Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow Part 55

Chapter 24.Glospin continues his rounds of the House, stirring it up and putting in a bad word for the Doctor to anyone he chances across.

Leela gets her kit off, but this is not a gratuitous "Nyssa gets her kit off" moment, just our n.o.ble savage getting back to basics.

The ghostly guard captain caught in the transmat chamber is the forerunner of Inspector MacKenzie of Scotland Yard, trapped like a display specimen in a drawer in Ghost Light. The captain's name is p.r.o.nounced Re-dred. He's an ancestral cousin to those other Chancel ery commanders Hilred and Andred, al three from the House of Redlooms, which obviously has militaristic blood programmed in its loom.

I love the idea of an alien housekeeper sifting through the contents of a bag from Marks and Spencer's food hal .

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Cousin Luton is a name in the spirit of Robert Holmes, whose own track record for silly names is justly legendary.

Apart from Runcible, Unstoffe, Glitz and Dibber, I love periphery characters like Nellie Gussett and the wonderful denizens of Megropolis 3, Singe and Hackett. Holmes was truly great at bringing his locations and characters to life with bizarre language, quirky personal details and references to unseen events, people and places. He could create whole worlds in a couple of sentences and had a gloriously evil sense of humour. Hence Cousin Luton's suitably gruesome and Holmesian (I hope) offstage death.

This scene with the fish and the chimney is seriously surreal, as if the Doctor's homecoming has set off the sort of unnatural portents that usual y foreshadow disasters in Shakespeare: yawning graves and fiery warriors in the clouds who drizzle blood in Julius Caesar, or lamentings in the air and clamouring night birds in Macbeth. Or maybe it's a miracle? Natural y, the Doctor has a perfectly sound explanation for it all. How boring! We're Doctor Who fans. We'd much rather believe the weird version.

Chapter 25.Ocean cones: The gravity of Earth's moon pulls the sea towards it, thus creating the tides, so if the gravity of Gallifrey's moon, Pazithi Gallifreya, was far stronger, it might create huge mountains of water that surge majestically round the planet.

The legendary premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) is one of the first places I would head for if I had a TARDIS. The riot that erupted during the first performance of Nijinsky's ballet set to Stravinsky's tumultuous pounding music, is more famous than the actual ch.o.r.eography which only ever had eight performances. Yet only very recently, the Kirov brought to London a reconstruction of the original bal et, drawn back together from original designs, pictures and the memories of dancers. It was thrilling, majestic and quite gorgeous to look at in an arty pagan tribal sort of way. Most of the critics, true to form, were very sniffy.

If there had been a Season 27 on TV with Sylvester, Ace would have only had two more stories. It was planned that the Doctor would enrol her at the Academy on Gallifrey as a kick up the backside to the Time Lords. This was the culmination of all those other excursions he'd taken her on in an effort to sort herself out. Ace would have initial y resisted the idea, the Doctor would have reluctantly bowed to her wishes, and then touchingly, because she'd finally won a victory over his manipulating ways, she'd have done it for him anyway. The story, set in sixties London, also featured the Ice Warriors, but it never had a proper t.i.tle. I never got further than a basic storyline before the axe finally fell. The story acquired the name Icetime in the projected season 27 hypothesised by the Doctor Who Monthly.

Through this chapter, as the Doctor repeatedly refuses to go downstairs to meet formally with his long-lost Cousins, we hear the distant dinner gong sounding like a death knell. Three strikes and you're out. Final y the House, like a much tested parent, loses patience with its offspring and resorts to a capital punishment of its own bizarre devising.

Chapter 26.(...Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.) Yet another sneaky Hamlet reference in the chapter t.i.tle. But it's the Danish play in reverse, as the Doctor gets targeted in the role of villain and a piece of theatre comes a bit too close for comfort. Or so Glospin hopes.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing articles for such luminaries as Stephen James Walker, David Howe and Gary Russel , I used to say that the Fifth Doctor was the only one you'd feel comfortable inviting home for tea. The rest would be an absolute (and joyous) nightmare. That was years before Sylvester arrived, but here he is proving the point. This is the Doctor as subversive, the way I like him. No wonder his Cousins find him so deeply aggravating and embarra.s.sing. He's perfectly capable of behaving himself, but like the little boy in the d.u.c.h.ess's lullaby, "he only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases." Even the Fifth Doctor isn't so house-trained these days.

