Target: The Doomsday Weapon

Always a massive favourite with me, despite the fact that this is one of two Targets in which Jo meets the Doctor for the first time.

Possibly Malcolm Hulke's biggest servings of back-story here - there's over a page of Jane Leeson's biography just before she gets killed, presumably because it's a good opportunity to tell us the back-story of the colony in general.

People have put down the implicit comparison of Ashe with Jesus, but he gets a fair amount of stick from MH too, coming across as weak and long-winded. His strongest pre-death moment is the Leesons' funeral - which has also faced criticism for being too obvious, though it made a big impression on me as a kid. No-one else had explained the social and psychological purpose of a funeral to me before then.

Dent isn't quite the ruthless, icy person of the screen version. Famously 'an IMC man', he's still ruthless, but he comes across more as the company man than the robot. All his reactions come from IMC handbooks and training courses. On first reading he reminded me instantly of my friend's dad, who worked for the Ford Motor Company and was so impressed by his employer's mighty economic power that he never talked about anything else.

There are quite few minor differences from the screen version, details shifted around from scene to scene and an extra speaking colonist or two. The ones that stood out are the absence from the novel of the Doctor repairing the fusebox (and commenting that Norton hadn't made a very good repair), and the addition in the novel of the Doctor noticing that giant lizards would be stuck for food on such a barren planet (the planet, incidentally, is not named in the book).

The Primitives and their little god are quite different in the book - the former are human-looking, with 6 fingers on each hand, instead of alien humanoids, and the latter is an impressive glowing figure, instead of a bizarre puppet.

Jo is a lot more intelligent and assertive on the page, I did wonder if she was being written as Liz for some reason. But her costume is faithfully reproduced in the illustrations, whereas Mrs Leeson and Caldwell have completely different faces.

'How did you know those IMC people were coming to the planet?' the Doctor asks the Master. The Master is interrupted before he can reply! Is MH suggesting the plot is a little unlikely?

The ending differs in two key respects: the colonists are still outlaws in the book, which suggests worrying possibilities when the Earth government finds out what's been going on. But on the other hand, we're shown the planetary conditions beginning to improve, with rainclouds sweeping in and shoots springing up in the desert.

There's always going to be something special about a DW story involving fake monsters, simulated with filming tiny lizards close up, and by using prop monster claws...