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The evil Master has stolen the Time Lords’ file on
the horrifying Doomsday Weapon, with which, when he finds
it, he could blast whole planets out of existence and make
himself ruler of the galaxy. The Time Lords direct the Doctor
and Jo Grant in the TARDIS to a bleak planet in the year 2471,
where they find Earth colonists under threat from unscrupulous
miners and mysterious monsters with frightful claws. And hidden
somewhere on the planet is the Doomsday Weapon, for which
the Master is intently searching...
This audio book has a lot in common with its sister title
Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters,
also released this month. Both are unabridged readings of
Malcolm Hulke novelisations of Third Doctor stories, originally
published by Target Books in 1974; both feature dangerous
reptile creatures (though in this instance they prove to be
faked); and both are read by a member of the Beevers household.
Whereas Caroline John revived The Cave Monsters, her
husband, Geoffrey Beevers, who played the Master in The
Keeper of Traken, Dust
Breeding and Master,
activates The Doomsday Weapon.
Geoffrey beavers away for 4 hours 45 minutes, and he does
a decent approximation of Jon Pertwee’s vocal characteristics.
Unfortunately, we frequently hear him turning his pages, and
his velvety yet guttural tones are quite different to those
of Roger Delgado, who played the evil Time Lord in Colony
in Space, the television serial upon which
this novelisation is based. This is a little off-putting and
can make it difficult to imagine Delgado’s Master rather
than Beevers’s emaciated incarnation. When the Master
pleads with the Guardian of the Doomsday Weapon towards the
end of the adventure, his entreaties sound more like pathetic
whimpers than the shouted protestations that Delgado typically
delivered.
It is therefore somewhat fortunate that the villain doesn’t
actually appear until about two-thirds of the way into the
story. And there lies a flaw in Hulke’s story structure.
The threat of both the Master and the Doomsday Weapon are
set up in the first chapter, but then nothing comes of either
of these plot elements until more than halfway through the
third of the four discs in this pack. This flaw is magnified
in the novelisation due to the change of title from Colony
in Space
to The Doomsday Weapon, the prominent illustration
of the Master on the front cover, and much fuss being made
of both villain and weapon on the back cover blurb.
A similar fate befalls the character of Jo Grant. She gets
an excellent introduction in Chapter 2, but thereafter has
very little to do. This chapter is almost entirely original,
establishing Jo as a new character, because, even though she
appeared in three serials prior to Colony in Space,
this is the first book to feature her.
The author also changes the year from 2471 to 2972 (though
this is not reflected in the synopsis) but, as ever, the most
crucial alterations that he makes are the ways in which he
fleshes out his characters. We see through the eyes of protagonists
such as Captain Dent, a slave to the Interplanetary Mining
Corporation rulebook thanks to his IMC wife, IMC children
and beautiful four-room IMC home. There is also copious
and poignant detail about the over-crowded conditions on 30th-century
Earth and an almost completely original opening chapter featuring
the doddering old Keeper of the Time Lord Files and his young
protégé. Hulke generally tightens up his rather
plodding six-part television script, and we are spared the
embarrassing visual aspects of the transmitted serial, including
the pathetic-looking IMC robot and the tiny model of the Adjudicator’s
ship.
Though I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as The Cave
Monsters, The Doomsday Weapon is well worth a listen.
Buy this and you’ll be doomed to almost five hours of
fun.
Richard
McGinlay
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£17.99
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£11.99
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