Gallifrey's most dysfunctional family: Surely the Doctor can't be comparing Springfield's finest family to his own?

Marge may have the equivalent of Innocet's hair, but otherwise the Simpsons are paragons of virtue in comparison.

I wanted the Family to have something real y interesting for this festive dinner. That's probably why Ace, sorry Dorothee, went to Marks and Spencers.

Hoorah for Satthralope. No enemy of the Doctor could ever set about him the way she does. It's that family thing again.

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The little (or rather big) puppet play is another chance for a resume of the history of Ra.s.silon's coming to power, with guest appearances from the other two members of his ruling triumvirate, Omega and ...the Other. The play is a hangover from Gallifrey's more cultural y exotic past, before the Time Lords' grey bureaucratic, civil service mentality set in. It's all deeply symbolic and colourful in a heady mix of styles from Kabuki and Bunraku puppet theatre to Morris dancing and the York Mystery plays. I've filled out some of the stage details since the first performance in the book version, including an extra dance routine and some more pointed audience reaction. Next year it visits the Edinburgh Festival, before a short season at Sadler's Wells.

Chapter 27.Just for a change, this chapter shares a t.i.tle with one of Alan Ayckbourn's three The Norman Conquests plays - another farce set in a dining room.

Captain Redred makes his transmat journey from the Deathday to the present in what seems to him like less than no time, but for everyone else is 673 Gallifreyan years. By the time he gets a grasp on what's happened to him, he'll probably need counsel ing.

Satthralope's starter course of fish tongues links back to the Old Time. According to Time's Crucible, the line of Pythias, ancient seers who once ruled Gal ifrey, existed on an exclusive diet of fish tongues. The final Pythia threw a bowl of tongues at an envoy of Ra.s.silon who plotted her overthrow. Although the Pythia's followers left Gallifrey after her death and founded the Sisterhood of nearby Karn, the role of wise women at home is preserved and honoured by the Housekeepers, who in some small way, still echo the once great power of their predecessors.

The Doctor's tirade against his family and account of his adventures, resurfaced in revised form in the Probability Tree scene in Auld Mortality. It's part of the Doctor's credo. His raison d'etre was to see the rich diversity of the Universe. Ironical y, this freedom is exactly what was denied to the rest of his family as a result of his actions.

The 'Happy Name Day' moment was another occasion when the characters took over the story. Ace, sorry Dorothee, just climbed up on her chair and started singing in defiant support of her best friend. I thought that was very sweet. It also suggests that the Doctor's chosen companions are his true family, rather than the motley crew of Cousins with whom he got lumbered at birth.

The Vatican was obviously one of Robert Holmes's sources for the Time Lords - witness al those Cardinals, and the outgoing President in Deadly a.s.sa.s.sin, who is a dead ringer for the old Pope John. So I thought it only appropriate that the correct term for the severing of links between Lungbarrow and the Matrix should be an Excommunication. When I was writing Auld Mortality, I was tempted to let the alternative denizens of Skaro, the Thaleks, in their brief cameo appearance, betray themselves as quasi-religious fanatics by murderously chanting Excommunicate! But Nick Briggs, probably wisely, wouldn't let me.

Chapter 28.The "Yemaya and Yemaya etc..." quote, coming to Chris's head live from the Doctor's overloaded brain, is a mangled misquote of the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" line from Macbeth. Yemaya 4 was the planet visited by the Doctor, Chris, Roz and Benny in Kate Orman's novel Sleepy.

The most obvious ways to get the TARDIS down from the dustweb are either to throw things at it or get a ladder.

