Peter Grimwade is our host for this novelisation. He opens up with some fairly ponderous humour about Brendon School and how it came to be on its present site, a former country house. The obelisk on the hill is a memorial to a general who belonged to the family that lived there.
Ibbotson mentions that the car belongs to the Brigadier almost as soon as we see it. We clearly aren't expected to be surprised that the Brig's in this story. Turlough doesn't slap the door, he kicks the bodywork. Hippo still polishes off the mark.
Turlough is described as having pre-Raphaelite looks. The nature of his pact with the Guardian is not revealed till the infirmary scene (Turlough himself can't remember it until then). He thinks of the Guardian as 'the man in black' several times - possibly an Appointment With Fear reference, possibly not.
There's no moan from Tegan about how Dojjen should have destroyed the Great Crystal, or any other mention of their previous adventure. (Not unusual in Targets of course).
The Headmaster's name is Mr Sellick and he keeps a pet dobermann bitch. When Turlough lies to him about nobly taking the rap for Ibbotson, the Head wonders if he's picked up some of the school's fine moral values after all. A nice bit of satire there I thought.
Mawdryn's spacecraft features a staircase of solid gypsum. My experience of geology, and plasterboard, makes me want to bitch that solid gypsum would be much too soft to make stairs out of, but perhaps PG means alabaster or some other mineral containing gypsum.
The TARDIS crew don't find an arcade game on board, but a machine that produces spellbinding music. Nyssa still, however, expresses disapproval - Calvinistic disapproval in fact.
The Brig's line about flogging Ibbotson is just bluster, because he's a kind man at heart. His way of saying 'I wasn't born yesterday' is 'I haven't just arrived on a banana boat'. The reason he calls the boy's body disgusting is to cover up his own poor condition. And later he worries that getting angry with Ibbotson will bring on one of his turns.
Tegan 'never knew why the Doctor had swallowed Turlough's unlikely story of how he came to be in the TARDIS.' Neither do we, because we aren't told what the story was. She speculates that post-Adric remorse has softened the Doctor's judgement.
Turlough's mention of tangential deviation makes the Doctor realise that he isn't from Earth.
While Nyssa and Tegan are standing on the hill after the TARDIS arrives, a rain squall clears away to reveal the school at the end of a rainbow (!).
The transmat capsule that brings Mawdryn to Earth is stated to be dimensionally transcendental. (On screen it certainly appears to be bigger on the inside). It is also filled with the smell of putrefaction, which reminds Tegan of her uncle's (not father's this time) cattle farm. (What kind of farm was that? 'Jeez mate, we've gotta get those cow carcasses cleared up, they're stinking the place out.') Mawdryn is oddly described as resembling a deformed boy, though this may be a misprint for 'body'. It takes an hour to move him into the TARDIS. The 'girls' then wrap him up in the Doctor's old red coat - does PG see the purple coat as red, or is he changing it to be the reddish coat from Robot/Ark in Space? He says later that the Brig recognises it, so I suppose it must be the latter explanation.
The whole '1983 Brigadier's quarters' scene is used, rather well I thought, to give the impression that the Brigadier has let himself go and become an ageing eccentric. The clapboard shed - which the Doctor assumes is the scout hut at first - has damp walls, smells of unaired clothes and generally has the 'self-imposed bachelor squalor' of someone who believes only women can keep the place tidy. It certainly isn't what the Doctor expects from the spick and span soldier of his recollection.
This is backed up by our view of the Brig and his quarters in 1977. He's unflappable and (to Tegan) British in the way that Captain Stapley was, and his hut is ship-shape. His television is playing the National Anthem, not the anti-Jacobite song Lilliburlero as heard on screen.
Tegs, by the way, is appalled to find herself in 1977. And she thinks a bunfight is something like the Eton wall game.
In Turlough's dream, the Headmaster smiles when he says he's heartened that Turlough has confided in him.
Mawdryn doesn't say 'Yes - a Gallifreyan human' during the regeneration argument. He asks a question expecting the answer no - 'Is a Gallifreyan human?'
The box where the Brigadier has stored the homing device isn't full of electrical bits and pieces, but vaguely military debris like gas masks and a tube of moustache wax (!).
1983 Brigadier feels a tingling at the back of his neck whenever 1977 Brigadier is nearby.
The Black Guardian speaks to Turlough on board the ship through a portrait, not a bust.
Mawdryn's longing for death reminds the Brigadier of a traumatic incident during his first action, in Palestine just after the war, against terrorists (religion unspecified). And the laboratory on the ship has a smell that reminds him of overripe pheasant.
The Doctor doesn't look at Tegan and Nyssa as he dematerialises the TARDIS on the doomed attempt to leave the ship - perhaps because he's ashamed at not helping Mawdryn - so he doesn't see the initial signs of ageing.
When 1977 Brigadier gets to the laboratory and sees what's going on, his one thought is to deal with the 'swine at the controls'.
On the journey in the TARDIS back to Earth, 1983 Brigadier thinks of all the forms of transport he'd rather have taken (and paid full fare, 'Scotsman or no').
After Turlough's welcome to the TARDIS - no handshake - we join the Brigadier's thoughts as he goes down to the pub that evening. The Headmaster doesn't mind that Turlough's been 'removed', as his fees were paid in advance. (With that attitude I don't doubt he went on to be a New Labour education adviser). And a retired mechanic has undertaken to get his car working again.
It's a strange cut from these reflections to Mawdryn's ship blowing up, but that's how PG chooses to end the book.
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