Terrance Dicks is particularly good at neat opening sentences: 'In a drab and featureless corridor, a drab and featureless man stood waiting before a shuttered hatch.'
When Leela and the Doctor leave the TARDIS, they find themselves on a flat roof - 'rather disappointingly'. What's he getting at I wonder?
When Leela first hears Cordo's story, she pictures the 'Gatherer' as a Xoanon-like monster.
Marn doesn't have the knowing manner she does on screen. She's no Krau Timmins - she's terribly impressed by the Gatherer and how hard he works, and when she hears about Kandor, she's 'shocked to her conformist core.'
In the lift, the Doctor thinks that a lift is a lift, anywhere in the galaxy.
He gets the Gatherer's measure:
A senior bureaucrat, he guessed, cunning and experienced, status-conscious, but without the strength to wield real power. There would be someone behind Gatherer Hade, someone far tougher, and far more intelligent.
Offering the Doctor a raspberry leaf is Marn's idea, though she looks at Hade for permission first. This whole scene has various rearrangements of the lines and actions seen on screen, most of which don't matter, though there's a glaring exception: the Doctor just says 'Humbug' when he leaves (as if an insult), without actually offering Hade one of the sweets so named. It's almost as if TD hadn't watched this scene!
On the way to the Correction Centre, Leela and Cordo encounter three citizens queuing up to be erased. Cordo takes it matter-of-factly, but Leela is appalled:
Life was cheap enough as far as she was concerned, and death in battle an everyday hazard, but this casual acceptance of planned extermination made her skin crawl.
Veet's efforts at cooking for the Others 'seldom met with much appreciation'.
For the corridor ambush, K9 hides behind an overhanging pipe, not round the corner of an intersection.
The Doctor wonders at first whether the revolution is worthwhile, if Leela's dead. But then he decides that 'A society that had driven someone like Cordo to climb on to that parapet deserved to be overthrown.'
The Collector's computer makes the same clever guess about the Sevateem, but refers to a 'degenerated, unsupported Earth colony' not a 'degenerate, unsupported Tellurian colony'. 'Degenerate' was better, I thought. Incidentally, 'zero zero five' corresponds to the Dewey Decimal code 005 for computer software and programming languages.
The background information on the Doctor is fuller: 'He appears to have a long history of anarchic violence and the causing of economic disruption. He is not commercially orientated'.
Leela in the steamer is like 'an orchid under glass'. An unusual simile for the unflowerlike Leelster.
Hade promises sexaphonic sound from the steaming, not duodecaphonic.
Marn accompanies the two guards who are sent to the PCM plant - she beats a retreat when she sees them get captured.
The Doctor explains to Leela that the Collector's safe is an old-fashioned bank manager's safe brought from Earth. I'd be surprised if Leela knew what a bank was, or a bank manager; I suspect the Doctor is explaining an apparent anachronism to us. I prefer it to be done a bit more subtly. When Leela gets knocked out, he says 'Why don't these girls ever listen to me?'
When Bisham and Mandrell leave the plant after accomplishing their mission, the technician Synge makes a remark to his mate Hakit about their surprising day. Hakit just nods, but then after all, he's always been 'a work-unit of few words'.
After the crowd throw the Gatherer off the roof, they're suddenly filled with remorse. Most of them are disgusted by Veet's encouragement to give the Collector the same treatment, and they shuffle off shamefacedly - all this in entire contrast to their happy yelling on screen. 'There was a general feeling things had got out of hand, gone a bit too far.' This really spoils the moment in my opinion. It's followed by a peculiar remark: 'there wasn't very much that they could do about it now. From the top of a thousand-metre building, it's a very long way down.'
In the final confrontation with the Collector, the Doctor declares that commercial imperialism is just as bad as military conquest, rather than posing a question. (Although the scene is much the same on the page and screen, I can't help mentioning here how much I like it: the Collector trying to recruit the Doctor, and the subversive line about having tried warfare but finding the exercise of economic power more effective. The recruitment bit suggests one of those 'Eps 1-2: Wtf is the Doctor up to' stories.)
4 Terrances for this adaptation - it successfully rescued the story from my unfairly low opinion of it.
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