Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [152]
The little exchange between Dorothée and Leela deliberately lays out fandom's conflicting attitude towards the great question: Who is the Doctor? Leela firmly believes the Doctor's mystery should be preserved. Dorothée agrees absolutely with her, but is dying to find out anyway. But for all Leela's protestations, it was she who went digging up the Doctor's past in the first place.
I love the line "She folded away her thoughts in the dark." It's exactly inside Innocet's meticulously thorough and tidy character. It's also incredibly sad and touching. She's the only Cousin who really cares about the Doctor. I tried to keep this scene absolutely simple, but I cried a lot when I wrote it.
This is the Seventh Doctor's final quest before a new beginning. In full view of his friends, he's beset by both his Family and his past. And if that isn't enough, his own sanctuary and real home, the TARDIS, is being violated too.
As his despair mounts, he returns to his roots, back to the room where he grew up. But he doesn't find a solution there. It isn't back to the womb at all. Instead, facing his own fear like the Third Doctor in the Cave of Crystal, he lands up going even further. Back before the womb, like travelling beyond the edge of space into speculation.
The Doctor refers to Professor Thripsted's Flora and Fauna of the Universe in The Sun Makers.
Innocet's fate in the original tv storyline was quite different. She was crushed whilst saving the Doctor's life, when the room in which he was trapped was ground to dust by the enraged House. And that was where she stopped. It wouldn't have been fair to the actress to have resurrected her in another persona for the last half episode.
Here we are back at the Prologue. The women crouch round the figure of the Doctor. The President, the Tearaway, the Cousin and the Warrior: Romana, Dorothée, Innocet and Leela, all holding hands as they stare into the dark abyss of the Doctor's mind.
Chapter 30
On route, the journey back into the Doctor's past takes in each traumatic moment of regeneration that ended his former lives, and then we're back at the gates of the Past and Future. The old vulture with the eyepatch is (or was) the Pythia who once ruled Gallifrey. Unable to see the future anymore, she tore out her own eye and replaced it with that of the severed head of the Sphinx of distant Thule, which she had stolen from the Academia Library at the Capitol. She's none too fond of the Doctor, who had an inadvertent hand in her downfall.
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The Doctor's "Is that you, Sybil?" is the Emperor Claudius's greeting to a vision of the Oracle of Delphi as he lies dying in the TV version of I, Claudius. And the Rose Woman is the Goddess of Time who reappears on and off through the New Adventures series. The Doctor is her chosen champion.
In Deadly Assassin, Chancellor Goth confesses that he first met the Master on Tersurus. That planet has probably been under the aegis of Gallifrey for millennia, as both Rassilon in Time's Crucible and the Other in this story, have Tersurran servants. Their word Meyopapa seems to be a term of respect, the Tersurran equivalent of the Malayan word tuan or the Swahili bwana. Tersurus is also where the Children in Need mini-epic The Curse of Fatal Death is set.
Susan at last! She must be very young at this point, although we were never told how long she and the Doctor had been travelling together before they landed up on Earth in 1963. But at this point, her grandfather isn't the Doctor at all. There are shades of Verdi's Rigoletto here. This other grandfather keeps Susan hidden away, just as the Duke of Mantua's hunch-backed jester, who was party to al sorts of his master's debaucheries, hid his own innocent daughter from reality - with