Frontios
Doctor Who - Frontios
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Frontios |
Target novelisation Doctor Who - Frontios |
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| Author | Christopher H. Bidmead |  |
| Published | 1984 | |
| ISBN | 0 426 19780 1 | |
| First Edition Cover | Andrew Skilleter |
| Back cover blurb: The TARDIS has drifted far into the future and comes to rest hovering over Frontios, refuge of one group of survivors from Earth who have escaped the disintegration of their home planet. The Doctor is reluctant to land on Frontios, as he does not wish to intervene in a moment of historical crisis - the colonists are still struggling to establish themselves and their continued existence hangs in the balance. But the TARDIS is forced down by what appears to be a meteorite storm, and crash-lands, leaving the Doctor and his companions marooned on the hope-forsaken planet... |
The Director's Cut by Jason A. Miller 18/4/23
Frontios the novelization is what you would expect from a story about the malevolent forces of gravity: it is more densely packed and gripping than its TV forebear.
Frontios in book form is the story that Christopher H. Bidmead wanted to tell on TV but couldn't, because the scripts he submitted ran too long when filmed and because he included too many sets. Ah, 1984, when there wasn't enough budget to erect a TARDIS corridor in studio to run alongside the console room.
As you'd also expect from the witty wordsmith who penned the Castrovalva book, Frontios is jam-packed with Bidmead's signature observational humor. Few wrote the Doctor to Peter Davison's strengths better than El Bid. For examples, glasses, like the Doctor wears, are described as "occasionally useful for reading when the print was very small, or the book unusually dull". Turlough, who I've come to appreciate more and more in this Davison read-through, is thrown when the Doctor demands his help during a surgery: "It turned out that the Doctor needed somebody to hold his coat". Many laugh-out-loud passages here. But, oddly, the book is also pretty graphic in its images of vile body-horror, trading away the lyrical worlds of Logopolis and Castrovalva for the grisly Tractators and their corpse-driven machines that director Ron Jones either couldn't, or wouldn't, realize for TV.
The opening TARDIS scene is quite funny, with Bidmead's characteristic wit describing the way the Doctor and Turlough are each driving themselves to distraction out of boredom. Our introduction to the people of Frontios is also amusing; Mr. Range, the fussy civilian science officer "continued to flutter... like a pigeon looking for the best foothold on a statue". And tons of other funny similes. Bidmead works in observational humor from his day job as a technical writer. Tegan reads a handbook that refers her to Appendix F, even though it only goes through D... this is surely based on the writer's personal experience. Two random Frontios techies are named for Kernighan and Ritchie, the inventors of the C programming language.
And the political barbs are good, in a story about a colony in civil war and ruled by an inept youth named, of all things, Plantagenet. Brazen worried about "wild speculations that were dangerous...not because they were true, but because they were believed". The perfect description of America in the age of Trump... written in 1984.
Bidmead adds some mystery to the book by liberal use of foreshadowing, directly telling the reader that the main characters are unaware of something strange or mysterious that's going on around them. We're told, as soon as he meets Tegan and Turlough, that Cockerill is "extraordinary". This is bizarre, if you're coming straight from the DVD, because Cockerill has hardly anything to do on TV. But, the book being a director's cut, come to find out that Bidmead put Cockerill in a dozen other scenes that got cut, and there is a distinctly heroic story arc with a happy ending. Compared to the TV broadcast, when Cockerill vanishes without explanation halfway through Part Four. The book puts him back where he belongs, and is more interesting for it.
The Doctor by Bidmead is great, isn't he? He "often made the mistake of assuming everyone else was as clever as he was". Bidmead neatly transitions from a moment of Brazen ordering the Doctor's capture, to Brazen having "been completely chased out of the Doctor's thoughts"'. The New Adventure novels of the 1990s intentionally avoided writing from the Doctor's POV, to keep him mysterious, but Bidmead's inside his head the whole book, and it's a hoot, with the Doctor thinking of jokes about "the gravity of the situation" while in the grip of the Gravis. Deleted TV dialogue restored for the book gives the Doctor a nice speech about the importance of mathematics, too.
Unfortunately, as witty and entertaining a writer as Bidmead is, a book also, eventually, needs to have a strong plot to keep the reader guessing, and good mini cliffhangers at each chapter to prevent the reader from putting the book down. This is where Frontios falls short. The plot is familiar, the same colony-ship-in-trouble that we saw in back-to-back stories under Bidmead's tenure as script editor (Full Circle and State of Decay), but has no real unique twists or revelations, apart from the budget-saving device of not introducing the monsters until Part Three.
Tonally, the book is all over the place, like one passage where Turlough amusingly sees his reflection as a "freckled smudge", but then imagines his flesh rotting away to the skull. Ew. An editor should have cut that. And while budgetary concerns on TV caused the Gravis to speak in RP from his own lips, the book restores one of Bidmead's less felicitous scripted ideas, a cadaverous translator machine made up of a dismembered colonist. Again... eww. Speaking of bad editing, Norna has her mouth gagged and stuffed full of food...and then, trying to escape, grips a knife between her teeth. I think we know what day Nigel Robinson took an early lunch at the Target offices.
But that stuff doesn't bother me, not with witty prose like this:
Frontios is a bit dreary on TV, a weak finish to Bidmead's contributions to the series. The book is also not as wonderful as his two previous novelizations, but it's far superior to the TV broadcast, and will have you considering the story in a much improved light.