Doctor Who: Lungbarrow (47 page)

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.

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.

(...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 gets targeted in the role of villain and a piece of theatre comes a bit too close for comfort. Or so Glospin hopes.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing articles for such luminaries as Stephen James Walker, David Howe and Gary Russel , I used to say that the Fifth Doctor was the only one you'd feel comfortable inviting home for tea. The rest would be an absolute (and joyous) nightmare. That was years before Sylvester arrived, but here he is proving the point. This is the Doctor as subversive, the way I like him. No wonder his Cousins find him so deeply aggravating and embarrassing. He's perfectly capable of behaving himself, but like the little boy in the Duchess's lullaby, "he only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases." Even the Fifth Doctor isn't so house-trained these days.

Gallifrey's most dysfunctional family: Surely the Doctor can't be comparing Springfield's finest family to his own?

Marge may have the equivalent of Innocet's hair, but otherwise the Simpsons are paragons of virtue in comparison.

I wanted the Family to have something real y interesting for this festive dinner. That's probably why Ace, sorry Dorothée, went to Marks and Spencers.

Hoorah for Satthralope. No enemy of the Doctor could ever set about him the way she does. It's that family thing again.

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The little (or rather big) puppet play is another chance for a resume of the history of Rassilon's coming to power, with guest appearances from the other two members of his ruling triumvirate, Omega and ...the Other. The play is a hangover from Gallifrey's more cultural y exotic past, before the Time Lords' grey bureaucratic, civil service mentality set in. It's all deeply symbolic and colourful in a heady mix of styles from Kabuki and Bunraku puppet theatre to Morris dancing and the York Mystery plays. I've filled out some of the stage details since the first performance in the book version, including an extra dance routine and some more pointed audience reaction. Next year it visits the Edinburgh Festival, before a short season at Sadler's Wells.

Just for a change, this chapter shares a title with one of Alan Ayckbourn's three The Norman Conquests plays -

another farce set in a dining room.

Captain Redred makes his transmat journey from the Deathday to the present in what seems to him like less than no time, but for everyone else is 673 Gallifreyan years. By the time he gets a grasp on what's happened to him, he'll probably need counsel ing.

Satthralope's starter course of fish tongues links back to the Old Time. According to Time's Crucible, the line of Pythias, ancient seers who once ruled Gal ifrey, existed on an exclusive diet of fish tongues. The final Pythia threw a bowl of tongues at an envoy of Rassilon who plotted her overthrow. Although the Pythia's followers left Gallifrey after her death and founded the Sisterhood of nearby Karn, the role of wise women at home is preserved and honoured by the Housekeepers, who in some small way, still echo the once great power of their predecessors.

The Doctor's tirade against his family and account of his adventures, resurfaced in revised form in the Probability Tree scene in Auld Mortality. It's part of the Doctor's credo. His raison d'etre was to see the rich diversity of the Universe. Ironical y, this freedom is exactly what was denied to the rest of his family as a result of his actions.

The 'Happy Name Day' moment was another occasion when the characters took over the story. Ace, sorry Dorothée, just climbed up on her chair and started singing in defiant support of her best friend. I thought that was very sweet. It also suggests that the Doctor's chosen companions are his true family, rather than the motley crew of Cousins with whom he got lumbered at birth.

The Vatican was obviously one of Robert Holmes's sources for the Time Lords - witness al those Cardinals, and the outgoing President in Deadly Assassin, who is a dead ringer for the old Pope John. So I thought it only appropriate that the correct term for the severing of links between Lungbarrow and the Matrix should be an Excommunication. When I was writing Auld Mortality, I was tempted to let the alternative denizens of Skaro, the Thaleks, in their brief cameo appearance, betray themselves as quasi-religious fanatics by murderously chanting Excommunicate! But Nick Briggs, probably wisely, wouldn't let me.

The "Yemaya and Yemaya etc..." quote, coming to Chris's head live from the Doctor's overloaded brain, is a mangled misquote of the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" line from Macbeth. Yemaya 4 was the planet visited by the Doctor, Chris, Roz and Benny in Kate Orman's novel Sleepy.

The most obvious ways to get the TARDIS down from the dustweb are either to throw things at it or get a ladder.

Natural y the Doctor comes up with his own inimitable solution - a sort of victory by provocation, entirely in character for both him and the antagonised House. Result: Doctor 1, House 0.

The Great Hal at Lungbarrow is big enough for several scenes to be going on around it at once. So in this section, the spotlight keeps switching from one group to another as the inmates of the House gauge their reactions to the Doctor's revelations. Very theatrical in a "compare and contrast" sort of way. You throw the Doctor into a bucket of water and watch al his Cousins and their agendas bobbing and slapping about on the spreading ripples.

The claw marks on the TARDIS paintwork were acquired on the Trans-Amazon Express and belong to one of the Loups-garoux. The Who production office had already rejected my two-part storyline for a werewolf story during the Davison era. But why drop a good idea when it might be useful one day?

There was a little bonding scene between Badger and Ace in the original script, but redundant here. The start of it ran: (ACE IS SHOWING HER JACKET TO BADGER. SHE POINTS TO ONE OF THE BADGES.) ACE: And this is Houston Space Centre. I haven't been there either.

(BADGER STUDIES THE BADGES UP AND DOWN THE SLEEVE. THEN HE LOOKS UP) 237

BADGER: (PROUDLY) Then you are a Badger too.

(HE STARTS TO BOOM WITH LAUGHTER AND ACE JOINS IN.)

ACE: Yeah. Both Badgers!

(THE DOCTOR SMILES HALF-HEARTEDLY THROUGH HIS EMBARRASSMENT.)

The book version of the original studio-bound script of Lungbarrow meant a big expansion of the story. It was easy enough to add extra bits in Paris, or at the Gallifreyan Capitol, or anywhere in The Past, but the main thrust of the story still remained trapped inside the House. It's not unlike Evil Of The Daleks. All the 1866 part of that story is confined to Maxtible's house, apart from the brief location moment when Victoria stares from a window at the unreachable world outside, before being led away by her Dalek persecutors, just as Chris stares from the window of Lungbarrow in Chapter 5. (Yes, I know Evil has scenes in an outside stable, but that's a studio set, so it doesn't count.)

In Ghost Light, the mad explorer Redvers sees the house of Gabriel Chase as a jungle, and by Part 3, the place is actually becoming one. I tried to find as many ways of bringing the outside into the House of Lungbarrow as possible: most of the building is a forest, seen at different levels, with the attic as the dense woodland canopy. And now we have a stream and a black lagoon. The House has become a domain for the living furniture: a realm in which the House, as a living entity, is gradual y withdrawing into itself with its own denizens and creatures. Trapped inside, the Gallifreyan inhabitants are tolerated, but are becoming almost like intruders.

When Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch first outlined their ideas about the mythos of Gallifrey to me, I was quite shocked. I didn't sleep that night, partly because the Doctor's mystery was ingrained for me as something that should never be touched. It was heresy, but I also knew they were right. We already knew too much. Andrew and Ben weren't taking anything away, because so much had already gone. They were deepening and revitalising the mystery. I'd been having the same thoughts. That's where the idea for the Doctor's Family and House came from, but I'd been too scared to send the idea in. So this story is an amalgam of all our ideas, additionally influenced by what so many other people added in the New Adventures and by the looming Paul McGann movie, which in so many ways, meant the end of the world as we knew it. Even so, most of the detail is mine.

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.

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.