This week saw the release of a new Doctor Who adventure by yours truly, The Lords of Terror, the first instalment in The Time War 2 box set.
It stars Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor, and Rakhee Thakrar as his companion Bliss.
What’s it about? Well, it’s set on a planet which is being run along strictly
Orwellian lines, like Airstrip One from Nineteen
Eighty-Four, with oppressed workers toiling in armament factories as government
propaganda updates them on the unending war with the Daleks. But, of course,
nothing is as it seems.
I read somewhere that drama is all about having your hero
chased up a tree and having rocks thrown at them. That’s kind of what I tried
to do with The Lords of Terror – to put
the Doctor into the most terrible situation possible, where he is forced to
question everything he believes. The story is all about soul-searching moral
dilemmas, seeing which way characters jump when they are pushed right to the
edge. What I wanted to do was to give Paul McGann some moments equivalent – in dramatic
terms – to the fourth Doctor’s “Have I the right?” moment in Genesis of the Daleks. So I deliberately
echoed some aspects of that story, in which he was sent on a mission to prevent
the creation of the Daleks but found he could not go through with it. Not to
write a sequel or anything like that, that’s been done, but just to explore
some of the issues, in a different way.
The other thing I wanted to do with the story was to show
one of the steps that led the eighth Doctor from being the Doctor we all know
and love to becoming the man we saw in The
Night of the Doctor, a man who has resolved not to take sides in the Time
War, who then chooses to become the War Doctor and ultimately destroy both the
Time Lords and the Daleks to resolve the Time War. The road that led him to
that point must have been one filled with many dark nights of the soul, and The Lords of Terror is one of them.
So that, hopefully without spoiling any surprises, is what
it’s about, or what I intended it to be about. It can be ordered from Big
Finish here. Hope you enjoy it!
