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  • Doctor Who: The Space Museum

  • A 1st Doctor novelisation
  • By: Glyn Jones
  • Narrated by: Maureen O'Brien
  • Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
  • 3.8 out of 5 stars (10 ratings)
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Doctor Who: The Space Museum cover art

Doctor Who: The Space Museum

By: Glyn Jones
Narrated by: Maureen O'Brien
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Summary

An unabridged reading of this novelisation of a classic 1965 TV serial featuring the First Doctor, as played on TV by William Hartnell.

The Tardis materialises on what, at first sight, appears to be a dry and lifeless planet serving only as a graveyard for spaceships. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki discover a magnificent museum housing relics from every corner of the galaxy. These have been assembled by the Moroks, a race of cruel conquerors who have invaded the planet Xeros and enslaved its inhabitants.

Upon further exploration the Tardis crew seem to stumble upon the impossible: for suddenly, facing them in an exhibit case, they find...themselves!

Duration: 5 hours approx.

©2016 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2016 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Even duller than the TV serial it's based on

There's a plot that got used rather a lot in Star Trek. The regulars get a vision of the immediate future in which a great cataclysm kills them and/or destroys the Enterprise or whatever. Crucially, the characters have no idea of the events leading up to this cataclysm, so their actions are as likely to cause it as avert it. But they try to avert it anyway, and luckily it turns out they made the right guesses. Which makes you wonder where the vision came from in the first place.

Before Star Trek, Doctor Who did this plot with the four episode serial The Space Museum. Many fans, myself included, consider the first episode a delightful, with weird images and storytelling techniques that support the idea of the TARDIS crew jumping a time track. It also has a great cliffhanger ending.

But after that, apart from a couple of amusing sequences, the remaining three episodes are very dull. The intriguing premise is barely mentioned again. The regulars just get lost in a maze of rooms and corridors while the generic Xerons plot to overthrow their equally generic Morok oppressors.

The book is even more dull. There is no sense of place - locations are outside, room, corridor or cupboard. We get a couple of descriptions of spacecraft in the eponymous museum, but most of the time we're just told there are display cases.

Novelisations often add to what's onscreen, but not here. The "extras" are just padding, Much is made of the fact that the Moroks have translation collars which enable them to speak English, something that was not in the serial, and which sits uncomfortably with the tradition of the TARDIS crew being able to talk to anybody - including the inhabitants of Palestine in the previous serial. (The language issue was addressed onscreen long before this book was written.) Lobos, the Morok governor, finds himself using a lot of Earth expressions (e.g. a red letter day), and wondering why. The intelligent reader/listener is surely going to think, Wouldn't his culure and language have developed equivalent expressions? In fact this book left me craving a good, well-thought-out science fiction story.

Strangely, the time space visualiser, which provides a fun link into the story that follows, does not get a mention in this novelisation, and we don't get the cliffhanger either.

I'm working through some of the novelisations in chronological order (even though the books don't always adhere to the TV order), so this one does come after the superb Doctor Who and the Crusaders. The drop in quality does this book no favours.

Next, The Chase, which has Daleks in, but not Bradley Walsh.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

A tale of Oppression and revolution

Despite the dull title, this story begins with mysteries to be explained, then builds the action to full scale battle.

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