcerting that only a ‘little’ anger results in ‘so hard’ a punch
‘the Doctor carried no armaments of any kind whatsoever on board. When Susan had mentioned this earlier [...] I had dismissed this as a lack of knowledge on her part. Obviously, I had thought then, the Doctor wouldn't want her meddling with guns or explosives’ - Did Londoners in 1964 never travel without an array of weaponry?
Ian's so relieved to handle a Dalek rod - ‘I felt happier with something in my hands. Puny though it was, it was better than nothing’
Susan on Ian: ‘You're a schoolmaster with a degree in science. You don't like being a teacher much, I gather’
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The Doctor on Ian: ‘a certain lack of early purpose’
Ian on Ian: ‘Secretly, I knew that I was beginning to enjoy what was happening to me. It was a fantastic wrench [...] yet already a part of me welcomed it. I'd enjoyed teaching but I knew it wasn't right. The job I'd failed to get at Donneby's was only one instance of a line of similar tries and failures to find the answer, not just to my future but to my own personality. That was all over and now I could work out the restless itch that had made me scratch my way through a dozen jobs. I could fill myself with excitement and adventure with the Doctor and then, when the day came for it to end and he returned me back again to Earth [...] I'd be happy to settle down to some ordinary work with no regrets’
‘It was an unpleasant business. I had to engineer the dead body back into the cabin before I could wrench open the door and then scramble over to reach the light switch’
‘I was in a new and unreliable world and it didn't help to think that the least trustworthy factor was the Doctor’
‘This sort of walking was deliberately quiet’
‘I spoke the last three words into the fog for the old man turned quickly and was swallowed up. I could hear his running footsteps’
‘I could hear him snarling at me’
‘The old man sobbed with anger and tore himself away’
When Ian says they shouldn’t go to the city - ‘I really thought he was going to hit me for a moment, his anger was so great’
‘a look of malevolent cunning and triumph suddenly mixed with concern that he had been caught out’
‘his eyes glinting with malicious amusement. “Perhaps one of her family found her and took her home.”'
When Ian points out that Barbara is hurt, the Doctor 'clicked his tongue in sympathy. It was the most insincere sound I've ever heard in my life'
When Barbara is revealed to be ill - 'To give him his due, he was immediately and genuinely concerned'
‘it's the other one I'm worried about. We must find her and get back to the Tardis’
When Ian stays to warn the Thals: ‘the Doctor, who was shaking his head from side to side. “Sentimentality, Chesterton. That's all it is. Still, I won't stop you”’
'Susan has told us the Thals are coming to the city. The Daleks will be occupied with them. With care, we ought to be able to slip through to the forest'
There’s a good reason they miss the danger signs on the atmospheric readings in the Tardis: '"But we haven't checked everything properly yet, Grandfather." "I don't care about that. I simply won't stand here and be subjected to insult from a young man whose intellect can't even stretch out to accept known and proved scientific fact. Open the doors!”'
'The Doctor rubbed his hands with glee and actually gave a little dance'
'You must forgive me, Chesterton; all of you must! What have I done with my stupid subterfuge?'
'he smiled at me in the most engaging fashion'
‘I hadn't any idea what was the matter with Barbara and the Doctor hadn't helped me one bit, although he was obviously driving at something’
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'Only one Captain of the ship, eh?'
