Thursday, December 16, 2010

Target - State of Decay

We see the opening scenes (and several others later) from Habris' point of view, which makes him a slightly more sympathetic character than he is on screen. Ivo's son Karl is positively keen to join the Selection.

The Doctor refers to the TARDIS as if it's alive, which always infuriates Romana (possibly because of the misunderstanding at the end of Horns of Nimon?) The green tinge of E-Space on the TARDIS scanner is 'slightly sinister'. It takes some time to travel to the unnamed planet once they've spotted it.

Once there, it's a pleasant spring day with a 'reassuring atmosphere of rural peace'. That's probably because in the book, we can't recognise Burnham Beeches as a location for horror films and awkward sex scenes in early George Orwell novels. It's the apparently hand-cultivated nature of the fields that prompts the Doctor to make the remark about opting for a semi-rural culture. The 'Astronomer Royal' is carrying a billhook, not a shovel.

Ivo says that the Lords protect them from 'the evil that stalks the night', not the Wasting.

Arriving at the rebel camp, the Doctor thinks for a moment that it's the ruins of a technological civilisation, before realising that it must be a dump. He says that he thinks 'technacothaka' means a museum of technology, but that he might have made it up. The outlaws have a different air from the peasants - alert and wolfish. There's no mention of the Wasting.

Marta (Mrs Ivo) ruffles Adric's hair when he puts the big jacket on.

The food the rebels found at the dump was preserved (I think we could have worked that out for ourselves). The Selection is for recruiting guards as well as those who 'serve the Lords'. Tarak refers to Zargo and Camilla by name, not as 'King' and 'Queen'. He gives the Doctor directions to the Tower.

During the bat attack, one gets tangled in Romana's hair. I was expecting a narratorial aside about this being a myth, but there isn't one - yet... The Doctor suspects that the purpose of the attack is to herd them towards the Tower.

Zargo and Camilla remind the Doctor of the King and Queen in a pack of cards. Excellent. We're told later that they move with an uncanny unison.

The cold meat on the buffet is undercooked - almost raw... Zargo explicitly says that he and Camilla came from Earth.

It is suggested that Aukon takes control of Adric at the selection by putting him into a trance - but the narrator doesn't quite commit himself.

When Camilla tells Zargo to be silent, it's 'suddenly clear that she was by far the strongest of the two.' The names are cited in the opposite order in the consonantal shift discussion. The Doctor says that the instrument banks and control panels from the Hydrax have been ripped out and dumped (presumably over at the technacothaka).

There are various minor changes to the conversation in the scout ship 'turret', notably that the Doctor adds 'Perhaps they thought they'd need it one day' to his explanation for why the instruments are still there. As he and Romana work their way down the ship, there are extra lines about what the various parts are: rocket vents, ignition chambers etc.

Aukon, encountered in the resting place, has a 'kind of holy exaltation' about him.

Ivo found out his son was dead when the body was dumped outside his door. Charming.

When the Doctor prepares to leave Tarak and Romana in the Tower, there's a lot of chat about how he can't ask Tarak to take that kind of risk. Tarak nobly insists. On his way back to the TARDIS, he hides from a bat, but it isn't necessary as it isn't interested. He speculates that, when Aukon isn't directing them, they're harmless; this gives the narrator the chance to tell us about real vampire bats being dangerous only to cattle.

K9 mentions that Earth is the Doctor's favourite planet before starting to list vampire legends. His line about fractional TARDIS displacements being easier in a smaller universe is the same in both versions, but isn't it great? One of my favourite bits of plausible DW science blah.

When the Doctor sees how well his Henry V speech is going down, he makes a mental note to 'pop back to Elizabethan London and tell young Will how well his speech had gone down.' The map is a sketch map drawn by the Doctor on one of Kalmar's manuals, not an illuminated manuscript.

It's not so much Adric's line about vampires not dying, but Romana's horrified reaction (to the implications, not the acting) that convince Aukon he's on side.

Habris expands on his speech about trying to help Karl - he got him taken on as a guard, but Karl was too rebellious, and Zargo had him killed. It still doesn't convince Ivo though.

The narrator carefully explains that two rebels helped K9 down off the throne when they evacuated the Tower.

The cuts between the Doctor on the ladder, the sacrifice and the escaping rebels are summed up as 'By now a number of things were happening more or less at once.' A very children's book touch, not something TD usually feels it necessary to do.

The villagers are all hiding inside their huts, which as the narrator remarks is a shame, because they miss seeing the flight of the scoutship.

K9 records Ivo's apologies, as well as his thanks. He has a very forgiving nature for an automaton.

It's well into the next day before the time travellers leave. Romana notes that Ivo and Kalmar have become joint leaders. K9 is using extra info from the Hydrax data banks to try and compute a way back into N-Space.

The Doctor follows his remark about a technological society by saying that there's a lot to be said for the simple life. Kalmar drily answers that they've had enough of that over the last thousand years. The Doctor doesn't raise his hopes re escaping E-Space: 'My advice is to make the best of it here. It's not such a bad planet, now you have it to yourselves.'

Adric cheekily says that it could take the Doctor a long time to get him back home. There's an extra TARDIS interior scene here, where Romana asks where they're going now, and the Doctor says he'll think of somewhere.

Kalmar's final thought as the TARDIS departs is that the Doctor, pleasant fellow as he is, is a little too erratic for a real scientist.

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