Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [142]
Rubbish monsters
The Drahvins and Bandrils were among the more rubbish of the Doctor Who monsters. The joke here, not that the Brigadier realises, is that some alien invasions were beneath the Doctor’s dignity to deal with.
Old clothes
Benny changes into the outfit she was wearing on the cover of her first novel, Love and War.
Monkey business
The description of Twelve Monkeys could equal y wel apply to the TV Movie.
Boldly going
Ha! I was right. I was right about Star Trek X. Five years before it was written, I guessed right! The line ‘they knew it was the last one, so they could get away with all sorts of stuff’ could be the tagline for The Dying Days.
Chapter 6
Close Encounters
The Roof
It’s unclear what the men are doing putting that thing on the roof , because I never explain it. They are setting up a homing beacon for the Martian ship, the same sort of beacon that the Martians need in The Seeds of Death. It’s why the ship ends up over Trafalgar Square. But I never explain that properly. Sorry.
Bessie
Note that Bessie’s registration number has changed.
Life on Mars
Until Mariner, most scientists thought Mars had primitive life, and none doubted that it could support life, at least in the sense that the top of Everest or Antarctica could ‘support life’. Even as late as Viking, some people still held out hope. By then, it had been clearly established that Mars in the Who universe had a breathable atmosphere. So here, they’re only discovering what anyone who’d seen Pyramids of Mars already knew.
The UN
One prediction I got wrong – I thought Mary Robinson would be the new Secretary General of the UN, but Kofi Annan got the job.
The X Files
I love the end of this chapter – there’s a real sense of pace. It breaks the rules, too, of course. This was the era of the X-Files. Bex was a huge fan, and joked that she real y wanted to see an episode which ended with Mulder and Scully saying al that usual guff about how there probably were aliens, but they’d never have any concrete evidence... just as one of the flying saucers from Independence Day flew overhead and the caption ‘to be continued’ comes up.
That scene doesn’t quite make it into The Dying Days, but the sentiment behind it – that Doctor Who could do the
‘foreplay’ that the X-files does (conspiracies, government cover-ups, aliens) but, unlike the X-Files it could then go onto the ‘orgasm’ of full scale alien invasion – informs the whole book. But TDD stil breaks the rules – alien invasions aren’t allowed to be public. I only got away with it because it was the last book.
Independence Day
Hmmmm... Independence Day. The film hadn’t come out in May 1996 when I was commissioned, although I’d seen the trailer. The book was finished by the time I heard Independence Day UK, the radio story that’s even more like The Dying Days. There was something in the air, that year – Mars Attacks! also came out.
Back to television
I know how I’d like to bring Doctor Who back to television. I’ve had the scene perfectly mapped out in my mind for years. No adverts, no pre-publicity, just an plain, ordinary night of television – there’s a new medical drama on BBC1 at eight that looks OK. Eight o’clock, the announcer solemnly tells the audience that they’re going to the newsroom for a newsflash.
Then a real BBC newsreader tells us that there’s an alien spacecraft over London. We cut to a confused OB
reporter – what’s going on. Then a electronic voice from the ship – ‘Surrender humans, or we wil exterminate you’.
Then the reporter panics, and starts to run away, and bumps into a very famous actor in a frock coat, with a gorgeous young woman just behind him.
127
‘Don’t worry,’ the stranger says, ‘You’re safe. I’l see to that’. The reporter goes ‘Who are you?’. And the Doctor turns to camera and smiles and goes. ‘Me? I’m back!" Cue opening credits, cue that theme tune, cue the phone network melting down as everyone in the country is either phoning each other to tell them to watch BBC1