Natural y the Doctor comes up with his own inimitable solution - a sort of victory by provocation, entirely in character for both him and the antagonised House. Result: Doctor 1, House 0.

The Great Hal at Lungbarrow is big enough for several scenes to be going on around it at once. So in this section, the spotlight keeps switching from one group to another as the inmates of the House gauge their reactions to the Doctor's revelations. Very theatrical in a "compare and contrast" sort of way. You throw the Doctor into a bucket of water and watch al his Cousins and their agendas bobbing and slapping about on the spreading ripples.

The claw marks on the TARDIS paintwork were acquired on the Trans-Amazon Express and belong to one of the Loups-garoux. The Who production office had already rejected my two-part storyline for a werewolf story during the Davison era. But why drop a good idea when it might be useful one day?

There was a little bonding scene between Badger and Ace in the original script, but redundant here. The start of it ran: (ACE IS SHOWING HER JACKET TO BADGER. SHE POINTS TO ONE OF THE BADGES.) ACE: And this is Houston s.p.a.ce Centre. I haven't been there either.

(BADGER STUDIES THE BADGES UP AND DOWN THE SLEEVE. THEN HE LOOKS UP) 237.

BADGER: (PROUDLY) Then you are a Badger too.

(HE STARTS TO BOOM WITH LAUGHTER AND ACE JOINS IN.).

ACE: Yeah. Both Badgers!

(THE DOCTOR SMILES HALF-HEARTEDLY THROUGH HIS EMBARRa.s.sMENT.).

Chapter 29.The book version of the original studio-bound script of Lungbarrow meant a big expansion of the story. It was easy enough to add extra bits in Paris, or at the Gallifreyan Capitol, or anywhere in The Past, but the main thrust of the story still remained trapped inside the House. It's not unlike Evil Of The Daleks. All the 1866 part of that story is confined to Maxtible's house, apart from the brief location moment when Victoria stares from a window at the unreachable world outside, before being led away by her Dalek persecutors, just as Chris stares from the window of Lungbarrow in Chapter 5. (Yes, I know Evil has scenes in an outside stable, but that's a studio set, so it doesn't count.) In Ghost Light, the mad explorer Redvers sees the house of Gabriel Chase as a jungle, and by Part 3, the place is actually becoming one. I tried to find as many ways of bringing the outside into the House of Lungbarrow as possible: most of the building is a forest, seen at different levels, with the attic as the dense woodland canopy. And now we have a stream and a black lagoon. The House has become a domain for the living furniture: a realm in which the House, as a living ent.i.ty, is gradual y withdrawing into itself with its own denizens and creatures. Trapped inside, the Gallifreyan inhabitants are tolerated, but are becoming almost like intruders.

When Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch first outlined their ideas about the mythos of Gallifrey to me, I was quite shocked. I didn't sleep that night, partly because the Doctor's mystery was ingrained for me as something that should never be touched. It was heresy, but I also knew they were right. We already knew too much. Andrew and Ben weren't taking anything away, because so much had already gone. They were deepening and revitalising the mystery. I'd been having the same thoughts. That's where the idea for the Doctor's Family and House came from, but I'd been too scared to send the idea in. So this story is an amalgam of all our ideas, additionally influenced by what so many other people added in the New Adventures and by the looming Paul McGann movie, which in so many ways, meant the end of the world as we knew it. Even so, most of the detail is mine.

The little exchange between Dorothee and Leela deliberately lays out fandom's conflicting att.i.tude towards the great question: Who is the Doctor? Leela firmly believes the Doctor's mystery should be preserved. Dorothee agrees absolutely with her, but is dying to find out anyway. But for all Leela's protestations, it was she who went digging up the Doctor's past in the first place.

I love the line "She folded away her thoughts in the dark." It's exactly inside Innocet's meticulously thorough and tidy character. It's also incredibly sad and touching. She's the only Cousin who really cares about the Doctor. I tried to keep this scene absolutely simple, but I cried a lot when I wrote it.

