Monday, July 12, 2010

Target: The Ark In Space

The Ark in Space is an oddity in that I'm equally attached to the Target and screen versions - the Target made an enormous impression on me as a kid, with its fountains of pus and exploding heads, but the screen version, when I first saw it in 2005, held its own, and Ian Marter's reinterpretation began to seem unnecessarily baroque compared to its clean lines.

Marter seems terribly impressed by the details of the Ark, describing the technology of the Thirtieth Century in a welter of Capital Letters. Many items have longer names - the autoguard for example is an Organic Matter Detector Surveillance System. (It's pretty terrifying though, it's not just the old superimposed spark trick).

Harry, as you might expect, is the butt of the humour far less often. For example, he doesn't make the joke (?) about the Eumenes being one of our frigates: indeed it's him, and not the Doctor, who explains about parasitic wasps.

Vira is much colder towards the time travellers and remains suspicious of them for much longer - but she's more demonstrative towards Noah than she is on screen. Rogin is more friendly, but he's still not so familiar as to make the 'space technicians' union' joke.

Sarah's bravery in negotiating the conduit is emphasised: the claustrophobia is quite horrible, particularly when she has to traverse a transparent section of tube that goes through the Solar Stacks, and imagines the Wirrrn larvae (see below) coming bubbling up the tube behind her to engulf her.

She doesn't refuse the Doctor's help when she emerges, perhaps because she comes out 100ft above the floor and has to wait for him to build a cat's cradle with his scarf for her to jump into. The edge is taken off his goading of her by the fact that the reader is let in on the secret before it finishes.

She also stops the Doctor (after the brain visualisation scene) from stumbling towards the Wirrrn by rugby-tackling him.

The winning feature of the book is the horrific descriptions of the Wirrrn (so spelt) and their 'larvae', which aren't big grubs but sizzling, seething conglomerations of sticky nastiness which drip off things, seep through vents and lash out at people, notably Noah of course, ultimately leading to this triumph:
Then he reeled back with an appalling shriek into the airlock as, with a crack like a gigantic seed pod bursting, his whole head split open and a fountain of green froth erupted and ran sizzling down the radiation suit, burning deep trenches in the thick material.


The final escape from the Transport Vessel is very tense: 'at any moment a panel might open to reveal a Wirrrn, rearing up in triumph', which always nastily suggested that that had indeed happened on this reading.

There is no purpose-built transmat system on the Ark for getting to Earth - the Doctor offers to pop down in the TARDIS and rig up a suitable receiving station to which to connect the internal transmat. This is presumably to get round the criticisms about the sudden screen reveal of the transmat right at the end, which I've written about elsewhere and feel to be ill-founded. It's a pointless move anyway, because Marter's Sontaran Experiment novelisation has to come up with another reason for the presence of the silver spheres on Earth.

It's also more explicit that Vira is waiting for their return: on screen one gets the impression that, even though they don't come back, once a few more Arkers got defrosted the problem was easily solved. The book gives me the uneasy feeling that Vira felt let down by the non-return of the time travellers.

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