Malcolm Hulke again, telling another eco-tale where this time the environmentalists are the baddies.
The initial evacuation is shown through the experiences of one Shughie, who's come down from Glasgow for the Cup Final (either the Scottish Cup final was held in London that year, or he and his mates are big fans of English football). He gets offed by a dinosaur that he thinks is a whisky-induced hallucination.
The Doctor and Sarah's journey across London takes a lot more time - I think Hulke is enjoying the chance to do some Day of the Triffids atmosphere with empty shops, rotting food and looters. Sarah is delighted to see Woolworths again, much to the Doctor's exasperation.
10 million people were evacuated, not 8 million. The patrol leader does not fire a machine gun burst to intimidate the Doctor and Sarah. Instead he has a megaphone - 'Speaking through it gave him great authority,' remarks the narrator.
The Doctor's childish treatment of Gen Finch's question in their initial encounter is made a bit more reasonable by having the Doctor express his annoyance at Finch's rudeness.
Butler has a scar. Whitaker thinks that's a pity - because Whitaker is 'about as blatantly gay in the novelisation as is possible in a Target book'.
In the aircraft hangar, when the Doctor's working on his detector there are several very odd references to a small black knob which he 'keeps twiddling', asks the Brigadier if he's got any oil to lubricate it, and finally 'forgets about the troublesome black knob.' What can this mean?
The Doctor doesn't justify not having built a portable detector in the first place (on screen he does so on accuracy grounds). He just says he didn't think of it.
There's some good Hulkery in the dinosaur scenes - we're always shown the creature's POV (they want to munch large green leaves, they think the Houses of Parliament are other monsters, they are afraid of the flash on Sarah's camera because they think it's lightning).
Sarah taunts Butler about his scar, but it backfires because he tells her he got it from being a fireman, when he fell through a glass roof rescuing a child. Sarah feels bad (perhaps he made it up so she would!) but we're left wondering why she does it in the first place.
The climactic scene is different: some of the spaceship people are persuaded to let Whitaker pull the lever. There's no business about the Doctor having reversed the polarity, Grover and Whitaker disappear simply because they're closest to the device.
There's an epilogue where the Doctor answers Sarah's doubts about changing history by showing her a Biblical account of odd creatures which might have been from the future, or another planet. Much as I appreciate this familiar SF trope, it feels tacked on.
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