This is the Seventh Doctor's final quest before a new beginning. In full view of his friends, he's beset by both his Family and his past. And if that isn't enough, his own sanctuary and real home, the TARDIS, is being violated too.

As his despair mounts, he returns to his roots, back to the room where he grew up. But he doesn't find a solution there. It isn't back to the womb at all. Instead, facing his own fear like the Third Doctor in the Cave of Crystal, he lands up going even further. Back before the womb, like travelling beyond the edge of s.p.a.ce into speculation.

The Doctor refers to Professor Thripsted's Flora and Fauna of the Universe in The Sun Makers.

Innocet's fate in the original tv storyline was quite different. She was crushed whilst saving the Doctor's life, when the room in which he was trapped was ground to dust by the enraged House. And that was where she stopped. It wouldn't have been fair to the actress to have resurrected her in another persona for the last half episode.

Here we are back at the Prologue. The women crouch round the figure of the Doctor. The President, the Tearaway, the Cousin and the Warrior: Romana, Dorothee, Innocet and Leela, all holding hands as they stare into the dark abyss of the Doctor's mind.

Chapter 30.On route, the journey back into the Doctor's past takes in each traumatic moment of regeneration that ended his former lives, and then we're back at the gates of the Past and Future. The old vulture with the eyepatch is (or was) the Pythia who once ruled Gallifrey. Unable to see the future anymore, she tore out her own eye and replaced it with that of the severed head of the Sphinx of distant Thule, which she had stolen from the Academia Library at the Capitol. She's none too fond of the Doctor, who had an inadvertent hand in her downfall.

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The Doctor's "Is that you, Sybil?" is the Emperor Claudius's greeting to a vision of the Oracle of Delphi as he lies dying in the TV version of I, Claudius. And the Rose Woman is the G.o.ddess of Time who reappears on and off through the New Adventures series. The Doctor is her chosen champion.

In Deadly a.s.sa.s.sin, Chancellor Goth confesses that he first met the Master on Tersurus. That planet has probably been under the aegis of Gallifrey for millennia, as both Ra.s.silon in Time's Crucible and the Other in this story, have Tersurran servants. Their word Meyopapa seems to be a term of respect, the Tersurran equivalent of the Malayan word tuan tuan or the Swahili or the Swahili bwana bwana. Tersurus is also where the Children in Need mini-epic The Curse of Fatal Death is set.

Susan at last! She must be very young at this point, although we were never told how long she and the Doctor had been travelling together before they landed up on Earth in 1963. But at this point, her grandfather isn't the Doctor at all. There are shades of Verdi's Rigoletto here. This other grandfather keeps Susan hidden away, just as the Duke of Mantua's hunch-backed jester, who was party to al sorts of his master's debaucheries, hid his own innocent daughter from reality - with particularly blood-curdling results.

This shady figure, whoever he is, has obviously been on Gallifrey long enough to become a grandparent, although we don't know to which of Susan's parents he is the father. He may not even be Gal ifreyan himself. Who knows?

And while Susan was the last child born alive before the Pythia's dying curse rendered Gallifrey a sterile world, we learned in Time's Crucible that Ra.s.silon's own unborn daughter was a victim of the curse. Susan's father died on one of Ra.s.silon's bow-ships, which implies he was involved in the Vampire Wars. Meanwhile, on the alternative Gallifrey of Auld Mortality, where the Doctor definitely is Susan's natural grandfather, we hear that Susan's mother thought he was a bad influence on his grandchild.

Has it occurred to anyone else that all the characters on the Sandminer in Robots of Death are dressed as chess pieces? How many chess games have appeared in Doctor Who? (That's another one for the Forum.) Ra.s.silon's multi-layered game within a game within a game etc is certainly the Mother of all Chessboards, knocking out Mr Spock's game by several extra dimensions. It sounds dangerously addictive. Meanwhile, the Other's words about being "a p.a.w.n on the board in the thick of it" echo the Doctor's own words in Chapter 21.