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‘there was another look from the two brothers, one very similar to the one that Kristas wore. It was a look of strange excitement and I recognized it instantly and was glad. They knew they were fighting now, that it was possible to stand against what seemed to be the invincible and defeat it. For the fast time I felt that they were not simply the survivors of the planet Skaro, ekeing out a miserable half-existence and shutting their eyes to reality. They were the true heirs ready to earn their inheritance’
‘It's curious how everything we do I now see in terms of a struggle. I did not realize it before. The sun will be a worthy opponent’
‘“I have a strange feeling,” he whispered, careful not to arouse the others, “of wanting to do something about Elyon's death”’
‘something new was being born here, some new purpose in the Thals—yet it was a purpose that was as old as time itself’
‘There was a part of him that had lain dormant, as with all the Thals, that part that knows adversity and battles against it. I thought about this and other things and after a long silence turned to him to explain what was being born inside him, but he was asleep’
Ian starts trying to get the Thals to fight back before he realises he needs their help: 'before you go, have a talk with my friend the Doctor. We've already immobilized one of the Daleks. They aren't invincible, you know. We can work out some sort of plan to defeat them'
The Doctor talks to the Thals about the necessity of fighting – still before any mention of the fluid link: '"I'm no advocate of human conflict. I have seen splendid races destroyed; brilliant cultures lost beyond recall; marvellous cities in dust and rubble, where beauty and grace flourished. But terrible though it may be, one must sometimes commit an offence in order to stamp out the greater evil. I say to you, fight! Struggle to hold on to life. Protect the weakest of you and honour the eldest. Provide for the girls and the mothers. Teach the children." Alydon said, "All these things we mean to do." "That is precisely what you will fail to do," replied the Doctor, 'if you give in to the Daleks"'
Ian: ‘I have to go to the city or else my friends and I will die. I believe the same choice lies before you. But what I want to impress on you, Alydon, is that I am not asking you to sacrifice your people on our behalf. You must believe that'
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Dalek art: 'we came across what I can only describe as an example of Dalek sculpture. It was little more than a series of metal squares welded together, without any particular design or pattern, and since it had no attachments to the flooring or showed that it possessed any internal engines or served any purpose at all, we concluded it must be some form of bizarre decoration'
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Dalek farming: 'The light in it hurt my eyes and I screwed them up and saw that the entire area of the floor, except for two feet all round was taken up by a glass case under which I could see thousands of little green shoots. The heat in the room was terrific "Artificial sunlight," breathed Barbara. 'Don't you see, Ian that's how they grow things"'
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Dalek hydration: 'They must drink some of the water'
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‘My guess is that electricity wasn't just used to power the casing they wore or fire their guns. I think they needed power to help their hearts beat’
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‘what we saw inside. It was an evil, monstrous shape. There was one eye in the centre of a head without ears and with a nose so flattened and shapeless it was merely a bump on the face. The mouth was a short slit above the chin, more of a flap really, and on either side of the temples there were two more bumps with little slits in them and I heard the Doctor mutter that they must be the hearing parts. The skin was dark green and covered with a particularly repellent slime. I felt my stomach heaving and I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted blood. The Doctor viewed the thing with repugnance and wiped a hand over his brow’
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‘Chesterton, if I had any doubt at all about what we were contemplating, the sight of that disgusting thing has totally dispelled them. And they call the Thals mutations!’ - yes they do! As, in fact, do the Thals. They do so because they use the word 'mutations' to refer to things that have mutated, which the Thals have, rather than just things that are ugly.
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‘“the Thals battled on with a drug they managed to evolve, which warded off the poisoned air. They perfected it until it was able to cure them from any disease at all. As time went by, with each successive generation, they gradually came round in full circle. What we see now is the result of total mutation. They weren't unattractive people in the beginning, you know, but now they have eradicated ugliness and awkwardness from their bodies altogether.” He paused significantly. “And from their minds as well.” “But the Daleks haven't,” said Susan. “Precisely, my child”’
And the moral of the story: '"always search for the truth." He looked away from Alydon and weighed the fluid link in his hand. "Be straightforward," he went on. "It's surprising how much trouble can come from a small deception"'
Is it just me or is Whitaker sort of channelling Graham Greene for this (specifically The End of the Affair)? It’s not his natural prose style – Doctor Who and the Crusaders reads differently – so it’s possible, considering Doctor Who is written as a first-person narrative from Ian’s perspective, that it’s a choice based on Whitaker’s idea of his protagonist. Certainly, Ian’s cigarette habit makes him a more brooding and less wholesome figure than that played by William Russell, an impression reinforced by his blind and unpleasant responses to Barbara’s affection and concern, his need to work his frustration out through physical aggression and his obsession with weapons, bizarrely confused by the Doctor’s lack of arsenal and so very relieved to get his hands on a Dalek rod.
