The pictures, by the way, are all based on shots from the screen version. And they're often in the wrong places: for example there's a picture of a tray-bearing Dalek meeting Susan and Ian in the detention cell in the middle of the chapter where the Thals attack the city.
Also of course, for many years this was where the Target Doctor Who canon began: the first few chapters are an alternative account to episode 1 of Unearthly Child. But they have the exact same purpose: to get Ian and Barbara into the TARDIS and away from Earth, 1963.
Ian is a teacher but is looking for a job as a rocket scientist; he wears sports jackets, smokes and is rather the John Wyndham hero. Plain-speaking, decent, stubborn and upper middle class.
Barbara was a secretary with supply teaching experience who branched out into personal tuition. 'Extra cramming in special subjects.' She's proud and spends most of the book taking offence at Ian's presumptuous treatment of her.
She found herself employed at £20 pw (excellent money in 1963) by a doctor, to give his granddaughter, Susan English, a working knowledge of English history. One foggy night she insists on driving her pupil home - to Barnes Common....
And so Ian, who has just driven to Reigate and back for an interview, sees Barbara come staggering out of the fog after crashing into a lorry. Susan has vanished (into the Tardis - always so printed) and the Doctor is still on the scene of the crash because he's looking for her TARDIS key, which she's dropped.
His and Ian's first encounter is basically a translation of the AUC junkyard scene into this setting. Ian wants to know where Susan is, the Doctor won't tell him; the Doctor wants to get rid of Ian so he can leave in the TARDIS, and this makes Ian suspicious. The Doctor, by the way, has a supply of 'everlasting matches' which intrigue Ian.
Ian is not however led into the TARDIS by hearing Susan speak: he wants to use the 'police box' to phone the police. The Doctor tricks him and Barbara into walking away, but they have second thoughts and turn round to see him opening the police box doors. A fierce radiance shining from within gives the game away, and it's only then that Susan calls out 'Grandfather?' Ian and Barbara push past the Doctor and into the TARDIS; she faints, and he hits his head, but has time to be amazed by the size of the TARDIS control room. Absolutely characteristically, he compares it to a middle-sized restaurant, with room for at least fifty tables.
It isn't till Ian wakes up from his bump on the head that we get the Doctor's 'wanderers' speech, and then Barbara's exposition about how she came to know Susan. This is followed by a remix of the science lab conversation from AUC: Susan has the same mixture of extraordinary special knowledge and odd cultural lacunae, memorably thinking that 'Japan was a county in Scotland.'
The Tardis is much like the TARDIS, roundels and all, but has a lot of other wonderful paraphernalia, like corridors made up of pillars of coloured glass.
The Doctor is characterised largely through Ian's antagonistic exchanges with him: devious, powerful, intense, superior ('so superior I felt like kicking him') but shedding twenty years when he smiles.
The arrival on Skaro is a rehash of the early part of AUC ep 2, the speech about birds wheeling in another sky being transferred to when they're actually out on the surface.
From this point on, we converge much more closely with the screen version. There's still variation in detail: for example the TARDIS has an oil-and-water massage shower, and a shaving/haircutting machine, which gives Ian 'as good a barbering as I would have received at Simpson's in Piccadilly.' The food machine is there, too, though Ian complains of the hardness of the eggs, not the saltiness of the bacon.
Before Ian falls asleep - the TARDIS has 6 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms - he reflects on how perhaps travelling with the Doctor will deal with the restless search for fulfilment that's been plaguing him these last few years.
Next day, the 'That's not his name. Who is he? Doctor who?' line from AUC resurfaces, modified to 'Perhaps that's what we ought to call him - "Doctor Who"?'
Ian gives us an excellent description of the city: 'as if someone had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build a city and then someone else had come along and pushed thousands and thousands of tons of ashy soil all around it.' There's some extra suspense during their exploration of it - movements seen in the background and so on. And the Doctor is much more noticeably ill.
Our first encounter with the Daleks - 'a round metal thing about three feet in height, like an upturned beaker with a domed top. It had dull metal flanges all round it and three different kinds of rods sticking out in front' - is necessarily through Ian and not Barbara. The Daleks are at first less explicitly aggressive, demanding to know the cause of the Doctor's illness and saying 'You will all rest in a compartment we shall show you.'
Ian tries to run away because the Doctor has told him to go to the TARDIS and bring back his 'stimulizer' pills. He doesn't do the 'my legs' bit till he wakes up in the cell.