I have a sneaky feeling that this historic confrontation should take place at Number 10, or more likely, the garden at Chequers. Only the costumes wouldn't be nearly as good. The Other first appeared in Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks. (What was his name again?) He is an eminence grise eminence grise; the power lurking behind the throne, like a skulking, limelight-shunning version of Alastair Campbell or Peter Mandelson, who manipulates the emergence of Gallifrey as one of the supreme seats of power in the Universe. But Blair and Campbell/Mandelson are puny subst.i.tutes for Ra.s.silon and the Other. Only Thatcher (all squawks and eyepatch), from whose evil Pythian empire a new world is being built, is worthy of comparison.

While the First Doctor escaped his persecutors by fleeing into the forbidden past of Gallifrey, the Other flees into the future.

Chapter 31.Susan didn't appear in the original tv storyline, but her appearance in the much-expanded book was a necessity.

The debate over whether she is or is not the Doctor's granddaughter is an old one. In early stories, it's difficult to deny the evidence that they are related, but by the time we get to Deadly a.s.sa.s.sin, Susan is still the only female Gallifreyan we have seen. Even in Deadly a.s.sa.s.sin, there are no visible women and only one female computer voice. After which, Time Ladies (I hate that term!) suddenly arrive by the coach load, but they almost feel like an afterthought. I'd be the last to deny us the wonderful Romana, but when I was thinking about the ideal Gallifreyan family set-up, I tried very hard to avoid anything boringly Earth-like. This is an ancient, alien world for heaven's sake. It's not 2.4 Children. It's no place for children at all.

Robert Holmes took joyous liberties with Gallifrey. There was no point in me writing anything if I didn't do the same.

Hence each family's statute quota of 45 Cousins, all born full-grown from a genetic Loom, prescribed by the need to counter the apocalyptic curse of the Pythia. Unfortunately that rather put Susan out in the cold. In Time's Crucible, Ace, who had learned a little of Gallifreyan families, was surprised to find a card in the TARDIS library that said "Happy Birthday, Grandfather." Yet if the last real Gallifreyan children were born millennia ago and Susan had a natural birth, then how could she possibly be the Doctor's descendant? And where, if she real y was direct bloodline, are her parents, the Doctor's own children? Whatever the possibility, whether her lineage came direct or by the extended scenic route, Susan still knows her grandfather when she sees him.

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Lord Ferain met the Doctor in the trenches of Skaro at the start of Genesis of the Daleks, looking a bit like Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Hence the Alternative History of the Daleks that sits in his office at the CIA.

Chapter 32.Leela hasn't actually told anyone else about her interesting condition, but Romana obviously knows. Why else does she keep asking Leela how she is? So did she give orders for Leela to be kept under surveillance, even in the most intimate of situations? Or has Leela's K-9 been leaking information about morning sickness and folic acid levels to his counterpart?

Oh no, not another trial scene! Well, it sort of happened that way. Earlier on, when Ferain first emerged from the Gallifreyan woodwork, he kept talking in cold and detached legal jargon, so when I reached this point, the Doctor started to play Ferain at his own game. Naturally the Doctor takes the established rules, does a quick sleight of hand and turns them on their heads. He's such an old subversive!

Gallifreyan names: In Kate Orman's novel Sleepy, we're told that the Doctor's name has thirty eight syl ables! (Of course, we're not told what the name is.) Gallifreyan names probably run on the Welsh Llanfairpwllgwyngyl gogerychwyrndrobwl llantysiliogogogoch princ.i.p.al. Although I can't believe the Doctor's name is anything remotely like St Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the Red Cave. Anyway, that's still twenty syllables short. If we follow Kate's ruling, the ful -blown names we get for other Gal ifreyans here must be abbreviated versions too. Even Leela has been given one by right of her liaison with Andred: Leelandredloomsagwinaechegesima, (which makes her sound a bit like the third Sunday before Lent.) Blimey! Imagine how long the daily register at Prydon Academy must take. My real problem was that while everyone else in the universe could call the Doctor Doctor, his own Family would obviously call him by his real name. Fortunately the Doctor's disgrace came to the rescue. His incensed Family had struck their embarra.s.sing renegade's name from the House's records.

