The Mutants
Doctor Who and the Mutants
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The Mutants |
Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Mutants |
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| Author | Terrance Dicks |  |
| Published | 1977 | |
| ISBN | 0 426 11690 9 | |
| First Edition Cover | Jeff Cummins |
| Back cover blurb: A massive shape scuttles out of the darkness and strikes the earth Overlord down. It is a Mutant - a huge insectoid creature. It moves in a crouch, its back arched and scaly, with huge knobbly vertebrae. The controlling Overlord, the Marshal, has ordered all such Mutants killed instantly. What was happening to the people of Solos? Why are they gradually turning into Monsters? Hands that become claws, flesh that turns scale-like... When DOCTOR WHO meets the Marshal and Jaeger, he realizes that all is not as it appears to be. The Marshal has a sinister plan to gain control of this planet, and DOCTOR WHO must save Solos from this mad earthman, as well as save the Solonians themselves. |
It lacks Geoffrey Palmer... and Terrance Dicks' usual Pertwee magic by Tim Roll-Pickering 8/2/04
Bashing the Jon Pertwee years has become commonplace amongst many fans in the past decade or so, and there are few stories which get bashed more than The Mutants. There are many easy targets for the critics, whether the basic logic behind the Doctor's involvement (sent on a mission by the Time Lords to deliver a message when he has no idea who to give it to and the recipient is completely unable to decipher it), the dreary sets for Skybase and the poor location work or the deus ex machina resolution to the tale that is all to quick and convenient. There are some positive points, such as Geoffrey Palmer's brief role as the Administrator or the basic ideas behind the story parodying the then contemporary situation in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) but these are few and far between. The result is a story that has few defenders. The novelisation might be expected to be equally as dreary, but there are earlier books where Terrance Dicks has worked wonders despite adapting a very poor television story (Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos immediately springs to mind). Might someone approaching Doctor Who and the Mutants not unreasonably hope for a solid book? Given Dicks' usual devotion to the Pertwee novelisations from this period, as opposed to some of his Tom Baker novelisations which feel as though they were produced en mass, this would perhaps not be an unreasonable hope to make.
The cover is pretty good as well, even though the TARDIS and a Mutt never meet whilst the inside cover blurb of the first edition states that the cover features the "third DOCTOR WHO" - so the likeness must match those on the cover for Doctor Who and the Space War as being one of the most bizarre yet! However the book is unfortunately not up to the same standard.
To be fair to Terrance Dicks the source material he is working from isn't the best. The basic plotline of the Doctor being sent to deliver a message just simply doesn't work and it becomes all too clear that this is just a plot device aimed at taking the Doctor to Solos and then keeping him in the narrative. In almost any other era of the series the TARDIS' ability to travel through time and space as well as the Doctor's determination to stand up to injustice wherever he encounters it would have combined to ensure that the Doctor would remain until the conclusion of the tale. Such a basic flaw in the story is impossible to overcome and it would take a basic restructuring of the plot, something that neither Dicks nor many other novelisers would undertake, in order to bring any sense to the book. However Dicks also fails to bring the tale to life. Apart from the odd line enhancing Jaeger, showing how he was exposed as a plagarist and forced to flee Earth, very little is done to bring any of the characters to life and so the prose is featureless and flat. The result is a book that feels very much as though it has been churned out by a novelisation machine and is a sign that Dicks' weaknesses on some (and it must be stressed, only some) novelisations has spread to his adaptations of the Pertwee stories. The television story wasn't a great spectacle and this book isn't one either. 3/10