"Phil won't leave his room" - A Doctor Who Production History

Maybe he gets to do a 60 minute Radio 4 special recorded at the same time as The Wrong Doctors, produced so as to ease fans into accepting him as the Doctor. I'm sure that the Beeb will want to squeeze as much material and publicity out of his casting as possible.
 
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Again, his casting irks Segal and there's the fear that by asking too much of him, he might want paying his proper fee instead of the "mates rates" Delgado sold him on. If you really want one more performance from him, then he could have a cameo in Delgado's Radio 4 jaunt.
 
Because the show is never off the air for longer than three years, there's not as much spinoff media to fill in Wilderness Years. There are more TV stories to novelize and there'll be some continuity extension happening in those. I can also see Target/Virgin publishing original novels (or even more likely, short story collections), but not as a regular line, because there's not as much of a hole to fill.
 
I've yet to decide that. I'm going to have a talk with my friend Gary about political scenarios in the 90s and with that, what the BBC's priorities are.
 
The Fifth is the least popular, Part 13 outlines his shifting image among the fans. Deelix Nove is TTL's Adric and was written out swiftly due to the poor response. Sophie is sometimes written off as bland by fans who think characterization means having an obvious quirk.

I haven't abandoned this TL, by the way. I just wrote myself into a corner with Part 29 and am waiting for a friend to be free to chat with me about it.
 
The Fifth is the least popular, Part 13 outlines his shifting image among the fans. Deelix Nove is TTL's Adric and was written out swiftly due to the poor response. Sophie is sometimes written off as bland by fans who think characterization means having an obvious quirk.

I haven't abandoned this TL, by the way. I just wrote myself into a corner with Part 29 and am waiting for a friend to be free to chat with me about it.
I'm always happy to talk and collaborate, remember.
 
Thanks for that, it's appreciated.

I'm hoping to talk to my friend Andrew in the next week. Unless I massively rewrite Part 29, get set for the ghosts of a dead world and pale stranger wants the Sixth Doctor's blood!
 
Part 29 - The Wrong Doctors (Conclusion)
In the Dalek warship, Port 9 all the monitors go blank. "Was that part of your plan, Doctor?" asks Koryn.

"No," replies The Doctor. He checks his handheld computer. "There's a real time distortion occuring. I'd made the Dalek instruments hypersensitive to normal fluctuations that it's shut them down. One of my past selves might have done some clever, or maybe something stupid, or…"

"Or?"

"All my selves are in trouble."

***​

On the Sixth Doctor's TARDIS, the lights are flickering and he's grimly holding on to the console as the TARDIS is shaking violently. The usual grinding sound of the temporal engines is louder and deeper. Suddenly, with a huge BOOM the craft is still. The TARDIS has landed.

The Doctor leaves the TARDIS to find himself in a fog shrouded forest. There's a low moaning wind and The Doctor soon becomes aware of distant, disorted screams and nearby, unintelligible whispers. "Good job I don't believe in ghosts," he muses to himself "or I'd be very, very anxious right now."

He is jolted from his reverie by a clear voice calling him.
"Doctor? Are you here? I thought I heard the TAR--" The Doctor places a hand on the shoulder of the person shouting, spins her around and places a finger on his lips.

"Kay Gee," The Doctor whispers "I'm extremely glad to see you. I'm not sure I want people to know I'm here. Not until I know where 'here' is."

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"I'm sorry, but I don't know." Any further explanation is temporarily halted by a sudden vision of a screaming woman flying past them. Standing still but passing as a blur, like she's being transported on a huge turntable.

"Doctor," gasps Kay "didn't you once say you didn't believe in ghosts."

"I hope I'm wrong. I can think of scientific explanations, but they worry me more than the existence of spectral souls. Tell me how you came to be here."

"I was part of a group of historians gathered to study the historicity of…well, of 'The Doctor'."

The Doctor's eyebrows shoot up in surprise. "Did you use your special insight on this project?"

