Fellow MGK contributor Matthew Johnson posted a couple of weeks ago about his undeniably unfilmable (but interesting) idea for a Doctor Who story, and the comments section turned towards everyone else’s idea for a Doctor Who story they probably couldn’t do. Which, in my case, has perhaps less to do with the story idea and more to do with the fact that I can’t really see the producers of Doctor Who accepting an unsolicited pitch from a novice screenwriter based on his blog post about the idea, but I’ve accepted a long time ago that I have no idea how to break into television. (Television studios, I can do. But that’s another story.)
My idea comes from noticing the pattern that the series has established over its first five seasons in its “Doctor Who meets a famous creative person” episodes (‘The Unquiet Dead’, ‘The Shakespeare Code’, ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’, ‘Vincent and the Doctor’.) The creative person runs afoul of a menace that is peculiarly fitted to their creative endeavors, with a Doctor Who twist (Dickens meets alien “ghosts”, Shakespeare fights evil witches from another dimension, Agatha Christie wanders into a murder mystery that involves space wasps, and Vincent van Gogh discovers aliens that, due to his unique perception, only he can see.) The menace brings the creative person to a personal low, even as the Doctor finds himself unable to thwart it; he succeeds by using praise to bring out the creative person’s unique gifts, allowing them to defeat the menace in a way the Doctor can’t. Finally, the Doctor reveals a hidden truth to the creative person: Their gifts are unique and their works will endure throughout eternity.
Naturally, I had to subvert the formula. 🙂
In this story, the Doctor and Amy wind up in England, in 1844. The politician and author Edward Bulwer-Lytton is at a personal low, having been forced out of Parliament, separated from his wife, and dealt with the death of his mother…and he’s not handling it well. In fact, he’s having a nervous breakdown, hearing voices that tell him to excavate a massive hole on his estate.
The Doctor finds this highly suspicious. Not because he thinks Edward is insane, but because the TARDIS is picking up high-end telepathic broadcasts that suggest he very much isn’t. He insinuates himself into Edward’s company in order to find out just what’s at the bottom of the hole, and isn’t surprised to find that it’s an alien race. The Vrilya, as they are called, came through from another dimension that was losing its cohesion, and when they escaped, well…beggars can’t be choosers. A portal to a maze of subterranean caverns, with no way up to the surface, still beat a world where the laws of physics were breaking down.
The Vrilya are angelic, intensely powerful, and bring with them a miracle substance that is the pinnacle of their technology, called “vril”. They plan to offer Edward, and by extension Britain, the substance in exchange for a path for the rest of their species to come through. With the prospect of all his shames and failures erased, Edward is sorely tempted.
But the Doctor realizes that vril is more dangerous than it appears. Its energies are actually the cause of the destabilization of the Vrilya’s home universe, and if they begin using vril in large quantities on Earth the way they did back home, well…”unmitigated disaster” barely begins to describe it. The Vrilya don’t take well to what they see as a death sentence for their people (they see life without the miracle of vril as a fate worse than death) and use their powers to banish the Doctor to their universe.
But the Doctor makes contact with Edward through the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits (the ones that let him instantly understand any language.) He convinces Edward that his mind is receptive to the Vrilya, but that link works both ways–he needs to open himself up completely to the Vrilya, let them see the fullness of the human condition as expressed through the mind of one of its most celebrated authors. Startled back to normality by the Doctor’s praise, Edward does so…and unexpectedly, the Vrilya flee back to their home dimension. The Doctor pops out as they pop back in, relieved to be back. “Where did they go?” asks Amy, who really hasn’t had much to do in this episode. “Oh, probably off to try again somewhere else. Anywhere the portals can open. Anywhere that’s not here.”
“And my works, Doctor?” Edward asks. “Will they endure? Will I be remembered, in ages hence?” The Doctor smiles thinly, and assures Edward that the name Bulwer-Lytton will be famous for centuries to come. But unlike Vincent, he decides not to give him a ride in the TARDIS to show him exactly how…
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The title for this one is obvious:
“It Was A Dark and Stormy Night…”
So does The Doc or the Vrilya give Edward the lines?
And why the hell is there NOT a Doctor Who & Rex crossover?
Argh! Someone beat me to the dark and stormy night reference!
I’ve had an idea for another type of inversion. Not necessarily an obscure figure, but a figure who the Doctor unabashedly loathes and actively tries to avoid, but who nevertheless manages to inject himself into some very complicated situations that requires the Doctor’s aid. I had in mind someone like, say, Nietzsche, with something of a strange temperament, who is undeniably famous but who could be grating enough to get under the Doctor’s unflappable nerves.
I really like that idea, Tim. Someone like Socrates maybe, to get an elaborate set, or anybody who was mostly a bit of a firebrand.
Poor Bulwer-Lytton. I once had a first printing of Last Days Of Pompeii and my local used/rare book store wouldn’t even take it off my hands.
Three Doctor Who episodes I’d like to see: one where there is someone famous, but it’s someone that the Doctor knows history would be better off without them. Not Hitler, that’s too easy, but someone pivotal in history that the Doctor MUST keep alive even though he hates it.
Second, an episode where the Doctor gets stuck in something and is totally lost. No idea what’s going on-an era or place he’s never never been, and a plain old vanilla human is the magnificent bastard. For some reason I’m on a Nazi kick today because I was going to mention Canaris, but you know the Doctor’s been somewhere in WW2.