The Doctor is not taken out and interrogated: we learn about the Thals from Susan's report of the conversation she had with the Daleks while they were being brought to the cell. A Dalek then enters and exposits about the time travellers not having any anti-radiation drugs; this leads to a discussion of the capsules they found outside the TARDIS, to which the Dalek listens 'patiently' and then leaves - presumably to inform its colleagues, because it then returns and orders Susan to start walking. The stuff about the extent of the Thals' mutations is inserted here.
Ian then conks out from radiation sickness, and when he recovers, Susan has returned and recounts her trip to the TARDIS. Ian is deeply impressed by her courage, and indeed you don't have to be a John Wyndham hero to think the same, as she tells of staggering through the storm thinking four-headed, six-armed monsters might be after her.
She apologises to the Doctor for having arrived in the TARDIS 'saturated' with rain and leaving puddles all over the floor. There's some suspense with Alydon initially speaking to her from the shadows, like a disgusting mutant would, before emerging to show himself as 'the most wonderful looking man I've ever seen anywhere in any world.' There's some charming business with Ian involuntarily looking jealous and Susan jokingly apologising, and Barbara raising her eyebrows 'to agree to a future and secret conversation' about Alydon. (As if anyone reading this doesn't already know!)
There isn't any talk from Alydon about crops and rain, the Thals merely intend to search the city for food, and on her return Susan naively told the Daleks this and wrote the 'Su San' invitation at their dictation. Thus far her narrative in the cell. The Doctor then explains the Daleks' motivation, thus introducing young Shallow to the word 'jeopardy'.
Ian doesn't think much of the idea that the Daleks are powered by static electricity; neither does the Doctor really, as he says 'I know the use of static electricity may seem absurd but it is an answer, isn't it?'
The first attempt at the cloak plan fails: the Dalek is suspicious to see the time travellers standing in two pairs, and orders them together, giving them a demo of its gun-stick when they aren't quick enough. And it spots the block on the door and makes them remove it. But Susan cunningly asks for more water, which is brought later by another, more trusting Dalek.
Target Doctor has no truck with physiological relativism: the disgusting appearance of the Dalek creature (described in fair detail by the narrator) convinces him that they are right to oppose the Daleks and support the Thals.
There's a nasty moment where the lift guard Dalek notices that the Doctor is pulling Ian's Dalek along, and orders him to 'Step away!' Ian is able to bluff his way through, though. In the lift, it's a button-hook that the Doctor uses to disable the door sensor - a fine bit of Edwardian characterisation.
They help Ian out of the Dalek casing almost immediately, so there's no suspense as to whether he's still inside when the Daleks break through (it wouldn't work with him as narrator).
The object that they push down the lift shaft is specifically described by Ian as a 'sculpture'.
The conversation near the gateway - where the Doctor wants to use the Thals as a diversion, Barbara is disgusted, and Susan wants to go back and help them - is transferred to the observation floor, and it's Barbara who wants to accompany Ian and is ordered to do what she's told. She understandably becomes resentful about this - David Whitaker presumably seeing more narrative use for Ian/Barbara tension than the Doctor/Susan struggle for independence in the screen version.
Temmosus makes a better speech here, it's more focused and less rhetorical. And after the first Dalek shot, he makes everything stop by sheer force of personality, telling the Daleks that cooperation is the only way forward. They still kill him of course, but what a way to go.
Alydon is much more impressive in his first conversation with Ian. On screen we pity the Thals for being naive, on the page Alydon almost seems to pity Ian.
Ian has an initial discussion with the survivors of the city party (seven Thals were killed, not just Tecanda, who isn't named here) as they rest on their way to the encampment. The pacifism issue is brought up here, and Alydon says 'with a terrible sincerity' that rather than fight, the Daleks will have to exterminate them.
At the encampment, we don't see the maps of the solar system or the picture of the original Thal male, but the Doctor does the same basic speech about war, radiation and circular mutation. The Doctor doesn't get Ian's surname wrong here, or anywhere else in the story.
Barbara is annoyed at Ian's rude behaviour earlier, and the Doctor annoys him by giving him advice as to how to deal with her. This conflict replaces the argument on screen about whether they should put the Thals in danger by persuading them to help recover the fluid link. Incidentally, it's only the Doctor who's made up his mind to leave Skaro before he finds that it's missing: on screen all four of them are ready and willing to leave.