"No, I dragged my heels, made suggestions of negligible usefulness. I wanted to observe. Something about the project didn't seem right. Suddenly, the whole party found itself…transported…housed in a castle…HERE." Kay has to raise her voice, the screams, whispers and visions have increased. The Doctor and Kay find that they are now huddled close together. The Doctor suddenly pulls away, seized by an idea.

"WAIT! WAIT! Right to left! The 'ghosts' or whatever, the voices, they're all moving right to left. This is a vortex! Let's keep moving to the centre. I suspect this castle is in the eye of the storm!" He once again takes Kay's arm and they tramp onwards.

Eventually, they reach the castle. The voices have become so distorted they're blended into an unnatural hiss and hum. The ghosts are now just a constant fog.

"You managed to get out," says The Doctor "how do we get in?"

"The layout is similar to some 14th Century castles I've studied. There's a secret passage that leads to what might have been a river. If it was, it's dried up. It was a short drop, but I don't know how we'll get back up."

"How about we walk up the front door and see if it's unlocked?"

"You haven't changed that much," says Kay.

"I was rather hoping you wouldn't say that, but my course is set. In we go."

The two struggle through the spectral gale, across the drawbridge and to a small opening set in the vast, wooden door. This smaller door has been left open, swinging on its rusted hinges. Through the door and across the courtyard they go until they enter the great hall. The door to the hall slams behind them and the noise decreases significantly, a few of the ghosts flicker like white flames, giving off a few low moans. The Doctor freezes, causing Kay to become very anxious. "Doctor?"

"I can sense it. Broken time. Something terrible has happened here, is happening here, is going to happen here. I'd turn and run, but I don't think I can escape it."

"You wouldn't run away, Doctor!"

"Not permanently, but I wish I could withdraw to think, to plan and I can't."

"THE TIME LORD IS HERE! THE CEREMONY WILL BEGIN!"

The Doctor and Kay suddenly find themselves being grabbed by unseen people. Strangely, they apologize under their breath. "Sorry, Kay, but we don't know what else to do."

"Doctor!" Kay shouts. "It's the people from the historicity group!"

"BIND HIM!" cries a pale, emaciated man in a black robe (Murray Melvin) as he steps into the light. "Defiler of Skaro, you shall pay! Bind him to the altar!"

The "altar" is a large wooden table and the people who seized The Doctor do their best to tie to him to it. They just about manage it, but their efforts are halting and uncertain.

"Skaro?! This is Skaro?"

"These are the ruins of Skaro after you destroyed the Daleks in the Final War."

"I don't know about the Final War. That's my future, but I'd hazard a guess that I'll let the Daleks destroy themselves. I really don't think I should be here. This is too far after my time."

"From the ruins of the Final War we shall reach back to the First War and change our tragic history. The breach shall be opened with blood!"

A machine has been brought in. Looking like Satan's own fridge with a keyboard and monitor interface roughly patched into it. "Listen everyone, that is a time vortex generator," The Doctor shouts to the room. "There are no ghosts! Those are time echos!" The assorted members of the historicity team move forward uncertainly but are stopped by the shouts of the Thal.

"These are the echos of the suffering of Skaro! The many who suffered in the long war. They can be saved." He moves towards The Doctor. "You saw what the First War did to Skaro, but having seen it you didn't use your great powers to go back in time and prevent the suffering. Even when your own people gave you the chance to prevent the Daleks spreading throughout the universe you couldn't do it. You let them spread their evil and when you had enough of playing the hero, you wiped them out, leaving Skaro a sterile world. But the powers of the vortex are within you. Time is in your blood and with that blood I will access time and undo the evils done to my home world."

"You don't understand," screams The Doctor. But he is stopped as the Thal steps forward and grabs The Doctor's arm. We see Kay wince as The Doctor screams. The Thal moves towards the Time Vector Generator. In his hand he holds a dagger and the blade is wet with a few drops of The Doctor's blood!

