Saturday, November 27, 2010

Target - Creature From The Pit

This is an example of a type of Target we'll be seeing more often from this point onwards - not so much an adaptation as a chance to rewrite the story so that either the plot, or the atmosphere, or both, are closer to some original intention.

I'm not really keen on David Fisher's style with its footnotes, and facetious Doctor, so it was a bit of a trial having to re-read this. Even the additional opening scene has Karela wondering why they bother throwing people into the Pit when they could just kill them. I can think of that sort of thing for myself, thank you very much.

There's no Theseus/Ariadne reference in the TARDIS scene.

The Doctor doesn't read the two books while he's hanging in the shaft - he just tries to recall what Tensing told him about climbing. When he falls, he lands on Doran, but he's already dead so it doesn't matter. The Creature is preceded by a metallic smell 'like old batteries'.

The narrator says that Terran and Chlorian astrology can't be compared because the zodiac of the latter has 17 houses. Zodiacs are divided into signs not houses - houses are a division of the heavens as seen from one particular place and time. 'I sir have studied the subject, you have not.'

The Creature weighs 385 tons, and comes from an exotic planet with beaches of powdered carbon and sweet sulphuric acid rain.

Chloris has four moons, and to see them all at once is lucky.

Sometimes Adrasta lies awake worrying that Karela is going to assassinate her. By the way, she has candles burning all night in her bedroom, and two Wolfweeds to guard her.

Erato is much more long-winded once he starts talking. Indeed the narrator compares his style to Macaulay at his worst. There's a fairly complete explanation of exactly how Adrasta got Erato into the pit in the first place.

K9 is able to destroy the bandits' metal because it consists mostly of copper ingots produced by Erato (and then stolen from the palace vaults) and Erato deliberately introduced a structural instability into the metal.

There's no final scene with the trade treaty - the book finishes on the 'lucky number' joke.

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