Ian is clearly a less content and settled character than on TV, ‘a schoolmaster’ who doesn’t ‘like being a teacher much’ with ‘a line of […] tries and failures to find the answer, not just to my future but to my own personality’ behind him. Instead, he is a man unusually ready to star in his own thriller, not just because he is quickly shown to be quick-thinking in an emergency and willing to do unpleasant but necessary tasks (traits shared by the more homely TV Ian) but because the ‘excitement and adventure’ satisfy a hollowness at the centre of his character. This Ian needs to travel with the Doctor before he will be able to ‘settle down to some ordinary work with no regrets’ whereas TV Ian already had and, from the moment he enters the Tardis, is ready for a return to the pint and the pub of home.
Balancing film-noir Ian is a Doctor who veers toward the sinister, described as ‘the least trustworthy factor’ in Ian’s ‘new and unreliable world’ (that’s the world that includes the Daleks). He is introduced using the motifs of a Victorian serial killer, his caped figure slipping in and out of the fog surrounding the confused Ian and Barbara, threateningly ‘snarling’ at the pair. He also, like Ian, betrays a frustration that leads easily to aggression. However, the nastiest adjectives are reserved for moments which also reveal traits more familiar from Hartnell’s portrayal, as when his ‘look of malevolent cunning’ gives way to a childish ‘concern that he had been caught out’ and his ‘malicious amusement’ is coupled with his actually telling the truth: ‘Perhaps one of her family found her and took her home’.
Overall, Whitaker chooses to balance the roughest edges of the Doctor from the pilot episode with the more charming figure he had become by the end of the first series rather than soften the whole character as Hartnell began to do from the moment 'An Unearthly Child' was rerecorded. This can be seen in his attitude to Barbara, making ‘the most insincere’ gesture of concern Ian has ever heard in response to her injuries in the opening scene but later showing ‘immediately and genuinely concerned’ on learning she is ill, even while he struggles to actually individually identify people, settling simply for ‘the other one’. He dismisses ‘sentimentality’, plots to use the Thals as a distraction and endangers everyone’s lives by petulantly failing to check the Tardis’s instruments in his rush to prove his point but he’s also possessed of childish glee, genuine remorse, great charm and emotional perception, easily identifying Barbara’s feelings for Ian.
The adjustments to the two central characters, even embroiling them in a conflict to be the ‘one Captain of the ship’, serve Whitaker’s portrayal of the Thals’ pacifism as thoroughly unnatural, something which involves them ‘shutting their eyes to reality’ whereas in fact ‘everything’ in life should properly be seen ‘in terms of a struggle’, even a hot day. The desire to fight is so natural it is a ‘a purpose […] as old as time itself’, something that has ‘lain dormant’ in the Thals rather than been expelled, and its awakening is portrayed as exclusively positive, allowing them to shift from mere ‘survivors’ to ‘true heirs’ of the planet. This conception of conflict as the universal natural state stands out especially because of other changes Whitaker has made to the televised story: Firstly, it is no longer possible that the Doctor and Ian are simply overegging the need to fight for their own ends as the begin encouraging the Thals to take on the Daleks before they realise they no longer have the fluid link; and secondly, the Daleks become less of a nihilistic monolith of horror than on TV, what with their art, farms, thirst and little beating hearts. Whether deliberately or not, Whitaker seems to be suggesting that there is something fundamentally wrong with you if you genuinely don’t want to fight.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only anti-progressive view Whitaker promotes, with descriptions of the Daleks and the Thals being used to suggest that appearance and moral behaviour are intertwined. On viewing the organic mutant inside the Dalek, Ian describes its shape as ‘evil’ and the Doctor takes it as confirmation that they are right to side with the Thals. Meanwhile, there is a suggestion that the Thals’ physical eradication of ‘ugliness’ removes such things ‘from their minds as well’. Either Whitaker is presenting the characters as innately prejudiced for instinctively siding with humanoids and distrusting anything which looks different – which basically makes them Daleks – or he’s presenting their justifications and somehow rational and so basically just saying ‘beware the ugly for they must be ugly inside too!’ (that’s not actually a quote but it is essentially exactly what Whitaker's just put in the Doctor’s mouth). I don’t know exactly what you’d label such a philosophy but I’m not sure it’s one that should be peddled to kids and, though there is an attempt to weld a pat moral on to the end of the story, it’s clearly not a theme that runs through the whole book in the same way as ‘you’re a wuss if you don’t like fighting’ and ‘kill the uglies’ (again, not actual quotes) are.
