Resurrection of the Daleks Doctor Who - Resurrection of the Daleks (TSV)

BBC Books Doctor Who - Resurrection of the Daleks

Author	Eric Saward
Published	2019
Cover	N/A

Back cover blurb: The TARDIS is ensnared in a time corridor, catapulting it into derelict docklands on 20th century Earth. The Doctor and his companions, Tegan and Turlough, stumble on a warehouse harbouring fugitives from the future at the far end of the corridor – and are soon under attack from a Dalek assault force. The Doctor's oldest enemies have set in motion an intricate and sinister plot to resurrect their race from the ashes of an interstellar war. For the Daleks' plans to succeed, they must set free their creator, Davros, from a galactic prison - and force the Doctor to help them achieve total control over time and space. But the embittered Davros has ideas of his own...

• Short, But Pointless by Jason A. Miller

Short, But Pointless by Jason A. Miller 2/7/23

Resurrection of the Daleks is best known as one of the five televised stories never to be released as a novelization during Target's original print run. Over the last several years, however, BBC Books have managed to nail down the rights issues that led to this gap. Resurrection, the first of Eric Saward's Dalek duology, came out in July 2019.

But Doctor Who fans are an enterprising breed. Or, to coin a phrase, an inventive and invincible species. Indomitable. Which means that, left to our own devices, we've already novelized the missing stories. The New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, in particular, released all of 'em a number of years ago, and still available as free digital downloads. I previously reviewed Paul Scoones' 2000 novelization of Resurrection of the Daleks and found much to praise in his recreation (if not to say, remodeling) of the story.

As for Eric Saward's belated release, available in bookstores a full 20 years after Scoones made his work available to fans, this strikes me as more of a cynical cash grab from a frustrated writer, who at age 74 is probably wondering when he's going to be done with this story, originally written in 1982. He's had over 35 years to think about the highlights and errors in Resurrection, both of which have been endlessly discussed in fandom. He would know which plot holes need to be filled or explained; which scenes are demanding a lush prose adaptation; and which elements need to be smoothed over or deleted.

The name Saward on the spine should inspire confidence. His first novelization, The Visitation, is a fine serious work; his adaptation of The Twin Dilemma an attempt to do something original with its woeful TV cousin; and his book of Attack of the Cybermen is far superior to what was broadcast. So Resurrection, after 35 years, should have given us something as satisfying as Paul Scoones' fan release but with better prose and, at a higher page count, more value.

Instead, what Saward gives us here is a wildly uneven tale, at its best lavishing fine prose on memorable moments from the TV broadcast, at its worst rewriting the story in ways that don't improve clarity, and at its most cynical replacing tension and drama with bizarre stabs at Douglas Adams humor (Adams having been himself dead for the half the time that elapsed between Resurrection's broadcast and its BBC books release).

Like Scoones, Saward sees fit to rearrange the scene order, but, unlike Scoones, doesn't do so to produce added tension or dramatic clarity. Saward keeps the Doctor stuck inside the TARDIS for nearly the first full third of the book. The TV cliffhangers are all buried (both the UK two-part version and the overseas four-part versions) in mid-chapter. We're told that Davros' prison ship is the Vipod Mor, from Saward's radio Who script, Slipback, which is fine if you wanted to spend more time in the Sawardverse, but that only accounts for, like, six of us. The more affecting TV deaths -- the trooper whose face and hands are melted off by Dalek poison gas, and Colonel Archer, whose last words to his assassins are a relieved "Gentleman, you've saved my life!" -- are both utterly absent from the book.

Resurrection is a story with a huge body count, and Saward does at least make some of those deaths count, by staging them the same way that he did on TV. But the TV serial, which was full of memorable set-pieces that never connected up to the rest of the plot (the slave break in the opening scenes, the question of what Stien was doing with them and what was his relationship to Galloway and Lytton, and exactly what the Daleks were after on Earth), sees precisely none of those set-pieces resolved in the book. Saward shuffles around certain moments, places considerable emphasis on Lytton (who, unlike on TV, is already known to the Fifth Doctor when the story opens) and gives a lavish travelogue inside the TARDIS a little more than halfway through the book but never really does bother to explain exactly why Stien and the Daleks are doing what they're doing.

Some of the additions to the book seem self-indulgent. Almost all the continuity references are to Saward's other work, with the word "Terileptils" appearing perhaps more here than it did in his novelization of The Visitation. The Doctor's recollection of his past selves and companions on TV is reduced here to the death of Adric (ground already covered in the Twin Dilemma novelization) and painful memories of the Terileptils.

Not to say that Saward doesn't have his way with prose. There's some really good writing hidden in here. On the other hand, the prose at times borders on self-parody, with the adjectives "egregious" and "inevitable" making little sense in the way that Saward uses them. It also smacks of a rush job, the climax in particular being full of short choppy sentences, most of them full of Saward's characteristic smirk.

Things just get bizarre at the end. The Doctor's final trip through the time corridor is altered to include a never-explained talking cat. And there's a truly strange coda involving Tegan, which is just one of the worst ideas ever.

I like Resurrection on TV and wanted to see a serious book that fixed the more problematic elements from the TV production. Instead, we get a half-hearted, self-parodic rush job, which gives one the sense of Saward flipping off his audience. For the guy who did such lush work with The Visitation and who managed to fix the more glaring problems with his two Colin Baker stories, this one was definitely not worth the 35-year wait.