***​

On the Dalek warship, The Lost Doctor frowns. "Have you noticed, Koryn? There doesn't seem to be any alarm. A huge distortion has shut down the time monitoring equipment and there are no flashing lights, no klaxons." He ducks down beneath a monitor station and starts pulling wire out, trying to jump start the equipment. "Daleks aren't noted for their calm. Something's up. AH!" The monitor flickers into life. After a little adjustment, The Doctor manages to get a signal. "Oh, no," he gasps. Enough finesse. I'm just going to have to throw a spanner in the works." The Doctor finds an intercom and broadcasts throughout the ship. "I am in Landing Bay 9 and I'm not a Dalek. Come and get me, boys!" He steps away and says to Koryn "When the Daleks get here, stand behind me."

***​

On Skaro, the Thal places the dagger in a chamber in the Time Vortex Generator. The Sixth Doctor pleads, "You're making a mistake! You can't rewrite history."

"You have changed history, frequently."

"I've changed it and tried to aim for a better outcome, but I can't write it. To be the author of history, I'd have to have total control over all of time. Every action, every consequence would have to be guided by my will. I wouldn't trust myself with that power and I've never encountered an entity I would trust."

The Thal gazes at his monitor. "The vortex profile complete. I am ready to open the breach." But suddenly, the number of ghosts increases. They appear and disappear from different points in the room. Their modes of dress differing.

"These are the new ghosts," The Doctor shouts. "New victims of new wars. Possible wars. You can't stop the First War with one action. You can delay it. You're seeing the time ghosts of Thals and Kaleds who might never be born or might never have been born. These are the ripples of the action you are about to take. Every time you set your mind to a course of action, the potential changes."

"You are on time's side. Maybe you think yourself to be time's champion. But you don't know how it feels to have have time cut through your life like a sword."

"I DO!" It's The Lost Doctor. He has entered the hall.

"How did you get here?" splutters The Sixth Doctor.

"Interesting story, I'll tell you some time."

***​

Flashback to the Dalek warship. Daleks flood in to Landing Bay 9. The Lost Doctor holds his hands up and smiles. "I never thought I'd be pleased to see you."

"WHO-ARE-YOU?"

"Who else would be poking around your landing bay dressed like this?"

"YOU-ARE-THE DOCTOR!"

"I didn't say that. You can't be sure who I am. Maybe I'm just a big fan of…"

"SILENCE! THE-DOCTOR-HAS-TWO-HEARTS! I-WILL-SCAN…bzzz…nzzz…zzz…bzzz"

Rapidly, each Dalek falls to the same mystery ailment. They stop moving and their screeching voices are replaced with low buzzes. The Doctor turns to Koryn, puffs out his chest and straightens his waistcoat. "The third weapon?" smiles Koryn.

"Woven inside is an information matrix. The Dalek scan is vulnerable. They scanned me for two hearts but absorbed the information, like involuntarily reading a bar code. The information is overwhelming their processors and being transmitted to every Dalek on the ship."

"Why didn't you do that before?"

"Because now every Dalek onboard is locked up, there aren't any left to pilot this thing and before long, it's going to drift aimlessly until it finds a gravity source to pull it in and crash. On top of that, the heating, air pressure and other systems won't be being monitored, so there's any number of things that could kill us. And that's not the worse thing."

"What's worse than us being killed?"

"We won't find out what their plan is."

***​

Back in the great hall, The Lost Doctor is speaking. "I found out what their plan was. I was able to find that this was their destination. I set the warship on a crash course with the nearest sun and brought my TARDIS here. I had to realize that this wasn't all about me. For once I figured in the Dalek plans, but I wasn't their ultimate victim.

"They're using you. The attacks on me were to narrow down my movements, make it hard to have my other selves help each other. While I was fighting a battle on different fronts, but the only one that mattered was the one here."

The Lost Doctor is walking carefully towards the Thal. "You want my blood? You can have it," he says as he gets close enough to the Thal to take the dagger from him. The Doctor pricks his thumb and smear some of the blood up and down the blade. As he returns the dagger to the chamber, the ghosts begin to subside.

