Another plug. Doctor Who: The Shadow Heart was released
earlier this month, another audio from Big Finish, this time starring Sylvester
McCoy as the seventh Doctor and guest-starring (amongst others) Chase Masterson
as intergalactic mercenary Vienna Salvatori. It’s a third part in a sort-of
trilogy, but as always with these things, it’s entirely self-explanatory, so
you don’t have to have heard the previous stories to follow what’s going on. It can be purchased here.
It’s received mixed reviews, with some viewers correctly saying
how great it is, and some reviewers being
completely mistaken. Which may sound facetious or dismissive, but as a writer
of these things, where it’s too late to change anything, that’s really the only way you can deal with reviews. You can’t flagellate
yourself for what’s past and bemoan the fact that you should have done x
instead of y; you can only shrug and move on, and maybe learn from the
experience (although the likelihood of applying that learning will be slim, as
you’re never going to write the same story twice.)
I must admit, though, to being a little disappointed, if
only because when I finished the script I was convinced it was one of the best
Doctor Who things I’d done (and I don’t always feel this way when I finish
scripts, normally I’m convinced it’s the most awful thing I’ve done). I’d put more
thought and effort into writing it than usual (and the usual amount is already
far too much) and, in particular, I’d tried to pack in as many weird, wonderful
and original ideas as possible in order to give the punter value for money.
After the first two stories in the trilogy had been quite dry and serious and had
been told on a quite constrained canvas, I wanted my story to explode, be epic, be
colourful. To be different. To not just be More Of The Same.
So that’s why it takes place on four different planets
(well, three planets and a moon). Why it has several space battles. Why it
features more alien races than I can recall, along with robots and an array
of larger-than-life characters. And – this probably isn’t a spoiler, because it’s
obvious from the start – and it’s why I included the idea of the Doctor
following a non-linear path through the story, as an extra ‘element’. The idea
excited me, because it hasn’t really been done before, for a character to
arrive half-way through a story, then travel back to the beginning, then travel
forward a bit, then travel backward and so on. Normally with time travel
stories you tell it from the point of view of the time traveller, but this time
I thought I’d tell it from the point of view of everyone else, in strict
chronological order. And, like I said, I thought it hadn’t been done before;
yes, you have things like The Time Traveler’s Wife, but even there you can’t track
the husband’s non-linear journey through the book, the author keeps the precise
sequence of appearances vague. I wanted to tell a story where the listener
could, if they so wished, listen to it both chronologically or from the Doctor’s
point of view and where it would make dramatic sense both ways; partly to give
value for money, and partly to challenge myself. Because telling these sort of
stories, making them logical, is pretty mind-bending. You keep coming up
against the Predestination Paradox Problem – I may blog about what it precisely
is later. But the idea was to tell a story that one way round looks like the
Doctor has ingeniously planned everything in advance; but where, if you follow it
from the Doctor’s point of view, he’s just making it all up as he goes
along.
Anyway, so that’s why it has space snails and a planet of
monkey-bats and a planet smashed in half and a computer that resembles a
gothic cathedral and a futuristic space navy with 18th-century
trappings and the non-linear stuff and loads of other things. Because I wanted
to tell a big, self-consciously epic story, as a contrast – particularly as a
contrast to my previous play, Protect & Survive, which was told on an
incredibly small-scale.
So I must admit to being a little non-plussed by a review
dismissing the whole story as a parody of Star Wars. Now, the customer is
always right, if that’s how it came across to them then that’s entirely valid.
All I can say is that wasn’t the intention. If anything, writing
science-fiction, Star Wars is something you’re always trying to avoid, because
it is so well-known, so iconic. But on the other hand, there’s the problem that
by doing so you restrict your canvas; do you never include a scene set in an
alien pub because Star Wars did that? Do you never include a snow planet
because Star Wars did that? It’s an interesting problem; do you consciously
avoid anything that’s been done in Star Wars, or do you pretend Star Wars never
existed?
Either way, nothing could have been further from my mind
when writing this story than Star Wars. I mean, I like Star Wars, I’ve seen
all the films, I’ve played the Lego games, I’ve even had an emotional breakdown whilst
watching Attack Of The Clones, but it wasn’t a conscious influence on The
Shadow Heart. The influences – if they aren’t obvious – were the 1980
Flash Gordon, Serenity, and some 2000AD comic strips like Ace
Trucking Company, as well as a couple of sitcoms.
(For example. The pub landlord character in The Shadow Heart
was not intended to resemble any character from Star Wars, but was specified in
the script as sounding like Marion out of Mongrels.)
(And, for what it’s worth, the inside of the Shadow Heart
wasn’t inspired by the Death Star, it was inspired by various medieval
depictions of hell.)
(To be honest, if I was going to write a Star Wars parody I wouldn't know where to begin, as Family Guy has pretty much ploughed that furrow. Maybe I'd take the piss out of all its cod-mysticism.)
I’m also a bit bemused by a couple of reviews saying that
the seventh Doctor time-travelling during the story to set up a master-plan is old hat. Again, I can’t argue with how it may have come
across, but I’d defend my choices by
saying, firstly, that’s what that character does, and secondly it’s using that idea in a way that has not been done before (to my knowledge,
at least).
And one or two people say that the character of Vienna, a vain,
glamorous, borderline-psychotic female intergalactic bounty hunter, has been
done before elsewhere. Well, I may have limited terms of reference, but again, I thought I was being original; I
certainly wasn’t imitating anything. A cursory trawl through the internet doesn’t
bring up any similar characters... so I have to ask, would a male bounty hunter
have been better?
Anyway, the point of all this is merely to observe that you
never can tell how something you write will be received, as no two people have
the same terms of reference, or the same imaginations. I’m still very, very
proud of The Shadow Heart; it’s ambitious, it’s full of ideas and I was certainly
striving to be original when I wrote it.
I certainly put in the hours! So why not download it, if you haven’t
done so already, and see what you think?
