Download Now Doctor Who: Ghost Light Outlined By Marc Platt Supplied As Electronic Format

this whole book I kept thinking to myself, "I can't tell if this is really bad or really good, " I'm going with really mediocre, Like the original serial on which it is based, this novelization had the potential to be one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever, The core story is there, and it's good, But the book feels like someone took the script which had probably already been bastardized and tried to make it into something it wasn't, There main culprits here are the characters' thoughts, which we aren't privy to in the serial, They hint at something more than is shown but unfortunately feel like they're just hung on the husk bad story pun, sorry of the edited script, Still, having finished the book and never feeling bored by it, I'm pretty ambivalent, Ghost Light is a psychedelic tale about transformation, The Doctor influences his companion Ace as evolution unfolds around them in a tense, dramaticth century house inhabited by an alien survey team who have pretensions to become human.
Light, the archvillain of the story, is something quite unlike anything else ever seen in Doctor Who, This novelisation captures the horror of the script and allows us the pointofview of many of the characters, thus enabling us to better understand a dense storyline with dialogue that sounds like it was written on LSD.
Possibly the most bizarre Doctor Who story ever written, I remember this episode from when I was a child and even than I found it odd, It is as strange as the haunted mansion featured in the story, The story as told in this book is just as out there as the tv episode although I did like it, Ace and theth Doctor is one of my favorite duo's from when I watched the original Who reruns as a kid, They always had a found family feel about them, That aspect of their relationship shows up really well in this book, This was one of the weirdest Doctor Who books ever, also very hard to follow at times, However it still holds the feel and charm of the Classic Series and was a wonderful read,

The POV was constantly changing, but I enjoyed that, It allowed me to get inside the characters head in a way you can't when it's on screen, The peeks inside Ace and the Doctor's heads were my favorite, their thoughts on each other are often very sweet and family like, Perhaps my favorite line was a scene where Ace was thinking about the Doctor and thought, “The Doctor was the first person for a long time who had even bothered to accept her for what she was: a delinquent.
”

The Doctor and Ace enjoy some playful bickering not shown on screen, such as this line, after Ace is told to find something Victorian to wear,
“And Alice he called after them,
Im not wearing a bustle! came the retort,
At least try for a bit of parlourcred!”

Also captured much better than in the series is Ace's internal struggle, She's very afraid of being back in Perivale and especially at Gabriel Chase, and isn't sure if she can still trust the Doctor, When she finally confronts him after learning she's in Gabriel Chase she runs away from him, “She hadnt realized she could hate the Doctor so much, He tried to take her arm, but she pulled clear, " After quite a while, she finally seems to forgive him, and even confesses to him what happened in the house when she went there in thes, and the Doctor is shows an amazing amount of comfort to her.


“No, Control! Dont do it! Thats what I did in! Please! Dont do it again!
The Doctor caught her in his arms, This was not what he had rehearsed in his head, Ace. You didnt tell me.
Youre not my probation officer! You dont have to know everything!
Oh, how he sometimes wished that was true, Ace. He cradled her gently. " “She buried her head in the Doctors embrace, ” “The Doctor gently rocked Ace and hushed her tears, Its all right, Ace'. ”

The Doctor himself is captured through the text as the wonderful scheming manipulator he is, while maintaining the part of him that honestly cares deeply for Ace, He continually thinks about her, and before she discovers where they are, a few comments he made caused me to think he may feel a little guilt at bringing her there.
After he harasses her to tell him about the house, “In at the deep end again, he thought guiltily, but the flood of complaints and abuse never came, When he looked, Ace was already fast asleep in her chair, Poor Ace, he said aloud, and he tucked her discarded dinnerjacket around her, ” It is no secret that several stories of the later years of the original series of Doctor Who suffered from edits made for reasons of running time rather then plot necessity.
Ghost Light was one of the best examples of this and it does indeed remain a Doctor Who story that raises a lot of questions, Some of those questions through have been answered and have been for some time, The Target novelization of the story, published inand novelized by Marc Platt the same writer who wrote the television story, shows that in some cases television stories work better on the printed page.


What shines through the most is the plot and the details of it lost in the television version due to the aforementioned editing done to it, A novel or rather novelization be definition gives the author a chance to let the reader get inside the heads of character's and also to allow for more depth in terms of the plot.
Ghost Light's novelization does exactly that, Platt doesn't do any huge in depth backgrounds about character's but he gives them depth by adding little pieces here and there, This means that things that perhaps weren't quite clear in television version such as who Light really is, what's he doing and why he sets out to do what he attempts to do towards the end are all brought into greater focus.
There's also the neat addition of a couple of new scenes in the first chapter that help set up the story and a major plot revelation that comes much later in the story.
The result is a story that is much more coherent,

What also shines through is the characterization, Ghost Light has the distinction of being one of the best acted of the original series stories or at least in my humble opinion anyway so that fact alone might be surprising.
But what the novelization reveals is that not only was much of that on the page all ready but also something else, From Josiah Samuel Smith to the Reverend Ernest Matthews to Nimrod, Control and the mysterious Light itself this novelized version of Ghost Light gives Platt a chance to shine, This is large part thanks to his descriptions for the characters, their mannerisms and the occasional change of point of view to them at just the right moment for dramatic effect.
Perhaps though the character's who come through the most are the Doctor and especially Ace, This is very much an Ace story and from the new material in chapter one right through to the very end that fact is in abundance, The result is that, despite the complexity of the plot, this remains very much a character driven story,

Yet despite all that, it moves at a good pace Those additional bits here and there have some interesting consequences, The big one is that almost half the page count is taken up with just getting through what was the first part of the television story, This is because of that Platt, like in the television version, builds up the atmosphere of Gabriel Chase and then introduces a bewildering array of character's within it, Yet once Ace goes underground as it were the story really starts moving and building up the tension for the dramatic reveal of Light before the Doctor deals with the madness that seems to consume everyone around him.
In that way Platt uses the cliffhangercentered nature of his scripts to his advantage here with the novelization being filled with perhaps more mystery and tension then its television counterpart.