"Let me show you what I found out. Let me show you the timeline that was the Daleks' ultimate aim."

On the monitor is an image of thousands of Daleks. "They were going to let you reach back to the First War, but once you did they were going to pounce and seed the Dalek race from hundreds of years earlier. Kaleds and Thals would be converted. These ruins wouldn't be restored, they would no longer exist. All of Skaro would be a Dalek habitat."

"No," gasps the Thal.

"You wouldn't just lose Skaro. You would never have even had it in the first place."

The number of ghosts is similar to what it was at the beginning.

"Let me turn this machine off. Let the ghosts rest."

"You can't know what I feel. The loss."

"I lost myself, friend. I do tamper in time, to make things better. There are limits to what I can do, what I should do, but I haven't always judged them right and now I can remember endless pasts, but I don't know which is mine. I know I have loved truly maybe once, maybe twice in my life, but I remember countless loves and I don't know which is mine. I mourn people who turn out not to have died, or to have never been born. I even remember dying thousands of times. But here I am. Eventually, the changes I made had an imapct on me and I had to absorb them. I don't just have to live with my choices, I have to *have lived* with them. But I think I've ultimately made things better. That's how I know who I am. That's who The Doctor is."

***​

The Doctors, except for the Seventh, are gathered again on the Time Lord homeworld and discussing plans for getting back to their respective timelines.
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"Tony got a bit of a short shrift in the end. There had been a subplot involving him, but there were time and budget pressures and he said to me 'I've been playing this part for the last six years, I don't mind giving the others a bit of space'.

"His part of the plot was going to tie up a lot more to Colin's Doctor potentially being killed on Skaro and breaking the timeline. Every time we looked at something to edit out, Terrance encouraged me to cut out plot rather than action. I said to him 'Are they going to understand it?' and he said 'They'll understand it *enough*, that's all we need'. I suppose he was right."

PJ Hammond, DVD Extra, The Wrong Doctors
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The Seventh Doctor finally enters. "Now this is over, I was finally able to do what I was planning to do in late-21st Century London. I ended up in 2093 this time, but no matter. Come in, my dear."

Susan walks in. "Is this the party, grandfather?" she says.

"Oh no," says the Seventh Doctor. "I just thought they'd all like to come along."

Lord Dezan protests. "This crossing of your timestream has served its purpose, I cannot permit it to continue for a social…"

"Dezan!" snaps the Seventh Doctor. "Let us have this. We've saved the universe AGAIN. Don't be such a…such a…TIME LORD!"

"I cannot countenance…"

"Tell you what, you can come along and keep an eye on things. You might even enjoy yourself. It's a housewarming or an annivesary or…well, it's a party being thrown by some very old friends."

***​

We see a long shot of a cottage on a winter night. The Doctors, including the First and Second seen from the back, walk up the path and knock at the door. The door opens and we hear the voice of Ian Chesterton. "Doctor? Susan? Look who's here darling! Who are your friends?"

"It's a long, long story, Ian."

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Next time: Some actual production history!!! Phew!

Thanks to Andrew Hickey for helping with the plot
 
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I had to go back and check, but yes, Christmas Day probably 6.05pm, which means Only Fools And Horses that went out at that time IOTL goes out later, Birds Of A Feather maybe goes out on a completely different night and what of EastEnders? Hmmm.
 
Hey, I have a campaign manager now. Who knew? At some point, I need to find a way of fully tying that Beach Boys thread to this one. In my mind, they're in the same world and I have some little idea of how the two PODs interact with each other. Yes, that means that The Beatles never split in what I've been referring to informally as "The Delgadoverse" .

By the way, I do have the first half of a plot breakdown for the TVM done. Now, I've already done more description than I ever intended to do and the last one damn near killed this TL. Does everyone want a) a full breakdown of the TVM plot b) a brief breakdown c) no plot stuff and just production detail?
 
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