Doctor Who and the Daleks: On Adaptation

It's a funny old oddity. Particularly given how close the characterisations of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki are to their television counterparts in The Crusaders.

I suspect that the initial changes followed the same preconceptions that The Doomsday Weapon later did; i.e. that Jo needed another introduction just prior to Uxarius because there was no guarantee of Terror of the Autons being adapted to print. I can't say anything production-wise (other than The Reign of Terror had only just finished as this book was published), but looking at the characters from their nascency it makes sense. They've yet to develop into the characters we know yet. A lot of Ian's frustration from "An Unearthly Child" is transferred to Doctor Who and the Daleks in full. He's not given any time to process events before Skaro and his adjustment to this new lifestyle occurs right in the midst of this book. The same is true of the Doctor. He's, well... very self-serving and pragmatic almost to the point of blind maliciousness. Almost.

Another big aspect is the shift in the group's dynamic. Ian and Barbara are strangers to one another in this story. While in the television series, he could take comfort and confide in her as a friend, he's very much on his own here. With Miss Wright being Susan's personal tutor, it's not him and Barbara separated from the Doctor and Susan, but the three of them with him as the ultimate outsider. It's over the course of the novella that they all grow to understand one another and follow the same motions that would have otherwise been done in An Unearthly Child. The Novel!Doctor here does what the TV!Doctor didn't do until Barbara forced it out of him in The Edge of Destruction, he admits to Ian and Ganatus that his lie with the fluid link was a bad move on his part.

At the end, when the two schoolteachers decide to remain aboard, we're essentially back to where we started with the group's dynamic circa Marco Polo. You could slot in that novelisation straight after as the second ever Doctor Who story and be none the wiser.

I actually think it's stronger than either An Unearthly Child or The Daleks. It blends elements of both stories, adds to the characterization, and has lots of interesting elements like the glass Daleks that weren't in the TV story. Barbara is perhaps the one aspect that's stronger in the TV version. Overall, though, I feel like it's a better "second draft"/"director's cut" version of a first Doctor Who story that really builds on what worked and what didn't in the actual episodes.