Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (21 page)

The series regulars are also presented rather differently to their TV equivalents. The Brigadier is to some extent an amalgamation of the strait-laced military officer of 1970 and the slightly softer, more parodic figure he gradually became: his ‘That’ll show ’em’ exclamation about ‘foreign competitors’ in
Chapter 2
could have slipped unnoticed into one of Lethbridge-Stewart’s later TV stories like ‘Planet of the Spiders’ or ‘Robot’.

The characterisation of Liz Shaw, meanwhile, gives no hint of the highly qualified scientist who assists the Third Doctor throughout his first season of television adventures. There is no mention of her degrees in physics, medicine and a dozen other subjects, and the only clue that she might be more than decorative comes in
Chapter 8
, when she is left at Squire’s farm to conduct a forensic check. Where ‘The Silurians’ shows the Doctor and Liz working together to find a cure for the plague,
Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters
leaves the science to the Doctor – to the extent that Liz simply tries to remember which formula the Doctor had written last. If anything, Hulke’s depiction of Liz here owes more to her successor as the Doctor’s companion, Jo Grant, though even Jo never gave the Brigadier an excuse to say ‘She’s got hysterics,’ as he does at the end of
Chapter 17
.

When it comes to the Doctor, Hulke makes him rather less abrasive than he appears in ‘The Silurians’, again perhaps reflecting developments in Jon Pertwee’s performance between 1970 and 1973. In one key scene, when he visits Dr Quinn’s house, the Doctor of the novelisation is perfectly charming and friendly, quietly hoping to persuade Quinn to confide in him. The equivalent scene on television has the Doctor being deliberately rude and provocative – and getting nowhere. The novel also slightly simplifies the moral ambiguities inherent in Hulke’s television scripts, with even the Doctor happily labelling the reptile men ‘monsters’ on a couple of occasions.

The ‘monsters’ themselves also gain substantial extra material here. Hulke opens the novel with a prologue, depicting the last hours of reptile dominance on planet Earth, that perhaps could not have been realised on a 1970 television budget. He then takes a few brief camera shots from a Silurian’s point of view in Episode 2 and turns them into an entire chapter as seen by one of the reptiles. He also gives individual creatures names: Okdel, Morka and K’to’s on-screen equivalents are known only as Old Silurian, Young Silurian and Silurian Scientist. (A later television story, ‘Warriors of the Deep’, gives the Scientist a different name, Ichtar.)

Terrance Dicks’s introduction to this edition alludes to the question of what this race of reptile men should actually be called. They are consistently described as Silurians throughout their eponymous television debut in 1970. A couple of years later, Hulke devised their marine cousins for ‘The Sea Devils’, giving the Doctor some dialogue (incorrectly) explaining that Silurians was a misnomer and they should have been called Eocenes. By 1974, Hulke had clearly given up on getting the name right, and this novel sticks to ‘reptile men’ throughout. ‘Silurians’ makes just one brief appearance, as a password for getting into the research centre. He does, though, have one last stab at accuracy in
Chapter 14
, with the Doctor suggesting
homo reptilia
.

While
reptile sapiens
might have been more apt, the lasting impact of these Target novelisations was clearly demonstrated almost forty years later, when Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor encountered a new tribe of reptile men in the 2010 episodes ‘The Hungry Earth’ and ‘Cold Blood’. Describing events previously seen only in this novelisation’s prologue, the Doctor says:

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Published in 2011 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company
First published in 1974 by Universal-Tandem Publishing Co., Ltd.

Novelisation copyright © Malcolm Hulke 1974
Original script © Malcolm Hulke 1970
Illustrations © Chris Achilleos 1974
Introduction © Terrance Dicks 2011
The Changing Face of Doctor Who and About the Author © Justin Richards 2011
Between the Lines © Steve Tribe 2011

BBC, DOCTOR WHO and TARDIS (word marks, logos and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 849 90194 9

Commissioning editor: Albert DePetrillo
Editorial manager: Nicholas Payne
Series consultant: Justin Richards
Project editor: Steve Tribe
Cover design: Lee Binding © Woodlands Books Ltd, 2011
Cover illustration: Chris Achilleos
Production: Rebecca Jones

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