Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [137]
Robert Holmes' Gallifrey is a cross between a comfortable gentlemen's club and the Vatican, and I've always seen that as my role model for the Capitol. It's so ancient it creaks. If society stopped, the on-going rituals would take centuries to wind down. There's a Byzantine proliferation of guilds, societies and strangely named officials, all stabbing each other in the back. Most of the workers have the factual y analytical minds of cataloguers, filled with a fascination for the detail of other people's events. They observe the Universe, annotating and revising their notes, while their leaders are locked in an endlessly shifting, complex and stately dance of power.
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Chapter 2
Almoner Crest Yeux is pronounced Yooks.
Leela: what did she see in Andred? Why would she give up travelling with the Doctor? (We're talking about the character, not about Louise Jameson leaving.) The parts of Gallifrey she witnessed in Invasion of Time would hardly encourage her to stay. Maybe she recognised kindred spirits in the Outlers? Or mistook the grandeur and pomposity for some sort of mystical haven? Not very likely.
I suppose Andred is the only attractive and vaguely sparky person she comes across, but real y Leela's whole departure is a tagged on afterthought. Better to look at how a practiced warrior and woman of action would cope in such a potential y deadly dull place. So she's bored and the Doctor, the most important and influential person in her existence, has gone. What else do you expect her to do, other than dig up his past?
Romana returned to Gallifrey from E-space in Terrance Dicks' Blood Harvest. By the time we get to Paul Cornell's Happy Endings, she has been elected as Lord High President. She's a lovely character to write, by turn authoritative and frivolous. Lalla Ward stamped all through her like Brighton rock.
Leela doesn't know the name for the striped pig-bear creature she encounters in the Gallifreyan forest, but it might be to Badger what brown bears are to our own domesticated teddies.
Chapter 3
In the original book, this used to be Chapter 4.
We've seen the TARDIS bathroom before, but somewhere, I like to think, there is also a glass roundel through which you can see all the Doctor's washing going round and round. One of the old Audio Visual plays, which featured Nick Briggs as the Doctor, ended with the Doctor in the bath and his plastic duck laughing at him in a chipmunky, Pinky and Perky, speeded up voice sort of way. I liked that a lot, so it's here too.
The two Aces - I wanted a sequence which would get Dorothée to come to terms with what she had become. If there had been another season on tv, Ace would only have had a couple more stories. As it was, her character stayed on into the book range and developed a long way further than anyone would have suspected. She grows up, becomes a bit of a maneater, leaves the Doctor, has a stint as a fighter in the Dalek Wars, comes back to the Doctor, and lands up living in 19th century Paris, able to commute through time using a time-travelling motorbike which belonged to Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (black female descendant of the Brigadier!) So Dorothée and Ace have a night in with a bottle - one of those nights in where you start playing Truth or Dare and talking about forbidden subjects which always lead to trouble.
In the tv days, Ace's surname was Gale, as suggested by her creator, Ian Briggs. Then in the books it got turned into McShane, or Gale-McShane, or Gale again. It's a bloody minefield out there. Maybe the kidnapped Parisian Dorothée is McShane and her carbine-wielding tormentor is Ace Gale...
A Marsh Dalek appears in The Dalek Book, published in time for Christmas 1964. I really liked the Marsh Daleks and used to draw lots of pictures of them instead of doing my maths homework - they were lot easier to draw than the normal Daleks. They were quite sleek, resembling a sort of tin can on stilts with few external features apart from an eye and a gun, and they patrolled wetland areas on the planet Gurnian where