Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [147]
Chapter 21
For years, I've had a theory that the Doctor's capacious pockets are as dimensional y transcendental as the TARDIS, a bit like Mary Poppins' carpet bag. Hence his impossible fetching out of the umbrella in the previous chapter. They might even be portals to another universe or something called Props Direct, a place that supplies just what the Doctor needs, but not always in the most useful form. Maybe we could have an entire adventure set in the Doctor's pockets, although A Universe in my Pocket sounds like a gooey celebrity autobiography best avoided.
So Chris is being treated to the Doctor's diverted nightmares. I'd wondered how the Doctor's head could cope with all that information, memory, manipulation, lateral thinking etc, once things started getting too busy in there. If he gets what the technical y-minded call a right brainful, does a little window pop up saying Out Of Memory? The Doctor's symbiotic empathy with the TARDIS supplies the drastic solution. The ship starts franchising out the data to other local repositories - i.e. Chris's head. I suppose it isn't programmed to ask permission first.
The Doctor's little speech about his uncomfortable feelings over coming home is the sole survivor of the sequence that I cut from the end of Chapter Eight in the original book. It works a lot better here on an emotional level, as well as in purely story-tel ing terms. But the Doctor is being deeply insensitive by saying it in front of Innocet. There are things that you do at home that you'd never do in public. But at least he has started to apologise.
There wasn't really room for Benny in this book. But in the tying-up of the New Adventures, it was important that she put in an appearance, however brief, in the final walkdown of companions. "Well Doctor, I'm afraid your old friend Bernice Summerfield can't be with us in person this evening. But she is on the line now, live from an archaeological dig somewhere in your head."
The image of the wel is borrowed from Maeterlinck's play Pelleas and Melisande, another huge influence on Lungbarrow with its stifling gothic castle, doom-laden family and tragic lovers. As one character says "there are parts of the garden that have never seen the sunlight." The play also contains one of the most frightening lines I've ever come across in anything: in answer to the child Yniold's questions "Why are the sheep so quiet? Why don't they talk any more?", the shepherd replies "Because this is not the way to the sheepfold." Pelleas is all shifting moods and dark colours. It shows you one thing, but means another. Little is defined, everything is symbolic or by implication. Debussy's setting of the play is arguably the greatest of 20th century operas. I'd certainly vote for it. I first heard it thirty years ago and I'm still always moved to tears by its melancholic beauty. The sunlit music for Act Two, Scene One goes with what Innocet saw by the wel .
Chapter 22
I first came across astral travel, the out of body experience, in The Ka of Gifford Hil ary, one of those occult novels by Denis Wheatley. He seems to have gone way out of fashion now. Maybe his works would seem a bit lurid or tawdry these days, but in the late sixties when I couldn't get enough of them, they felt like an adults-only branch of the wild monstrous fantasy of which Doctor Who was the main stream family branch. But those were the days when Eastbourne Col ege boys had to get written leave to go into town (maybe they still do), and I used to sneak out to the cinema with a friend to see The Devil Rides Out or Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, probably at the risk of detention if we'd been caught.
In a fit of venomous pique, the First Doctor takes sneaky revenge on Glospin and the rest of his Family. A bit like children reporting their parents for drug abuse or sueing them for maltreatment. I didn't anticipate this bit in the initial storyline. But when I got to the chapter in the text, the Doctor decided to go in a different direction. I love it when the characters take charge and override my projected