The Ark in Space

by Marter, Ian

  The Doctor adjusted his charred hat to a jaunty angle, and turned to step into the TARDIS. He collided with Harry who, hands firmly thrust into his pockets to avoid the temptation to tamper with anything, was about to enter with Sarah.

  ‘Where do you two think you are going?’ he demanded.

  ‘Oh, you’re bound to need a helping hand down there, Doctor,’ Sarah laughed. ‘You always do…’

  Harry smiled apologetically. ‘The Brigadier did ask me to keep an eye on you, Doctor,’ he said.

  The Doctor frowned, then he motioned them inside. ‘Very well, just this once,’ he agreed grudgingly. ‘But you’d better both put some warm things on one never knows what the weather’s going to be like.’ Sarah and Harry disappeared eagerly inside.

  The Doctor turned to Vira. ‘We shouldn’t be very long,’ he said.

  ‘I shall expect you… soon,’ replied Vira. ‘Meanwhile I must return to the Cryogenic Chamber. The Main Phase is beginning.’

  Sarah and Harry reappeared in the doorway of the TARDIS, clad in waterproofs and Wellington boots.

  ‘Back soon,’ cried the Doctor, waving the jelly-baby bag. He broke off a piece from the melted contents and threw the bag to Vira. ‘Good luck,’ he called.

  Vira caught the bag neatly. ‘Good… luck…?’ she repeated the unfamiliar phrase to herself, puzzled.

  An extraordinary groaning sound made her look up. A bright yellow light was flashing on top of the strange blue box into which the Doctor and his companions had entered… As she watched, the box faded and gradually disappeared.

  Suddenly Vira smiled in recognition. ‘Yes… yes,’ she cried. ‘Good luck…’

  She tentatively broke off a small piece from the sticky lump in the bag and put it into her mouth. She grimaced, then she smiled and nodded in approval at the taste. She looked at the empty space: where the TARDIS had stood. ‘Good luck, Doctor… and thank you,’ she murmured.

  She turned and left. In the Cryogenic Chamber, her people were awakening in their hundreds. At last her task had begun…

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE ARK IN SPACE

  Between the Lines

  First published on 10 May 1977, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space was the first novelisation written by Ian Marter, who had co-starred in the original television serial in January and February 1975. Marter had made his last appearance as Harry Sullivan in December 1975, since when Elisabeth Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith had also left the series; a month before this novel was published, new companion Leela had already been seen in her third story, ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ at the close of Doctor Who’s fourteenth season.

  Ian Marter had a reputation among Doctor Who fans in the 1970s and 1980s as a writer whose books expanded extensively on the scripts he was adapting. In fact, this novelisation remains very faithful to ‘The Ark in Space’, keeping close to the characterisations depicted on screen, reusing the majority of the dialogue unchanged and adding just a handful of new scenes, the most significant being at the very end of the book.

  What is noticeable in Ian Marter’s novelisation is its greatly increased sci-fiction/horror tone. As Steven Moffat points out in his introduction to this edition, the ‘hinted-at horror’ of the television production is transformed into full-on body horror in print, most notably in describing Noah’s fate.

  Marter also takes one of the most futuristic settings the series had portrayed by that time and steps that up, too. There is quite a lot of jargon and mysterious gadgetry (one item, the ‘Bennet Oscillator’, was named after the story’s director, Rodney Bennet) in the TV story. Marter makes everything sound that bit more technical and out of the ordinary. The range of technical equipment in Chapter 1 alone includes ‘Helmic Orientators’ (‘helmic regulators’ on TV), a ‘Gyroscopic Field Governor Circuit’, a ‘Temperature Stabiliser’, ‘Oxygen Valves Servo Backup Circuits’ (‘oxygen valve servo-mechanism’ on TV), and the OMDSS. ‘The Organic Matter Detector Surveillance System’ (of course) was referred to on screen as ‘some sort of automatic guard’.

