Monday, February 28, 2011

Target: Earthshock

Our writer for this comparison is Ian Marter, and don't we know it: the cliff in the opening scene is 'skull-like', with circling vultures, the troopers are a lot more edgy and menacing, and Professor Kyle is very nervous - suspiciously so, we're led to think.

In the Doctor and Adric's first scene, 'I'll make more time' is explicitly delivered as a joke. But the tone soon turns dark, with the Doctor speaking in a cold whisper and then a mocking laugh. And he suspects that if Adric did go back to Terradon, he'd resume his 'criminal activities'. Tegan, by the way, is described during these scenes as wearing 'stylish shoes'.

Another sign of Marterland in the TARDIS materialisation noises: 'raucous shrieks', a 'grinding and scraping noise', 'hideous scraping noises' and the trumpeting elephants simile from Ribos.

The troopers' lasers charge with a whirring sound (like Marter's laser-spears in Ribos).

The androids are described as male and female respectively, and the troopers share this perception of them.

There's a Pip'n'Jane passive in the Cybermen scene: 'They must be destroyed at once,' says the leader. The Cybes react negatively to the mention of 'the planet of gold'.

Scott doesn't say 'I would like to do something to help' but is more emphatic: 'We insist on doing everything we can'.

Our attention is drawn to the escape pod airlock as soon as we see the freighter bridge. 'Mum's home again,' says Berger when the captain's about to arrive, intensifying the metaphor of the ship as unhappy family with naughty boy Ringway and his two cold, distant mothers. (Projection?)

Talking of disturbing metaphors, the emergence of the Cybermen is described as the freighter 'giving birth to the silver horror concealed in its bowels.' That is a more upsetting image than any of the exploding heads and fountains of pus in Marter's Ark in Space adaptation.

Crewmen called Vance and Buchanan, not Vance and Carson, are the first to die.

After Tegan borrows Professor Kyle's overalls, the Prof dons some ill-fitting clothes of Tegan's. (The purple outfit?) Kyle has an 'ample bosom' apparently.

When the Cyberman is holding Tegan by the arm, the Doctor, or more probably Ian Marter, has a powerful urge to smash its fingers.

The Doctor suggests to the Cybermen that they'd be shaken up by impact with the Earth, not crumpled. The 'well-prepared meal' is not part of the his invocation of emotional pleasures.

Left alone on the bridge with Adric and Berger, Briggs giggles that it's nice to have congenial company.

The renewed reanimation of the dormant Cybermen is apparently an accident - caused by the Cyberleader slamming the door to Cybercontrol when the Doctor goes to look inside.

Nyssa clears the corpses of Professor Kyle and the trooper, and the remains of the Cybermen, from the console room. By the way, all Cyberman deaths are accompanied by streams of oily fluid, jets of oily vapour, evil black bubbles, etc, and at one point the Cyberleader gives vent to a 'hot, rancid hiss'.

Tegan goes 'absolutely wild' when she hears that the freighter is going to hit Earth. The Cybermanhandling of Nyssa is brought forward into this scene, and the Doctor has to twist Tegan into a position where she can see it before she'll calm down.

Briggs raises her voice 'in a kind of swooping falsetto' when she gives the order to abandon ship.

The use of the gold badge to attack the Cybermen is given a bit more logic by the suggestion that the filings from it are being sucked into their chest units. The Doctor pockets the badge at the end, and the book finishes, with him leaning on the console, in an ellipsis...

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