Rather than Alydon speechifying and Ian arguing with him, it's the Doctor who makes the speech. And we don't immediately go to the climax: there's a long interval where Ian tries to educate the Thals in the concept of hostility, by teaching them to box. They don't really get it, with amusing results. The Doctor finds this particularly amusing, and this winds Ian up to making his bluff of taking Dyoni to the Daleks.
After Alydon's big speech next morning, the Doctor very arrogantly uses a whistle to silence everyone and offer his services as 'general' for the attack on the city. There's no cooperative planning scene, it's all the Doctor's design. Nor is there any map; Ganatus is the source of their information, as he knows the terrain round the lake. Incidentally, Ian speaks of the lake as if he's already mentioned it to us - he hasn't.
The jungle surrounding the lake grows increasingly strange and mutated the nearer the party approach it. Ganatus tactfully pretends to stay close to Barbara because he enjoys her company, when actually it's so that he can help her. (At least that's what Ian tells us. It's his story and he's sticking to it.)
When they make camp, Barbara suggests building a raft to cross the water, but Antodus says ominously 'There are things in the lake'. This replaces Ian's premonitory encounter with the lake creature from the screen version.
There's then some banter between the Thals about eating Elyon if his food preparation isn't up to scratch, which is nicely macabre as it comes just before he himself gets eaten. There's no whirlpool on the lake by the way, Ian specifically tells us that the surface is undisturbed.
Next morning - after a hot drink of Ratanda - the party are attacked by a huge monster from the lake, but Ian fends it off with burning torches - and it's then attacked and eaten by its fellows. There's then a scene where Kristas climbs up the rock face with an improvised rope, which he then lets down so the others can climb up.
The narrative continues to stay with Ian, so of course we don't get the Barbara/Ganatus banter, though all the Nationesque stuff about splitting up and exploring separate tunnels is still there. There's no first or second rock fall, and no grousing about the journey being impossible or unbearable.The journey along the ledge begins after they use the rope to cross the chasm, and the chasm comes straight after the cavern that Ganatus falls into - whereas on screen the rope is used to cross a gap in the ledge.
Antodus doesn't get into any claustrophobic panic - Ian remarks that when he screams as he goes over the edge of the ledge, that's the first time any of the Thals in the party have shown fear. He doesn't sacrifice himself by cutting the rope either. And when he hits the water at the bottom, they hear some creature attacking him.
The final impasse isn't caused by a rock fall, they're just at a seeming dead end; there's a large hole above them which leads into the Dalek hydroelectric plant.
Their incursion into the city is shown in greater detail - they find a hydroponics room and a room full of spare Dalek rod attachments, which is where they meet Alydon.
Alydon recaps the business with the reflective plates, and explains about the Daleks' radiation bomb plan, and that the Doctor and Susan have been captured. When they discover the control room, Ian sends Alydon back down to the power plant with instructions to smash it.
The chief Dalek is made of glass, and is wearing the fluid link on a chain round its neck. Ian smashes its glass casing during the fight. But it isn't the damage to the control room that finishes off the Daleks, it's Alydon's work off-page down in the power plant. 'Then this... is the end... of the Daleks,' says the last one to die.
There's a sort of preliminary final speechmaking in the ruins of the control room, with Ian telling Alydon to keep life itself an ever-increasing thing of beauty, and the Doctor warning him to search for the truth (like he does in the final scene in the camp in the screen version).
He looked away from Alydon and weighed the fluid link in his hand. 'Be straightforward,' he went on. 'It's surprising how much trouble can come from a small deception.'
There's no business about compensators or tests of the soil. Instead, there's a final feast at which the Doctor makes another motivational speech, assuring the Thals that the Daleks are definitely all dead, and offering to come back and visit another time.
Susan doesn't get a cape and Barbara doesn't get any dress material.
Barbara is not with Ganatus: instead, Ian discovers her talking to Kristas - about how she and Ian can be reconciled. Kristas doesn't go away empty-handed by the way, he intends to propose to the lovely Salthyana, or rather to tell her, Thal-style, that he wishes her to remain at his side for the rest of their lives. Barbara says sadly that in Earth proposals 'the man asks the woman if she is willing.'
Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor outlines to Ian the advantages of him and Barbara staying on Skaro with the Thals - before inviting them to accompany him and Susan on their travels. 'The man always asks the woman if she is willing,' says Ian, thus letting her know that he overheard her wishes for reconciliation. And so they are reconciled. It's rather romantic actually, I wish I'd been able to appreciate that a bit more when I first read it.
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