Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [0]
All is not well on Gallifrey. Chris Cwej is having someone else's nightmares. Ace is talking to herself. So is K-9.
Leela has stumbled on a murderous family conspiracy. And the beleaguered Lord President, Romanadvoratrelundar, foresees one of the most tumultuous events in her planet's history.
At the root of it all is an ancient and terrible place, the House of Lungbarrow in the southern mountains of Gallifrey.
Something momentous is happening there. But the House has inexplicably gone missing.
673 years ago the Doctor left his family in that forgotten House. Abandoned, disgraced and resentful, they have waited. And now he's home at last.
In this, the seventh Doctor's final New Adventure, he faces a threat that could uncover the greatest secret of them all.
Marc Platt wrote Ghost Light, the last Doctor Who story recorded by the BBC. He also wrote the New Adventure Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and the Missing Adventure Downtime. He is told that he lives in Islington, but would not be surprised if that were Time Lord propaganda.
CONTENTS
· Author’s Preface/Introduction – Page 3
· LUNGBARROW – Page 5
· Author’s Notes – Page 224
Above: the original cover for LUNGBARROW
Originally published by Doctor Who Books, a division of Virgin Publishing Pty Ltd Copyright © Marc Platt 1997, 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted; this reproduction is made with grateful acknowledgement to the BBC website
– no infringement of copyright is intended, as this work is produced for private use only, and not for profit.
Original series broadcast on the BBC
Format © BBC 1963
DOCTOR WHO and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC
2
Introduction - Preface by Marc Platt
Roots
In 1996, when Rebecca Levene at Virgin asked me for another New Adventure, I hummed and ha-ed a bit, faffing round with various ideas, but Ben Aaronovitch insisted it had to be Lungbarrow - exactly what I really wanted to do, but hadn’t dared suggest. Then the BBC raked back the Virgin’s license because the McGann TV movie was in the offing, so Rebecca decided that Lungbarrow, with its revelations of the Doctor’s roots, was the story to finish the book series.
In fact, Lance Parkin sneaked in under the closing portcullis with The Dying Days as a parting shot, but Lungbarrow was the Seventh Doctor’s final Virgin. It’s a sort of Doctor Who equivalent of King’s Cross: the final stop for a whole load of storylines, not just from the Virgin books, but stretching back into the TV series as well.
Finding a family
The idea of the Doctor’s family had been knocking round my head for years before I ever got commissioned for the TV series in 1988. After a quarter of a century, we’d learned an awful lot about the Doctor. That was unavoidable. But there was now precious little Who left in him. We all want to know about him, but we also want him to remain a mystery too.
My idea was to start afresh. To clear the decks, I’d commit the cardinal sin of answering the fundamental questions, and then knock the explanations sideways with a whole barrel-load of new questions. You open the locked box only to find another locked box inside. Only this one’s bigger. The more layers of the Doctor you peel away, the stranger and darker he gets. And he stays the same. A mystery.
I’d been woken at 5am one morning by the idea of the family and the living house. The last thing the Doctor’s family could be was obvious. He comes from an alien planet, however terrestrial (and British) its inhabitants appear, so I was determined to get away from any Earth-style 2.4 children sort of family. It had to be strange, yet familiar too.
The idea I woke up with arrived in such detail that I got quite feverish, unable to get it written down fast enough.
One Loom, forty-five Cousins, two Drudges and one very grumpy House were all in place along with their hierarchy and their terrible fate. And then I sat on the story for a long time, not daring to submit the storyline. It was too outrageous.