Third, an ep from the point of view of someone who’s not the Doctor or a Companion, maybe an enemy mook, and there’s this odd guy running around messing things up and shouting.
@Sofa King,
The first idea would probably work best with King Leopold II. Not typically mentioned in the same breath as Hitler or Stalin in the West, but a man whose actions had huge consequences for the Congo and all of Africa, and whose removal from history would not go unnoticed.
For the second, would it be a situation that someone placed him in (which introduces the idea that the era markers he could use to identify the place are being deliberately obscured/muddied), or just somewhere new that he’s ended up?
And the third idea is just awesome.
For some reason I want him to meet Ed Wood, and reassure him that his work will be remembered by future generations. “I’ve been to his memorial theatre in Poughkeepsie! He pioneered the antirealist movement!”
Very amusing, but don’t tell Jess Nevins, who’s been arguing for years that Bulwer-Lytton is unfairly hated.
@Sofa King, as interesting as your third idea sounds on the face of it, it’s basically the setup for “Love and Monsters”, which is probably the worst episode of television ever broadcast, yes I’m exaggerating. But still, it sucked on a profound level.
I guess there’s nothing wrong with that basic setup, though. Actually “Blink” made use of it too, so there you go.
@Sofa King: If you can track it down, the out-of-print Doctor Who novel “Timewyrm: Exodus” has the Doctor befriending Adolf Hitler in order to convince him, at the pivotal moment, to allow the British to evacuate Dunkirk. It’s by the Terrance Dicks, the archetypal Doctor Who author, and is full of great moments.
@Prankster: I’d probably agree with Nevins, in the final analysis, but it’s inverting the “the Doctor meets someone whose fame is enduring” paradigm, not the “the Doctor meets someone very talented and brilliant” paradigm. (And for the record, I liked “Love and Monsters” a lot, but different strokes for different folks and all.)
“Love and Monsters” works really well if you take it as an allegory for fandom politics. Everyone’s making connections and having fun until THAT GUY shows up…
I’ve been told that “THAT GUY” is actually a very specific person in Doctor Who fan circles, but I wouldn’t want to say who. 🙂
Actually, The Doctor meets Lord Lucan could be an excellent story… [bit better than Elvis.]
I have to plead ignorance here – I know Bulwer-Lytton is the guy who opened his novel with “It was a dark and stormy night”, and that there’s the Bulwer-Lytton-Contest for Worst Novel Opening Sentence, but that’s about it.
Is he so disliked for his bad prose, or is it something else?
Neat idea for a story John: I think I’ll have to steal it for my ‘Young Timelords’ RPG campiagn.
Another variation (and one that might require so much exposition that the premise might well segue back into the ‘unworkable Dr Who story’) is to have the Doctor become involved with an *alien* literary figure. Having a companion along would be more or less essential, since the Doctor would need someone to explain why this extraterrestrial creative type is such a big deal within the context of their civilisation. After all, an alien scientist can have a quick-and-dirty comparison made to the history of human technological advancement so that the audience at home can grok his/her/its place in the scheme of things; but this doesn’t map so well with alien art movements.
I always liked the idea of the Doctor rescuing a stranded ship and taking on the young male passenger as a companion for half a season, only then to discover that its a young pre-war Davros. Which would present rather a few moral ponderies.
I can never come up with a decent villain to graft on to it, but whenever time travel comes up, I want to do a piece where it turns out that most of the major stock market crashes of the last ten years are due to time travelers pulling out their long term investments to protect them from the crash. Everyone I play with is getting a little sick of it.
@Rtam: It’s not so much “bad” as “purple and florid and over-embellished”, but it’s worth remembering that it was the style of the era. At the time, in fact, he was one of the most popular authors around, and a lot of his work is still in print. It’s just that it reads oddly to modern ears.
But yes, the joke is that the only thing the average person knows about him is that he’s a “legendarily bad” author.
It’s been done, minus the Bulwer-Lytton part. The Pertwee serial “The Claws of Axos” featured something just like ‘vril’.
Personally, I’d like to see the new series pull off a purely historical story; no aliens, no monsters, just the Doctor and co. trapped in an unfortunate time in history with a less than friendly historical figure, and a looming historical event on the horizon threatening to kill them all. Little Big Horn maybe? Dresden is a bit too Slaughterhouse Five to work.
Now, this story works a bit less cleanly with a TARDIS that mostly works… but one could get around that by having the story previous involve intruders into the TARDIS breaking something while the Doctor chases them about various as yet unseen corners of the thing.
Bulwer-Lytton wrote “It was a dark and stormy night”? I thought that was Snoopy!
Ah…to dream the impossible dream of an historical episode without a tacked on alien invasion. They used to do those quite well in the Hartnell era.
Scavenger: Snoopy was the one who came up with just stopping there. Bulwer-Lytton went on another 20 or 30 words before reaching that first period.
My own unwritten Doctor Who story is another historical figure one, with Issac Newton and Cybermen, both old and new varieties, and a lot of talk about Alchemy and Gold and such.
This is the same VRIL that the Nazis had formed a secret occult society around? Supposidly a power source that was to fuel their UFOs? I saw a show about it on the History Channel.
I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out how Karen Gillan should leave the show, but I’m afraid to write it out loud.
I think she should die. Horribly, and for no great reason. And then the Doctor should keep traveling with just Rory.
I just noticed that Moneydress came up with the plot to Season 9’s premiere…