Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [112]
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
Chapter Eight
yearning for home and better times that lies at the heart of the Doctor’s problem.
This chapter is mostly the monster chasing Trevithick and And now here comes The Sentience! So called, I suppose I wrote it straight through in one, excited burst and hardly because it felt a bit like the Intelligence and Doctor Who changed a word. I went home to write most of the book and creatures always need a name like that. It’s the first of the I can vividly remember sitting in the spare room, bashing non-corporeal floaty aliens with which I seem to have an away on my Amstrad, the green screen flaring, the dot-obsession. I just can’t seem to shake them though I promise matrix printer taking forever but just being so inspired and one day to do a ‘once-proud’ militaristic race based on, oh excited by this section. I went downstairs for my tea with let’s say, hedgehogs. Billy Coote becomes a medium for the the sense of a good day’s work done! There’s more Jaws, of floaty alien just as Gwyneth does in The Unquiet Dead. As course, in the exploding fire-extinguisher.
Alan Bennett says, we’ve only got a few beans in our tin to I once read somewhere that Trevithick stops at Level 18
rattle!
(of a possible 27) in the lift because this story would have The sequence where Trevithick dreams of the monster been part of Season 27 and that I was well known for bursting through the window as he watches TV was written thinking that the programme went downhill after Season 18!
to make sense of the cover! It bothered me that there was no This isn’t true, although I used to be very fond of Season 18
such scene in the book. I doubt I’d be so literal these days.
(not so much these days).
And Ace has Nitro-Nine A in her rucksack. Takes you back, doesn’t it?
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Of course, the Doctor seeing the ghostly Susan would’ve had more impact if it hadn’t been for The Five Doctors, but I wanted to do something new with the Sentience so that you can’t have everything! I’ve always been intrigued by it wasn’t just another alien invader. I think Doctor Who Susan. I used to think, in a very fan-boyish way, that she could stand a few more Earth-based menaces but I hit upon just called the Doctor grandfather but it’s clear that he’s just the idea that the thing actually predated the Earth. That in that. So just who is Mrs Who?
some, thankfully unfathomable way, the Earth had formed I wanted to use the flavour of that first, heart-breaking around it and it was stuck, like a living fossil or, as goodbye in The Dalek Invasion of Earth to show that the Trevithick describes it, like the letters in Blackpool rock.
Doctor had never quite got over Susan and that all his I think I had the Doctor dislocate his shoulder because I subsequent companions have, in some way, been an attempt thought he needed roughing up a bit. He’s suffering to get back to that first relationship. So Susan symbolises the throughout the story and it added to the grit to see him in real pain. Besides, this wasn’t long after we’d seen James 316
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
Bond bleed in the terrific and underrated Licence to Kill so I And now the church is overrun by gas-masked zombies, thought it high time the Doctor got a bit of a kicking.
one of which, when unmasked has a totally blank face!
Interesting that, down in the cave, there’s a lull followed Could be on the telly now, eh?
by Trevithick saying “It’s so cold,” just as Dickens does in I find the amount of exposition here a bit troubling and The Unquiet Dead. This is a ghost story staple, I suppose pat. Everything is explained by the Sentience, even down to and just something I absorbed into my DNA years ago. All using Billy Coote as a medium and discovering