Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [144]
Few people get close to Dorothée as a person, and if she sees them getting between her and the Doctor, then a degree of jealousy tends to kick in. Meanwhile, if this catwalk cat-fight had been in the TV version, it would be the point when all the private cameras in the studio suddenly appeared, just as they did when Ace and Gwendoline wrestled on the bed in Ghost Light.
Chapter 15
How much blame must the Doctor take for his Family's plight? We know from experience that he has a catalytic effect on any situation he visits. No one who meets him, even for just a moment, walks away untouched, unscathed or properly mangled. His involvement is usual y beneficial, but in his Family's case it's downright catastrophic. If you trace back the disastrous events in the House, don't they all lead to the moment when the Doctor failed to come home? Or do they go further back to the moment when he left? Or stil further to the moment of his birth? Cousin Glospin suspects it goes even further than that. Perhaps the real problem is that the Doctor exists at al . Sooner or later he may final y have to start saying he's sorry.
Poor Satthralope, rudely awakened from her deep sleep. She is keeper of the keys, the spider at the heart of the House's web, lost and lulled in shadowy dreams like Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed at Cold Comfort Farm. It takes time to wipe the sleep from her rheumy old eyes. But when she wakes, when she feels the shuddering protests of the House to which she is wedded, when she sees the transgression thrown along corridors of mirrors; then forbidden secrets, lost under the dust of centuries, wil be uncovered and the price of their hiding will be exacted. Far better for everyone, if she just turns over and goes back to sleep again.
I needed another passage harking back to happier times and childhood adventures. The only sunlight in Lungbarrow comes in shafts of memory from life before the darkness. So it's a hot dry summer in the valley at the foot of Mount Lung. Somewhere across the meadow the Gal ifreyan equivalent of the Famous Five are solving crimes and being insufferable little oiks, the Gallifreyan equivalent of Swallows and Amazons are fighting pirate battles on the lazy river, the blossom thieves in the magenta orchard are too fagged out to tweet, and even bookish Cousin Innocet has been led out of doors on a berrying expedition by her roguish Cousin, the Doctor.
Happy days. Any time now, Moominmamma wil arrive with the lemonade. It all serves to deepen the dank gloom to which the Family are now condemned. I like this little scene very much.
Chapter 16
One of those Victorian style "at homes" where guests call, present their cards, take tea and exchange pleasanteries? Not real y.
In Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, the Doctor, Chris and Roz spent time in Sydney, 1966. Chris and Roz didn't get the jokes in The Producers - a bit like all those incomprehensibly unfunny jokes in Victorian copies of Punch. You had to be there at the time and not just visiting.
Poor fat Owis has minimal social skills, is easily led and is far more at home with objects and animals that don't tell him how to behave. He's still a very large kid. In the 673 years since the trouble started, no one seems to have developed in the House at all. They've just grown thinner, paler and madder. And Innocet's hair has grown longer.
It's as if time stopped when the sun went out.
Sepulchasm - a typically grim board game of both luck and skill, named after the Gallifreyan equivalent of Purgatory. The players move their chapter-coloured counters round the board, trying to reach the safety of "home."
They use telepathic skills to stop their counters tumbling into Hell when the ground cracks