The Armageddon Factor

Target novelisation Dr Who and the Armageddon Factor

Author	Terrance Dicks
Published	1980
ISBN	0 426 20104 3
First Edition Cover	Bill Donohoe

Back cover blurb: Some time ago, the White Guardian, one of the most powerful beings in the Cosmos, had set the Doctor an urgent task - to find and reassemble the six segments of the Key to Time. The Doctor and Romana had successfully retrieved five of the segments and now they have reached the planet Atrios in the middle of an atomic war, to search for the last, most vital piece. Sinister dangers await them in this final stage of their quest...

• Showdown by Tim Roll-Pickering
• Can't Win 'Em All by Jason A. Miller

Showdown by Tim Roll-Pickering 23/2/06

The cover merely shows the Doctor and Romana wandering looking around a computer room, not exactly the image one would associate with the story. One has to wonder whether Bill Donohoe was given anything in the way of story information to create it.

Otherwise, this book seems to be lacking much of what makes the story work on screen. The early sequences now feel interminably boring as the characters wander around Atrios and don't really advance the plot very much, whilst the onscreen subtle mysteries feel incredibly pronounced, not least because of Dicks' willingness to include brief paragraphs that spell out points such as Astra and Merak's support for peace efforts before it is discovered or the Marshall's ruses being telegraphed. The trip to Zeos brings little in the way of relief and instead we get a rather confused run around on both planets.

A common criticism laid at the Key to Time season, and indeed at much of the series as a whole, is that grand events on an inter-planetary or even cosmological scale are often merely alluded to and never shown. Whilst this is realistic for the budgets available, it can occasionally result in all sense of context being lost. In print, there is no such restriction and if ever a book was crying out for a few additions to sort this out, it is The Armageddon Factor. There is no real sense of the scale of the conflict between Atrios and Zeos or of the problems facing the universe that the White Guardian needs the Key to Time to solve. Given Dicks' aim of trying to produce effectively a printed video this may be expecting too much, but the result leaves the book weak.

The Shadow's world is labelled "the Planet of Evil" and it's an accurate reflection on how the character is handled. Absent is the subtlety and intensity of William Squire's performance and we are left with a cliched villain in black. The plothole that Astra is deduced to be the sixth segment because she is sixth Princess of the sixth dynasty of the sixth house of Atrios is even harder to understand and no attempt is made to explain how the Shadow knew that the Doctor would arrive with the rest of the key.

The final scenes are improved a little on the television, with the almost comical scene of the Doctor pretending to get delusions of godhood transformed by the suggestion that he is succumbing to the influence of the Key. But there's still nothing to really explain how the White Guardian can operate the Key merely because it has been assembled, and yet his exact counterpart the Black Guardian needs to actually receive the Key to use it. This is even more pronounced by the new line, "The Key's been reassembled for some little time now. I imagine the real White Guardian has had all the time he needs." Consequently the confusion continues.

Like so many of the books released around this time, Dr Who and the Armageddon Factor fundamentally fails to do much more than mechanically turn the script into prose. There's no sense of scale or mystery, whilst dramatic moments are squandered and cliché reigns. This book is one to avoid. 1/10

(N.B. The inside frontspiece says "Dr Who and the Armageddon Factor", despite the full "Doctor" being used on the cover and spine.)

Can't Win 'Em All by Jason A. Miller 9/7/21

Well, they can't all be great. After doing some solid work on the previous three Key to Time novelizations, Terrance Dicks' adaptation of the Season 16 finale, The Armageddon Factor, falls a bit flat.

Part of this is due to the TV story's length, six episodes instead of the more usual four. Terrace usually spends three chapters on each story part, but here he's working with roughly the same page count for a six-part story as he got for a four-parter, so cuts had to be made somewhere. Three chapters are accorded for each of Parts One and Two, but the last four parts all get just two chapters apiece. This does not leave much room for Terrance's traditional wry observations, zingers or plot-hole fixes. He begins two straight sentences in Chapter 5 with the identical phrase "The conveyor-belt ran", which is a rare prose misfire. In short, this is much less entertaining than Terrance's usual fare.