It was just the Law of Irony that brought him neatly home to Lungbarrow on his nameday (some very Russian influences there), which just happened, purely coincidentally, to be the Feast of Otherstide as well. Only the Other doesn't have a name either...

I do like the fact that the Doctor eventually became the very thing he had planned to avoid. The Family wanted him to be President of the High Council, but were, of course, otherwise occupied when the event actually happened.

Yet another triumph for the Law of Irony.

Chapter 33.There's something of the Doctor/Master relationship between Romana and Ferain. They embody the Gallifreyan balance of power, High Council against CIA; bitter enemies, sometimes working together, sometimes against each other, but neither can do without the other.

The emergence of the ma.s.sive edifice of the House, up from its long-term burial, is a bit like Moby d.i.c.k surfacing before its final attack on The Pequod.

The Doctor's little speech about things he likes is the direct ant.i.thesis of his speech to Ace in Part 1 of Ghost Light listing the things he hates, which were also things that I can't stand too. While we were recording GL, Sylvester told me that he hates burnt toast as well.

Finally the Doctor has to confront his own angry parent in a one-to-one with the Loom, the very heart of the House.

It's a bit like the egg confronting the chicken, until the chicken really does find out what came first. Whichever way you look at the result, it's al worryingly Oedipal.

Chapter 34.Un bel di: the t.i.tle of the final chapter is appropriately b.u.t.terfly's aria from Act 2 of Puccini's Madama b.u.t.terfly, which turns up prominently in the TV movie. As in the original, it echoes the return of a long-awaited figure after years of absence, but for the j.a.panese geisha b.u.t.terfly that final reunion is nothing short of catastrophic.

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The opening section of this chapter, set on Extans Superior is entirely new. Because of all the loose threads that needed tying up, not just from this book, but the entire range of New Adventures and even before that, plus the requirement to link up with the McGann movie, the original ending of Lungbarrow was far too rushed. There was nowhere for the Doctor and Chris to come to terms with what had happened or to a.s.sess where their own relationship stood. So I've taken them out of time, given Chris a glimpse of that paradise he was dreaming about, and al owed the Doctor a few moments to mul things over. And then they can go back to exactly where they left off...

Ace/Dorothee's exploits in the New Adventures took her worlds away from the destined enrolment at Prydon Academy originally planned for her on TV. But it seemed right final y for her at least to offer to complete the Doctor's plans. And it shows that she'd also guessed just what he was up to al those years before.

After the all the fuss and people tying themselves in knots over whether Skaro was or wasn't destroyed at the end of Remembrance of the Daleks, the Doctor has a small comment of his own to make.

Innocet is a true librarian at heart. She sniffs her books. Kate Orman says that's what al real librarians do. The book Innocet's been given is, of course, Winnie-the-Pooh.

So here we are at the end - wel , it was an ending of sorts. By now I'd ticked off everything on my list of things that needed explaining or linking with the movie. The Doctor is such a personal thing - different for each of us. One person's Doctor treads on the toes of someone else's. In Lungbarrow, some things needed saying, and others (even Others) were better only hinted at. Or to quote Alice: 'Which dreamed it?' You pays your money and you takes your choice.

The Doctor had to face his past and put it behind him before striking out into the future. So the end is a beginning too. The first of several new beginnings. New Doctors and new old Doctors. The ride never really stops, does it?

It's been a little odd going back over Lungbarrow, and realising, despite my efforts to improve some sections, how much I stil love and care about the story. I've travelled a long way with it. And now, thanks to Daryl's amazing paintings, I even know what it looks like. Balancing nostalgia for the past with hopes for the future is what writing Who is al about. The old stories are a great place to play in, but it's finding the fresh slant and surprise that are important. And that, if anything at all, is the whole point of Lungbarrow.

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