Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [149]
Leela gets her kit off, but this is not a gratuitous "Nyssa gets her kit off" moment, just our noble savage getting back to basics.
The ghostly guard captain caught in the transmat chamber is the forerunner of Inspector MacKenzie of Scotland Yard, trapped like a display specimen in a drawer in Ghost Light. The captain's name is pronounced Re-dred. He's an ancestral cousin to those other Chancel ery commanders Hilred and Andred, al three from the House of Redlooms, which obviously has militaristic blood programmed in its loom.
I love the idea of an alien housekeeper sifting through the contents of a bag from Marks and Spencer's food hal .
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Cousin Luton is a name in the spirit of Robert Holmes, whose own track record for silly names is justly legendary.
Apart from Runcible, Unstoffe, Glitz and Dibber, I love periphery characters like Nellie Gussett and the wonderful denizens of Megropolis 3, Singe and Hackett. Holmes was truly great at bringing his locations and characters to life with bizarre language, quirky personal details and references to unseen events, people and places. He could create whole worlds in a couple of sentences and had a gloriously evil sense of humour. Hence Cousin Luton's suitably gruesome and Holmesian (I hope) offstage death.
This scene with the fish and the chimney is seriously surreal, as if the Doctor's homecoming has set off the sort of unnatural portents that usual y foreshadow disasters in Shakespeare: yawning graves and fiery warriors in the clouds who drizzle blood in Julius Caesar, or lamentings in the air and clamouring night birds in Macbeth. Or maybe it's a miracle? Natural y, the Doctor has a perfectly sound explanation for it all. How boring! We're Doctor Who fans. We'd much rather believe the weird version.
Chapter 25
Ocean cones: The gravity of Earth's moon pulls the sea towards it, thus creating the tides, so if the gravity of Gallifrey's moon, Pazithi Gallifreya, was far stronger, it might create huge mountains of water that surge majestically round the planet.
The legendary premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) is one of the first places I would head for if I had a TARDIS. The riot that erupted during the first performance of Nijinsky's ballet set to Stravinsky's tumultuous pounding music, is more famous than the actual choreography which only ever had eight performances. Yet only very recently, the Kirov brought to London a reconstruction of the original bal et, drawn back together from original designs, pictures and the memories of dancers. It was thrilling, majestic and quite gorgeous to look at in an arty pagan tribal sort of way. Most of the critics, true to form, were very sniffy.
If there had been a Season 27 on TV with Sylvester, Ace would have only had two more stories. It was planned that the Doctor would enrol her at the Academy on Gallifrey as a kick up the backside to the Time Lords. This was the culmination of all those other excursions he'd taken her on in an effort to sort herself out. Ace would have initial y resisted the idea, the Doctor would have reluctantly bowed to her wishes, and then touchingly, because she'd finally won a victory over his manipulating ways, she'd have done it for him anyway. The story, set in sixties London, also featured the Ice Warriors, but it never had a proper title. I never got further than a basic storyline before the axe finally fell. The story acquired the name Icetime in the projected season 27 hypothesised by the Doctor Who Monthly.
Through this chapter, as the Doctor repeatedly refuses to go downstairs to meet formally with his long-lost Cousins, we hear the distant dinner gong sounding like a death knell. Three strikes and you're out. Final y the House, like a much tested parent, loses patience with its offspring and resorts to a capital punishment of its own bizarre devising.
Chapter 26
(...Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.) Yet another sneaky Hamlet reference in the chapter title. But it's the Danish play in reverse, as the Doctor