Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Target: Planet of the Daleks

One of my all-time favourites, with a winning combination of 'companion alone', exciting geography and impressive Dalek civil engineering. That miles-high chimney is one of the coolest things Terry Nation ever invented. If he hadn't been a scriptwriter he could have made a fortune designing D&D modules.

Terrance Dicks doesn't bother trying to fit the start of the book to the end of The Space War. He back-references the Doctor sending a telepathic message, then collapsing, from the screen version of Frontier in Space.

Jo already knows where the log is, the Doctor doesn't tell her. As she walks through the jungle, dawn breaks suddenly 'as if someone had switched on a light.' Wester doesn't dribble juice on her hand, he has already coated it in curative paste when she wakes up, and he gives her the juice to drink.

Wester takes his furs off before smashing the bacteria canisters. And he doesn't become visible when he dies. I expect Terrance thought the effect wouldn't work on paper.

There's a little more connection between the location of the ice fissure, the Plain of Stones and the pools that they push the Daleks into. The bomb cache cave is at the edge of an area that looks like a quarry (!).

Rebec gets in the empty Dalek because Jo, although the logical choice on account of being small, 'was so obviously reluctant'.

The route to the surface for the Dalek army is a spiral ramp, not a 'power ramp'. When the Doctor and Jo say goodbye to Taron, he pops back out of the ship to throw them a couple of sets of anti-fungus protective gear, which they use to get back into the TARDIS.

Apropos of 'The Daleks are never defeated', there's a little digression about how Daleks don't recognise defeat, even when 'for any other life-form it would have been a day of total disaster'.

And finally: it's the Doctor who brings up the picture of Earth on the scanner, not Jo.

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