The biggest thing I noticed about the early chapters of Doctor Who and the Armageddon Factor is how grim the thing is in tone. Director Michael Hayes brought two things to the TV episode: an over-the-top comic bent with regard to two particular guest roles (Davyd Harries as Shapp, and Barry Jackson as Drax) and an unusually visually inventive style, such as with the Shadow's conjuring tricks in Part Four or the Shadow's face superimposed over his exploding space station in Part Six. You won't find those things in the book, because this was based on the camera scripts and not the final product. So Shapp is played dead straight, with some of his ad-libbed lines on TV (perhaps egged on during rehearsal by Tom Baker) or his blowing K9's dog whistle (oo-er), absent in print. K9 doesn't spin around and do a complex electronic mating dance in order to access Mentalis. You'll miss late-addition laugh lines such as "Your silliness is noted".

But what Terrance can do, of course, is spin a phrase, and that's what carries the book in the end. He elects to write scenes from the Marshal's POV, letting us know just how cynical and dictatorial the man is ("He knew of course that none of these accusations was true"). A bombed-out hospital ward "looked like a scene from hell", an uncompromising description (probably suggested by stage directions in the camera scripts) undersold by the more comic air to the story on TV. Upon our introduction to Princess Astra (Lalla Ward), "The Marshal sighed, wondering, not for the first time how so much obstinacy could be packed into one slim body." When Astra is possessed by the Shadow and smiles, it's "like a grimace on the face of a corpse". K9, when solving a problem, gives himself "a mental pat on the back". The Marshal is said to enjoy watching his own speeches on TV.

You can usually tell when Terrance doesn't like the script he's adapting. Here, Romana comments on one of the Doctor's war strategies as "utter nonsense". Draw your own conclusions...

Because he's compressing more TV action into the same short page count, Terrance necessarily has to miss out on papering over some plot holes or confusing contrivances. No effort is made to explain what "chronodyne" is, or why it can temporarily mimic the powers of the still-incomplete Key to Time.

Even if he doesn't add much by way of humor or insight to the action, though, Dicks certainly can set a scene. His introduction to the Shadow, the story's main villain, is a master class in prose: "The speaker was standing a little apart from the others. At first glance he looked not unlike them. He too was black-robed with a face like a living skull. But the robes were of some rich velvety material, and a collar of jewels blazed at his throat. Even without these symbols of authority, it would have been evident that this was the ruler of the sinister group. He had an aura of tremendous power and authority, and seemed to radiate darkness, so that light dimmed wherever he moved. The voice was deep and husky at the same time, with a note of sardonic malice. It seemed to echo, as if coming from the depths of a tomb." The Shadow's planetoid is also "some fantastic castle in space". And the interior has "a strange organic feel, like a rotten apple bored through by innumerable worms". Dicks adds sardonically that "the Shadow had traditional tastes" in dungeon design. The Black Guardian, once unmasked, is "a leering, scowling demon, gibbering with rage". In a short book where you can't waste words, Terrance always seems to find the apt description in the minimum possible word count.

Another one... "The Shadow swept along the corridors of his domain trailing a cloud of darkness behind him". As cleverly as Michael Hayes directed this thing on TV, that kind of visual could only ever be realized in print.

And when it comes to the endless war between Atrios and Zeos, depicted by a cash-starved TV production as a video game sequence on a monitor screen, the Doctor "knew that each dot of light that vanished from the screen represented the deaths of a space fighter's crew, young men killed in a senseless war before their lives had really begun". Looking back on it, and I would have read this book when I was about 12 or so... how much of my eventual worldview was informed by passages like these, describing the horror and futility of war? Did this book, and others like it by Terrance, help make me who I am today?

In one more sense, the book justifies the purchase price. This is one of those stories that I saw on TV before I bought the book. On a later bookstore shopping trip, when I had to choose two or three of some 35 novelizations on the shelf to buy that day, the reason I picked this one over many others is because, on TV, I was fascinated by the fact that Drax called the Doctor "Feet", or "Feeta Sigma" (as an American boy, I was clueless as to the origin of Drax's accent). Was that the Doctor's real name?! I knew that I needed the book to explain that for me. But, no, Terrance explains, it "wasn't his name... it was a kind of Time Lord coding"... and he "didn't think he could bear being addressed as 'Thete' for the rest of their association".

So I have Terrance to thank for that explanation, and this is my most lasting memory of Doctor Who and the Armageddon Factor.