Written by Terrance Dicks, based on Stephen Harris’ scripts for the 1976 TV serial.

One of the great TV serials gets one of the great novelisations. I get the sense Dicks really enjoyed this one and he’s going the extra mile to provide backstory and details that expand this slightly beyond what we got onscreen. That’s evident from the rare prologue and epilogue, which are Dicks inventions. In the first, Dicks presents readers with the myth of Sutekh written across the stars, explaining how he “blazed a trail of havoc across the cosmos” smashing world after world with his godlike powers until his fellow Osirians cornered him “on an obscure planet called Earth.” The epilogue sees Sarah Jane, safely returned to her 1980 (rather than the devastated alternative version that would result from a triumphant Sutekh), investigating what history has to say about the events of 1911.

This is a very script editorial touch, like Dicks adding back the timey-wimey epilogue in Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, clarifying for readers that history has been safely restored. Elsewhere, Dicks some background to Ibrahim and the Cult of the Black Pyramid, explaining that they were originally tasked by the Osirian “gods” of Egypt to prevent anyone from discovering Sutekh’s prison, that they wiped out Marcus Scarman’s local helpers, and that it was only the unsuspected presence of one of their “gods” within the pyramid that has perverted their mission. I’m just left wishing Dicks had explanations for another couple of script oddities – why did Sutekh bother having all his artefacts transported to Britain when it seems he could just have easily (and more secretly) run his operation from Egypt. And why, when the Osirians are said to have “dome shaped heads”, does Sutekh look like a malevolent whippet?

Nevertheless, it all makes a lot more sense than 2024’s Empire of Death, helped by Dicks leaning fully into MR James horror mode as he describes faces and voices. Sutekh has an “indescribably malignant face”, and his voice, “soft and ferocious at the same time, like that of some great beast” (which is the perfect encapsulation of Gabriel Woolf’s vocal performance). There is a wonderfully chilling moment as Dr Warlock comes face to face with his old friend Marcus Scarman: “Doctor Warlock knew at once that something was terribly wrong. The face was Marcus’s, though shockingly changed, but the voice was not. It was cold, dead, utterly inhuman. Doctor Warlock had the fleeting thought that something was speaking through Marcus’s lips.”. One of Dicks’ best so far. Grade 1.

Next Time: Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters.