This story is the first of a small category that I know well, but that I saw on television before reading the novelisation. As such I can't help treating them more critically - but this one stands up well to the harsher treatment.
Terrance Dicks goes to some lengths to build up a picture for us of a society where everyone expects everything to be done by robots. I wonder if he enjoyed adapting Chris Boucher's scripts, because they stretch him more - at one point early on, he's handling a sustained conversation with 5 people talking at once, something I can't recall happening in any other Target.
The mine is referred to as 'the Sandminer' throughout.
Uvanov plays 3-D chess with the robot, not the ordinary kind.
The desert has bands of coloured sand 'gleaming red, purple, black, gold in the dim yellow light of a distant sun.' How I wish we could see it.
The 'One of you/one of us' exchange is accompanied by some good Uvanov POV - 'He'd unconsciously left himself out of the group of suspects. They were putting him back in.'
The Doctor's first encounter with Uvanov has the former mentally sum up the latter as having 'something curiously pathetic' about him, a middle-aged man pretending to be young, a weak man pretending to be strong. (The narrator does, however, say that he's 'the complete professional' when it comes to his work).
Zilda's brother had Grimwold's Syndrome, not Grimwade's.
Leela's fight with V.5 is well done - she first properly understands that she's dealing with machines, not men, when 'her fists and feet rebounded from the heavy metal of the robot's framework'. Also she gets her knife back, which means she throws it, and not a hand at D.84, so he says 'Please do not throw things at me' and not the stupid sub-Adams remark he makes on screen.
The 'I heard a cry' scene is done so that it actually makes sense - D.84 means that he heard a cry other than the one coming from the Doctor, and they go off and investigate it. That is not at all clear in the screen version, at least not to me - it just looks like D.84 and the Doctor are pointlessly trying to annoy each other.
The other main difference is that the conversation between D.84 and the Doctor, where the former explains what he's doing there, starts off with narration about the threatening letters, D.84's true nature as a Super-Voc, etc, and then gives us the conversation we hear on screen. This is an improvement - we aren't parachuted straight into the talk about threats and Taran Capel.
This one is much better than I remembered - interesting to see TD raising his game. Recommended.
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