Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [144]
Such a bind
I like the fact the baddy keeps his evil plan in a Wallace and Gromit ringbinder.
Chapter 10
An Englishman's Home
Alone at last
We see the Martians alone for the first time, and – surprise, surprise – they’ve got an evil plan that Greyhaven doesn’t know about.
Code of honour
The original idea of the book was that it would be the human characters who ascribed nobility and culture to the Ice Warriors, but the Martians would real y be just nasty, snarling, spitting slabs of hate. Monsters, in other words.
So the humans would keep going on about how they came from a noble culture, and had a code of honour, but everything the Martians actually did was just sadistic and nasty. After the book was finished, I saw Mars Attacks!
where the Pierce Brosnan scientist character does that joke. But by then, the Martians, particularly Xznaal, had developed into pretty rounded characters. This chapter contrasts Xznaal and the Brigadier – both warriors, both having seen better days, both full of regrets, both thirsting for one last battle.
Grant Morrison
While, over the years, the odd ‘influence’ from Grant Morrison’s work has been felt in my books, the coronation of an alien as king of England predates the same scene in The Invisibles by a couple of years. It is, as Greyhaven is at pains to note, a fairly accurate depiction of a real coronation ceremony.
Queen continuity
Christmas on a Rational Planet, Lawrence Miles’s 1996 debut novel, had a throwaway reference to the
‘recoronation’ of Queen Elizabeth II. I thought I was being very clever by tying up a loose end by showing why she needed a second coronation. But Lawrence was tying up a loose end himself – how there could be a ‘King’ in Battlefield (set in the mid to late nineties, and a couple of months before TDD) but the Queen could celebrate her Golden Jubilee in Head Games (a sequence of which was set in 2001). As is often the way, two people trying to solve a continuity error have left a much bigger one in its place.
Top Secret
The Brigadier and Eve joke about UNIT being a top secret organisation. In the TV series, while UNIT’s meant to be one of the most covert organisations on the planet, they also drive around in big lorries marked ‘UNIT’, and the (local!) reporters in Spearhead from Space know who the Brigadier is, which organisation he runs and that he investigates ‘little green men’. It’s clearly one of the worst-kept secrets in the world.
Chapter 11
That Which Does Not Kil Us...
Titles
The chapter title was the provisional title of the novel The Also People. The provisional title of this chapter was
‘The Yeti on the Loo’, and you all know why, so I don’t need to explain.
The Tripods
We never see the Martian hang-gliders in action, which is a bit of a shame. Note that the Martians also have
‘tripods’ (as the Martians in The War of the Worlds did), and machines that look like the Martian war machines in the fifties film version of War of the Worlds.
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Morrotov cocktail
Benny comes into her own here. This was inspired by something Mark Clapham told me – Morrisons supermarket’s own brand vodka was, and maybe still is, called Morrotov. Well, Mark was a university student at the time, he’d know. Benny said in Love and War that there’s not a problem in the world that can’t be solved with vodka. Here she demonstrates this by making a Morrotov cocktail.
The dying Doc
And the Doctor dies. SFX had already reported that the Doctor died halfway through the book, so everyone knew it was coming. It was the last book, I could do it. Every other book, you know for a fact that he’s going to come bouncing back. Not here. Some people objected that BBC were doing Eighth Doctor books, so he couldn’t die.
Look again – the Doctor says he’s twelve hundred years old. This book