alternatehistory.com

Well, a little over on both counts, but I wanted to make sure that I knew what I wanted to say, as this is the first “meta” update. I started posting this timeline on the 10th of January 2019, and one year and two weeks later, I thought I’d do a little retrospective. It’s pretty lucky that we recently hit 100k words in the timeline (the threadmarked posts, that is). Consider this like a director's commentary for the posts done so far. Well, for me, it feels like I’ve been working on this for more than a year, but that’s because I have. This all stemmed from a conversation I had with a couple of friends about how easy it would be to change Back to the Future into a Doctor Who story, and I thought I’d try my hand at writing it. Then, about a year later, I started putting it on this forum.


This may or may not come as a surprise to some of you, but at the beginning, I thought I’d be done writing it by now. There’s two main reasons why that hasn’t happened. 1. My mood and creative ability has been all over the place this past year, and I don’t like writing when it feels like I’m not going to be putting out good stuff. 2. The scope of the timeline has expanded significantly since its inception.

My first draft for this timeline, which remains unfinished, went up to the year 2001, and it was a purely Doctor Who timeline, more in the vein of “Who is the Doctor?” and “The Doctor is Who?”, both of which are great timelines I recommend checking out. Star Trek was going to play a peripheral role, only occasionally mentioned, and each Doctor would only have a couple of updates. Suffice it to say, the purview has expanded somewhat. The next two updates are focussing on the comics industry and Disney respectively, neither of which are things I was planning on tackling.

So, why the change? Well, I just really enjoyed writing the timeline, and when I began work on the second draft, I found that I wanted to flesh things out more, and we ended up with what we have now. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so far, even if we’re not at the point I thought I’d be a year ago. As mentioned before, my mood and mental state has been all over the place (I’m pretty sure you could plot a graph of my mood based on how often I update this). But I’m in a much better place now than I have in years, though I don’t want to go too much into personal stuff here.

Originally, each part was going to be about the same length as Part I is, that is, somewhere between 10-20 actual “chapters”. As you can see, that’s no longer the case, as Part II is shaping up to be about 5x the length of the first one. We’ve been in Part II for almost a year now, but I intend to get us into Part III soon enough.


So, as a belated treat for the one year anniversary, I thought that I’d tell you, my loyal and fantastic readers, some of the places we didn’t go this time, so to speak. It’s primarily casting that I altered at various points, but there are a few other changes. So, fully aware of the fact that these parts of the updates are effectively ATLs of an ATL, let’s begin.


1: The Sixth Doctor’s films/the Amblin era
The first film, Back to the Future, is basically unchanged, but the second and third films are very different to how they were in my original plan. The second film, The Cyber Invasion, was initially going to be an adaptation of the classic series story The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but taking place in Hill Valley. The Doctor and Marty would be joined by a girl from this future, Eve, who would exist as a “temporal anomaly” after the events of the film were averted, and she was technically never born.

The third film, which ITTL is The Mad Dog Gang, was pretty much going to be the 1996 TV Movie Doctor Who. The Sixth Doctor would play a relatively small role, after being shot at the start. It wouldn’t be until the end that he regenerated. The film would have also seen the return of the Master, this time played by Peter Cushing. I decided against both the story and the casting in the end, at the insistence of my friend @Drorac, who read my first draft and gave me feedback.


2: The Seventh Doctor’s Actor
The actors for the Seventh Doctor’s companions have remained the same throughout all iterations of this timeline, though why and when Tom Hanks signed on varied a little. Despite this, who I had to play the Seventh Doctor changed a lot. Initially, I cast Sean Bean, until I realised another timeline had already done it better than I could, and that he was pretty much completely unknown at the time of his “casting”. So Sean Bean got the boot.

Then, it was Anthony Stewart Head, but after bouncing the idea off of another couple of people, it was clear that we thought he would work better in a villainous capacity, as he did in School Reunion. But that line of thinking got me onto the possibility of Hugh Laurie, who, as you all know, was the final choice ITTL.


3: The Eighth Doctor’s Arc and Companions
I can’t go into a huge amount of detail for these last two, as elements of them touch on things that I haven’t covered yet in the timeline. So, originally, the Eighth Doctor was going to have the arc that I’m exploring with the Ninth Doctor. But I realised that that left me with nothing really to do with the Ninth Doctor, at least, nothing I could think of. His companions were different too, as were much of the other cast. For starters, the Monk was not originally going to be a recurring villain.

Originally, the Eighth Doctor was going to have two companions, Alex and Jeremy, played by Courtney Cox and Matthew Perry respectively. The Ninth Doctor’s companion was originally going to be Bernice Summerfield, played by Lisa Boweman (I was pretty unoriginal with this one). Alex and Bernice were reworked into Isabella and Rachel respectively.


4: Benjamin Sisko’s Actor
A shorter one here, but originally, Benjamin Sisko ITTL was going to be Peter Capaldi. I decided against this because it meant that certain stories I really liked and planned to reuse or work in another way would have to be dropped or rewritten in a way that would, in all likelihood, have been pretty janky. So Laurence Fishburne became Sisko, and I kept Capaldi in as Captain Sheridan, one of the few Babylon 5 elements (though barely) that I included in the first season of DS9. (Again, that will be different from here).


So, there’s a few things that you probably didn’t know about the timeline. I apologise I this isn’t what you were hoping for when you saw that I’d posted a new update. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, to show you the roads we didn’t go down. There likely won’t be an update tomorrow, as I’m busy (but with some brilliant stuff, that I hope will mean I can get back to posting more frequently).

This is cliché, but I really wouldn’t have been able to get this far without all of you continuing to read and interact. This past month has been the best for me in terms of writing, with all of you sending me messages, and I’ve finally hit the stuff I’ve really been wanting to get into.

So, one year in, we’re at 1994, and I have plans up to 2023. Let’s hope it doesn’t take three more years to get there. I wish you all the best, and I’ll see you soon with some more actual canon update stuff. See you around.

Timelordtoe