Doctor Who -Daleks: The Mutation of Time is the novelization of the second half of the 12-part TV Doctor Who 'The Dalekss' Master Plan'. (The first half is covered in the novelization, Doctor Who - Mission to the Unknown. Our narrators of this First Doctor adventure are again Peter Purves (who played Steven Taylor), and Jean Marsh (who played Sara Kingdom, with Nicholas Briggs providing the voices of the Daleks.

If the first half started out with a tense situation involving death and a fate worse than death, this half starts out with comedy. The Doctor, Sara, and Jean land in Hollywood during the early motion pictures era. Their first problem comes from saving a young woman tied to a sawmill. It gets bigger after that. At one point the Doctor and Steven find themselves part of a Keystone Kops short. (Do look up the original Keystone Kops shorts. Their level of incompetence is truly inspiring.) ( )

Good conclusion but the silly bits in the middle hurt the tone. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1026018.html?#cutid3

The Daleks' Master Plan is simply too long to constrain inside a single pair of covers (at least at Target length), so Peel wrote it up as two separate novels, though you would be well advised to read Doctor Who - Mission to the Unknown first. Here again we have a grand panorama of Stuff Going On: the Doctor's compatriot, the Meddling Monk, reappears; Mavic Chen passes from hubris to nemesis; the Doctor must accept another death among his closest circle. Peel's treatment of the second half of the story takes slightly more liberties with the version as broadcast, mostly for good reason: the breach of the Fourth Wall at the end of episode 7 is removed, we get a bit more information as to what happens to everyone else after the Doctor leaves, and we get a Steven/Sara spark that will gladden the hearts of Hartnell-era shippers (including the assertion that they spent months together in the Tardis). He does the complex narrative more than justice. ( )