  Marter’s novel goes on to present ‘Biocryogenic Processing’, ‘Alpha waves’, a ‘Solar Reservoir’ (‘solar stacks’ on TV), ‘ultra high and low frequency oscillations’ that confuse microbes, paralysators, an ‘Abeyance Unit’, ‘Therm Shelters’, a ‘Gravity Static Field’, a ‘Tachyon Propulsion System’ (‘granovox turbines’ on TV; Marter didn’t have exclusive rights to technobabble in this story), and ‘plasma stabilisers’ (‘rocket stabilisers’ on screen).

  Along the way, Harry Sullivan is shown ‘mechanically’ translating terms like ‘Balaenoptera musculus’ (Blue Whale) and identifying the Eumenes as a species of wasp – on television, he recognises ‘Eumenes’ as the name of a Royal Navy frigate.

  The ‘shambling, eccentric’ Fourth Doctor is contrasted with this bright technological future, and his dialogue is occasionally a little more formal and old-fashioned than Tom Baker’s tends to be on screen: he’s given to calling Sarah ‘my dear’, for example, and rarely uses contractions like ‘isn’t’. He makes use of a pocket magnet, a magnifying glass and an ‘ancient brass ear trumpet’, which eventually allows Marter to write the line ‘The Doctor immediately took out his ear trumpet’. The Doctor’s description of the satellite as ‘a doughnut with an eclair stuck through the middle and connected to it by several chocolate fingers’ is another of Marter’s inventions for the novel.

  Harry is quick to draw a comparison between the satellite and Noah’s Ark in Chapter 2, slightly undercutting the unveiling of Noah and the ‘amusement’ of his name in the next chapter. Commander Noah loses his original name (Lazar) but gains a beard, while the other human inhabitants are unchanged from their television counterparts. The system of job titling suggested by the term ‘Medtech’ on TV is extended slightly with the introduction of ‘Technops’, who were simply technicians in the original.

  The satellite itself is known as Space Station Nerva in ‘The Ark in Space’, and its original designation is revealed as Nerva Beacon in ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ later in Season 12. Marter renames it ‘Terra Nova’ (meaning New Earth). The Doctor says here that it is a ‘Centrifugal Gravity Satellite’, and its various areas and chambers are more extensively named than they were on screen, notably the ‘Cincture Structure’. There are also ‘moving tracks’ introduced in Chapter 2, which would probably have been beyond Doctor Who’s budget when the serial was made in 1974.

  The monsters of the story, the Wirrn, are very slightly renamed as ‘Wirrrn’ in the novel (although the back cover of the original edition uses the ‘Wirrn’ spelling), and the way Marter introduces the word hints at it being less a name than part of a faltering attempt to assimilate human speech: ‘We are in… Wirrrn my mind… the Wirrrn will absorb… the humans…’ Their breeding colonies are specified as Andromeda Gamma Epsilon rather than just Andromeda, and there is no mention of them feeding on ‘senseless herbivores’ as there is in Episode 4, but their story is otherwise unchanged. Marter’s descriptions of them and their hatching, however, are considerably more lurid and graphic than was attainable (or permissible) on TV at the time.

  Marter worked from Robert Holmes’s scripts and restores occasional lines of dialogue that were cut during rehearsal and recording of the television episodes. At one point, Harry assures Noah that the Doctor is ‘an absolute wizard with bits of wire and things’, a line originally scripted for Episode 2 but unused. In its place, a couple of scenes later, but absent from the novel, is Harry’s declaration that the Doctor is ‘a first-class boffin’. Also missing here – despite being present in the shooting script – is the Doctor telling Vira that Harry is only qualified to work on sailors.

  Marter’s more significant additions to the story effectively begin in Chapter 4 with Noah donning a ‘heavy protective suit’ and helmet before his fatal encounter with the Wirrrn. While the onscreen Noah, in regular Nerva uniform, is an easier target for the Wirrn, the novel’s Noah is doomed by his suit, which prevents him evading the Wirrrn
’s attack. The suit’s gradual destruction, with bits of it scattered through the satellite, mirrors Noah’s own transformation throughout Chapter 6. As on TV, that mutation begins with his hand, something the Doctor spots and comments on immediately in Chapter 4.

