Okay, so while The Five Doctors may be a "fourth Doctor novelisation" in the sense that it's a novelisation with the fourth Doctor in it, it's not really a "fourth Doctor novelisation" in any meaningful sense. I mean, even by the standards of multi-Doctor stories, it's clearly not a fourth Doctor one, as the Doctor appears in just two small bits!
Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two |
 |
|
Collection published: 2022 Novel originally published: 1983 Acquired and read: December 2024 |
But I'm reading it as part of this sequence because 1) it felt weird to read four of the five books included in The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two, but not read the fifth, and 2) I don't have any unread fifth Doctor novelisations to lump it in with, so it made most sense to read it here. This is the one book in this sequence that's a reread, because I own the individual book (though I don't have an entry for it on my reading log, meaning I must have read it before September 2007, when I started tracking).
Anyway, as novelisations go, this is one of those ones that doesn't really add much to the televised story; it's pretty much the script put on the page. There's no extra bits, no added depth. You could imagine a writer adding more continuity references, or working in stuff that wasn't feasible to do on screen—Dicks, after all, wrote the script, and must have been keenly aware of its limitations!—like giving us more Tom Baker, but he doesn't. Unfortunately, that means it doesn't have much to offer a reader, a modern reader anyway. To be honest, The Five Doctors isn't a very exciting story... but it is a deeply pleasurable one to watch, it's just fun to see all these characters on screen doing their thing in the same story. I enjoyed it even when I was a neophyte Doctor Who fan and had never seen Jon Pertwee or Patrick Troughton in a story before; in fact, I remember even my kid sister (not a classic Who fan by any stretch of the imagination) getting drawn in when I watched the DVD.
But take out Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee (and Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney and...), and frankly, this story doesn't have a lot going for it. Which is fine for the script, it was meant as a vehicle for seeing old friends again, and it accomplishes that perfectly. But that means on the page, the story has little to recommend it beyond reminding you of a tv story you'd rather be watching. I can see how this would be helpful in 1983, when you had no way to watch the story again, but in 2025, I can just stick in my DVD.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: The Stones of Blood
No comments:
Post a Comment