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Which is a shame really because this, from my memory anyway, probably one of the best Who novelisations of the lot, expanding the characters, adjusting the narrative to properly suit prose, and with genuinely well-written prose too, but it also seems to be one of the ones you'd least want your children to read.
Height Attack!!
'The Dalek machine was about four feet six inches in height'
'The average height of the female Thal was about five foot six, but Dyoni was just under six foot'
'Kristas [...] a huge man of nearly seven feet'
Miscellania
The Doctor describes himself as ‘from the next Universe but one’ and 'Cut off from our own planet and separated from it by a million, million years of your time'
Is this a hint at one of the early ideas for the motives for the Doctor’s travels?: 'For what can I offer you? Constant danger. No permanence. A life of drifting from place to place, searching perhaps for the ideal and never finding it. Mind you, if you wish to stay with us, Susan and I agree we would be glad of your company’
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The Doctor's very perceptive when it comes to human emotions, almost as if he's familiar with them: 'He glanced speculatively at Barbara's back” “You'd be surprised what happens when you learn to control your emotions, my friend. It's the quickest way to learn the truth” and “you don't want me to tell you. The whole key to life is discovering things for yourself'
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Susan’s errors seem less purposeful than on TV, not giving clues that she's from a more advanced civilisation or travels in time so much as just showing she's unfamiliar with Earth: 'She thought Australia was in the Atlantic Ocean', 'She thought the Spanish Armada was a castle' and 'she had written that Japan was a county in Scotland'
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The Doctor and Susan have travelled before: 'I shall have some of that Venusian Night Fish we discovered. I'm very glad I laid in a supply of that'
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The death of Antodus is a little less than the climax of his accumulating doubts than it was on TV: 'Antodus stumbled over his feet'
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The Doctor’s fluid link trick is played interestingly, with the point being how Ian is helpless rather than ignorant or gullible: 'It was all most convincing if you had an unsuspicious nature. I stood there, waiting patiently for the Doctor to work his trick. His play-acting obviously fooled Barbara because she touched his arm gently. I glanced across at Susan and her eyes seemed to fill her face. I thought it was a bit cruel of the old man to play on his own granddaughter's feelings, too [...] I just had to accept the situation he'd contrived. For all I knew he had pounds of mercury all over the Tardis but there were too many places he could hide it and far too many other things he could interfere with and use as excuses to make a journey down to the city'
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The glass Dalek: 'He was resting on a kind of dais and his casing was totally made of glass. Inside, I could see the same sort of repulsive creature that the Doctor and I had taken out of the machine and wrapped in the cloak. The Dalek looked totally evil, sitting on a tiny seat with two squat legs not quite reaching the floor. The head was large, and I shuddered at the inhuman bumps where the ears and nose would normally be and the ghastly slit for a mouth. One shrivelled little arm moved about restlessly and the dark-green skin glistened with the same oily substance that had revolted me before. 'Hurry, hurry,' I heard it say and it spoke with a different kind of voice altogether, not like the dull, lifeless monotone of its fellows but more of a dreadful squeaking sound that only just made the words intelligible. The Doctor stopped his struggling and lifted his head up. 'Stop this senseless slaughter,' he bellowed. I saw the glass Dalek jump to its feet and give a little dance of rage, its one arm waving furiously and banging the inside of the glass. 'Silence!' it squeaked. I swung the metal rod high over my head and down and the glass shattered. The thing inside gave the most terrifying screech that made my heart thump against my breast and I saw it slipping over the broken glass and lie wriggling on the floor'
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