  That encounter leaves the Doctor stunned by Noah’s paralysator. On screen, the Doctor simply revives from this, annoyed that he’s been cut off mid-sentence and grumbling about stun guns. Marter replaces this with a slapstick sequence in which Sarah loses her balance and grabs Harry, and the pair of them knock the Doctor into some exposed live circuitry, so that he is revived by the electric shock.

  Also in Chapter 4, the Doctor makes little effort to persuade Libri to pursue and subdue Noah; instead, he hypnotises him with a pocket watch. When Libri catches up with Noah, the Commander’s physical struggle against the Wirrrn influence is immediately obvious, so there is little of the televised exchange in which Noah intimidates his subordinate into surrendering his weapon.

  There is a celebrated scene in Episode 4 in which the Doctor provokes Sarah into completing her journey through the Ark’s conduits by calling her a ‘stupid, foolish girl’ and claiming he knew she’d let them down. Marter slightly expands this scene, and also foreshadows it with Harry’s Morse code message of patronising encouragement in Chapter 7. Aside from that, Harry’s dialogue in the novel is generally a lot less old-fashioned and chauvinistic, so Sarah’s threat to spit in his eye if he persists in calling her ‘old girl’ is omitted from the novel. Instead, in Chapter 6, Sarah manages ‘an unorthodox but effective rugger tackle’, something never attempted by Elisabeth Sladen on screen.

  She also, in Chapter 7, manages to distract a Wirrrn by pulling faces at it. This whole sequence is considerably more complex than what is shown in Episode 4, and ends more gruesomely, with Sarah falling backwards into the rotting remains of the Wirrrn Queen, ‘shivering with nausea and choking from the acrid fumes’.

  When Ian Marter wrote this adventure, it was quite common for the Target range to rework stories so they would function as self-contained adventures, rather than as part of a series. Companion Jo Grant is introduced as a new character in two separate books, and the Third Doctor is suffering from a gunshot wound at the start of one adaptation, despite being fit and well at the end of the preceding novel. Something similar happens in Doctor Who and the Ark in Space. The televised story is the first in a sequence that sees the Doctor, Sarah and Harry travelling without the TARDIS, eventually returning to Nerva by Time Ring, having previously been hijacked mid-transmat by a Time Lord and, before that, beaming down to Earth from Nerva. Target had already published adaptations of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ by Terrance Dicks, which preserve the Time Ring continuity of the TV stories. Marter, however, substitutes a regular departure in the TARDIS, even though their destination and mission remains the same – to work on the transmat equipment so Vira can transport the humans back to Earth. This leads to the slight oddity of the Doctor apparently being surprised that Sarah and Harry intend to leave in the TARDIS with him, with dialogue that makes a lot more sense on television, when he’s about to travel by matter transmission. As a result, when Marter came to adapt the next story, ‘The Sontaran Experiment’, a year and a half later, and needed to ensure continuity with the surrounding stories as well as with his own novelisation, he had to invent a scene in which the TARDIS is accidentally transported back to Nerva.

  Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment very briefly features a bag of ‘shrivelled jelly babies’. Alongside Lycett, there is a little-noted casualty of the Wirrrn attack while the Doctor is linked to the Wirrrn Queen: his jacket pocket is damaged by a laser gun. The paper bag is scorched and its contents melted into a congealed mess, the only time in Doctor Who’s history that the Doctor’s jelly babies suffered such an ignominious fate.

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  Published in 2012 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group Company

  First published in 1977 by Wyndham Publications Ltd.

  Novelisation copyright © Ian Marter 1977

  Original script © Robert Holmes 1975

  Introduction © Steven Moffat 2012

  The Changing Face of Doctor Who and About the Authors © Justin Richards 2012

  Between the Lines © Steve Tribe 2012

  BBC, DOCTOR WHO and TARDIS (word marks, logos and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

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  ISBN 978 1 849 90476 6

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