To commemorate tonight's 'Lockdown Doctor Who' communal
viewing of The Doctor’s Wife, here's
an item from the vaults – my Doctor Who
story that was cancelled because it was too similar to The Doctor’s Wife.
Tiny bit of background. In 2009 I was asked to write the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, to coincide with Matt Smith being introduced as the
new Doctor. Now, I had some very strong ideas about what to do with the comic
strip, one of them being that it should tell the same sort of stories that
Steven Moffat would be telling on television. It would also have an arc, about
the TARDIS absorbing various life forms across its travels.
So in early 2010 I sent off my plan for what would be the
finale of the arc, which you can see below; DWM comic strip editor Scott Gray suggested the idea of making
Chiyoko the child of the mutated TARDIS, which I was happy to include. And for
the next six months I wrote the first three stories – Supernature, Planet Bollywood and The Golden Ones based on the arc we had worked out.
And then in August, I received an email for Scott saying
that he’d just read the script for Neil Gaiman’s upcoming story and it was far
too similar to mine – even insofar as having the TARDIS turn into a pretty
young woman!
Anyway, I went away and came up with a different ending to
the arc, which now formed the basis of two stories, Apotheosis and The Child of Time.
Which turned out very well, and The Doctor's Wife was marvellous too, so I have nothing to be cross about.
But I was a bit annoyed, back in August 2010. Entirely my own
fault, of course, for trying to tell stories like the ones they’d be doing on television...
COMIC STRIP “ARC”
PLAN
At
the end of story 1 – The Plague of Paradise, although neither the reader nor the Doctor
knows it yet, the TARDIS has been subtly altered by the events on that planet.
It has absorbed some of the local wildlife... and is beginning to ‘evolve’.
Over the next year or so
– with each
adventure, the TARDIS continues to assimilate more life forms into itself, and
with each new life form, it changes its nature, becoming more sentient, a
living, breathing creature. Added to the mix are some villains and monsters –
possibly the Axons! – affecting the way the TARDIS operates. It is growing
restless, savage, resentful... and hungry.
Final story – By now the Doctor has realised
there is something strange afflicting the TARDIS. It is no longer following his
instructions and has instead developed an independent persona of its own. In
order to run a diagnostic, the Doctor lands the TARDIS inside itself – only for
the Police Box exterior to turn into a monster, with windows for eyes and the
door transformed into a mouth!
The
TARDIS proceeds to consume itself – creating within its interior a whole world
out of all the places it has visited, populated with every life form it has
absorbed. Jungles and cities, all inside the TARDIS, all knotted up impossibly
in four dimensions. The Doctor and Amy have to fight their way through this
surreal labyrinth in order to restore the TARDIS to health and rid it of all
the various parasites and mutations it has picked up; it becomes a fight
between the psyche of the healthy TARDIS and the psyche of the diseased TARDIS.
The
whole story takes place within the confines of the TARDIS, a nightmare kingdom
representing its mental landscape. At the end, of course, the Doctor cures the
TARDIS and returns it to normal, with all the malignant elements safely ejected
into the time vortex.
Additional idea for
the story, March 2010:
The other idea I had for the story (well, it's quite a way
away, I'm taking my time!) was that the inside of the TARDIS would contain a
city, like Bruegel's depiction of the Tower of Babel being constructed, where
all the outer walls are Police Box panels and where all the inner sections
resemble the TARDIS interior, the console room and so on. That would be all
part of the 'inside the corrupted TARDIS' story.
(I later used this idea in 'Prisoners of Fate'!)