Novelizations offer the opportunity to expand, if not improve upon, the original script that it is based on, From his expansion of elements of the story to rich characterizations and its pacing, Marc Platt's novelization of Ghost Light does all of that, In fact, it does more then that, It shows that, despite being a story originally written for another medium, Ghost Light is better served as a novel, sitelink livejournal. com/. htmlcutidreturnreturnAfter enjoying most of Marc Platt's other work, including his novelisation of Battlefield, I was looking forward to reading this, I'm afraid I was disappointed, Once again, I realise just how vital the direction and acting of the TV version can be and the intensely visual and subtle original just loses most of its vitality and mystery on the printed page.
In particular, we lose the striking visual appearance of Nimrod the Neanderthal and of Light himself, who comes across as just some random and rather dull megalomaniac with super powers.
returnreturnScrapes through the Bechdel test: in most of the Ace/Gwendolen scenes they are talking about Josias and/or the Doctor, and the one exception is when they fight, and are then interrupted by Control.
A fight is barely a conversation, but I suppose it will have to do, Mrs/Lady Pritchard appears to communicate with the maidservants by telepathy, The Doctor Who episode "Ghost Light" is known for being a bit hard to follow upon a first viewing, The story was compressed and too much left out of the broadcast, With multiple viewings, especially in context of Ace's total character arc, it makes more sense, I had been told the novelization fills in a lot of the gaps, I suppose it does, but the story remains one of the stranger, but certainly one the most ambitious, of any classic Doctor Who tales, Props to Marc Platt for not following the same old formula, Thinking about it and I have been recently, I think Ghost Light is possibly one of the most important Dr Who stories ever written, It's been a while since I saw the TV episodes to the point where I've pretty much forgotten what happens, so now seemed like a good time to delve back into this, one of my favourite eras of Dr Who, looking this time at the novelisations, which for some stories this, Battlefield, The Curse of Fenric and Rememberance of the Daleks are considered the definitive, 'Directors Cut' versions.
The shape and the structure of it predicate the New Adventures books which started being published a year later, and without these for which Mark Gatiss, Russell T, Davies, Paul Cornell and various other writers who went on to write New Who on TV I don't think Dr Who would ever have come back to TV,
It's a beautiful little puzzle box of a thing, perhaps not immediately understandable on first viewing as three episodes of TV, but the novelisation improves on this massively, giving us background and fleshing out characters that don't get much focus as I recall in the episodes.
This isn't a perfect process however, there's still several instances of characters doing things without any real motivation, seemingly just because the plot requires them to be in a certain place at a certain time.
This is the only thing stopping me giving this five, as otherwise this is up there in the top, . . five Dr Who stories ever made, In my opinion. Took somewhat longer to read than expected partly as a result of needed a reformat, This novelisation of a famously opaque and muddled story it's not added some detail and probably makes things a little clearer, I now want to rewatch the televised story so that's maybe a criterion of success! It's not quite as epic as his novelization of "Battlefield", but Marc Platt does sterling work transforming a dense visual text into denseyetaccessible prose.
I have a special liking for the extra spin he adds to the Doctor's final line in the story,
Perivale,

A column of smoke rises from the blazing ruins of a forgotten, decaying mansion,

Perivale,

In the sleepy, rural parish of Greenford Parva, Gabriel Chase is by far the most imposing edifice, The villagers shun the grim house, but the owner, the reclusive and controversial naturalist Josiah Samuel Smith, receives occasional visitors,

The Reverend Ernest Mathews, for instance, dean of Mortarhouse College, has travelled from Oxford to refute Smiths blasphemous theories of evolution,

And in a deserted upstairs room, the Doctor and Ace venture from the TARDIS to explore the Victorian mansion

Who or what is Josiah Smith What terrible secrets does his house conceal And why does Ace find everything so frightening familiar Few stories better exemplify the newfound ambition of lates Doctor Who than Ghost Light.
There's a surfeit of ideas and influences Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Darwin, Richard O'Brien, and if they don't all quite come together, you can at least see they're all pushing in the same direction: Ghost Light wants to be a story about class and religion and personal demons, and all the rest of it all at once.
It's realised what Doctor Who can do and is so excited: it's also a story about evolution versus stagnation, Which is pretty fitting. Ghost Light is the second story of Seasonthe classic era's final season and is potentially the classic era's most enigmatic story, The plot sees the Seventh Doctorand Ace arrive at a Victorian house that Ace has destroyed one hundred years in the future, The main thrust of thestory has to do with the theme of evolution, It's a good story, and the novel fleshes it out, I've heard that the novel clarifies some elements of the TV version, though I didn't really find that the case the TV story isn't terribly confusing to me, That said, this is still an enjoyable, wellwritten novel that's worth reading if you like McCoy's Doctor, In the DVD extras on the "Ghost Light" episode, which was the most confusing Doctor Who I've ever seen, it was stated that much was cut from the story to meet time constraints and that the book version told the story better.
I do think it is a good story overall, but there are just too many characters and the narrative point of view shifts in jarring and confusing ways, A decent quick read, but it could still be better, .