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Doctor Who

Doctor Who Literature: Paradise Towers

I listened to Bonnie Langford’s reading of the book and it was splendid. The cover art is by Alister Pearson, who defined the look of Doctor Who art when I wandered into the cosmos.

Build high for happiness!

On 30 November 2024, I recorded the first of three Doctor Who Literature podcasts I was booked to do after my initial appearance in March 2023. As the trio are in relatively rapid succession—each novelizing a story from one of Sylvester McCoy’s three seasons in the title role—I suggested to host Jason Miller that we record them in the reverse order of publication, River Song-style, with us referring back to things in future episodes.

As I mention in this episode, disappointingly—for me—recorded first, I am wont to take things one step beyond reasonable. (Rrroll that R for the full McCoy.)

Happily, Jason—the other Jason, the one that hosts the show—fulfilled my long-standing desire to meet Jim Sangster, whose work I’ve admired for decades, so I’ll forgive his chonologia…next time.

Wallscrawl stating "Pex Lives".
©1987, 2021 by BBC Studios.

You can listen to our discussion of Doctor Who: Paradise Towers by Stephen Wyatt on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube, and don’t forget to have a look at Jim’s video—featuring the vocals by Antony Owen—that cracked me up just before we started recording.

Patreon Preview: Steven Moffat

Note: This is a preview of “The Strange Comedy of Doctor Who and Mister Moffat”, my 3,300-word interview with Steven Moffat. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $10 “Fresh copy!” level.

“I always wanted to be a writer,” said Steven Moffat, thumbing a goodnight text to his wife—eight hours in our future and headed for bed—into his Blackberry. “There was never a time where I wanted to be anything else. I can’t recall any other ambitions, quite honestly.”

It was Saturday, 17 February 2007, and we were sat in a quiet corridor of the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, the din of a nearby convention underscoring our conversation.

“The very first things I wrote were an adaptation—a very bad one, as you’d expect from a seven-year-old—of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and endless Doctor Who stories. I have the distinction—this year—of writing my own new version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Doctor Who; hurray, I’ve really made progress there.”

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

The Survival Remixes by Dominic Glynn

Survival Remixes by Dominic Glynn.

Dominic Glynn’s score for “Survival” lives on a well-worn cat climber at the back of my mind, and has done since the summer of 1990, when the final McCoy serials made it across the pond. It reaches out, claws extended, and swats me regularly, often when I least expect it.

Glynn’s just-released remixes bring back the end of an era, but with a new wildness. I particularly like “The Dead Valley”, which is a long way from the planet of the Cheetah People, but of a piece with that dying world.

The theme to the Indefinable Magic podcast is a welcome bonus, and I commend the podcast—one of Toby Hadoke’s Time Travels—to you, if you aren’t already a listener.

If I’ve intrigued you, give it a listen here.

Everything is connected.

Saturday, 29 April 1989. I’ve been invited to Kris’s home.

One day, there was no Kris. Then, Kris was everywhere: Cub Scouts, Taekwondo, and even recess. I was minding my own business, and then I was surrounded…by Kris.

So he’d invited me to his home.

There was a cat called Daisy, strange salty noodles unlike anything I’d tasted previously, and—most alien of all—television at 10:30pm, long after I’d ordinarily be in bed. Kris’s dad, Mike, joined us on the couch as the peculiar music started alongside the prismatic titles, and we found ourselves on—

Wednesday, 25 November 1998. I’ve invited Deana to my home.

We met in my first college class, The Physics of Star Trek, two years ago, and she’d gone with us to Stellar Occasion V in September, where Stephen Furst gave his little wave and Ed Wasser walked around with a Muppet-like Morden head on a stick.

The us consisted of me and David, the high school friend who’d convinced me to give Babylon 5 a third try after The Gathering and “Revelations” failed to impress in ’93 and ’94, respectively. At Dave’s urging, I’d watched again and “War without End” had won me over in ’96. The conversion was religious, and it was a lucky thing for Dave because I had cable when the series transitioned from syndication to TNT the next year.

So we gathered in my room, David, Deana, me, and my mother; she often followed my lead when it came to television. My father would not watch Babylon 5 until 2009, when I was commissioned to write the Babylon 5 Encyclopedia and watching the show suddenly seemed like supporting my career.

As the familiar TNT adverts—seemingly the same every Wednesday night—played out just before 8pm Central Time, I cranked the Dolby Surround, switched off the lights, and settled in for—

—Varos, a former penal planet where torture was broadcast on television and the colonial governor put his policies to votes that rained cellular disintegration rays on him if the people wished it. Into this dystopian nightmare materialized the Doctor and his friend Peri, desperate for Varos’s rare Zyton 7 ore to restore the full function of the former’s TARDIS, a space-time machine cleverly disguised as a London police box from the 1960s.

So this was Doctor Who.

I was aware of its existence. The back of the Intergalactic Trading Company catalog was devoted to the series—which seemed to be about a sextet of intergalactic space policemen, maybe a strangely dressed Green Lantern Corps, with phone booths and a robot dog—but aside from recognizing the iconography, I knew nothing about it. I rarely ever got past the pages of the catalog devoted to Star Trek products at the front. The technical manuals and uniform patterns obsessed me.

I stayed up late the next Saturday, too, to watch—

Garibaldi’s voiceover: “The Interstellar Alliance, based on the homeworld of the Minbari Federation, was founded in the Earth year 2261, shortly after the end of the Shadow War. Twenty years ago.”

Minbar. A flood of memories. Sheridan, awaking, his end near.

Babylon 5 was ending.

This was new. U.S. television shows didn’t end; they were abruptly cut down or faded into oblivion. It was the nature of the beast—the business—that shows continued until economics intervened.

Sheridan’s friends gathered for a last supper.

It was the end, but the moment had been prepared for—

More Doctor Who. But a different Doctor. A change. A regeneration.

They weren’t six men at the same time—except when they were—but rather seven incarnations of one man. (We can fix that limited gender in ten years—thanks, Steven.)

This was unbelievable. The series had been running consistently for twenty-five years, the protagonist periodically dying and being reborn, thanks to the biological sorcery of his ancient civilization—

John and Delenn embrace for the last time. He’s already gone. He’s been dead for twenty years, kept alive by the biological sorcery of an ancient being. Nothing lasts forever, though, and he sets off for one last look around the place that shaped him, that he shaped—

Earth, 1963. The Doctor returns to Totter’s Lane, where he left the Hand of Omega lifetimes ago, at the very start of his adventure.

I’m no longer interested in the front half of the Intergalactic Trading Company’s catalog. The back has my full attention. Star Trek will win back some of my love in a year, when the Borg take Picard, but it will never again roll off my tongue when someone asks me what my favorite show is. From this point forward, the answer will be—

Babylon 5. The station, so tied to Sheridan’s destiny, is scheduled for demolition. There’s no more certain way to end a show than to destroy its namesake. (Ask Blake’s 7 or Robin of Sherwood.)

From the week of 13 May 1996 to this moment, 8:47pm on 25 November 1998, I’ve been obsessed with Babylon 5. It arrived at the perfect time.

There had been an article in the newspaper in 1994. A soap opera writer from Los Angeles was teaching a class at TCU where students were making their own television series. My father had pointed it out to me. “That’s where I’m going, and they’re going to make my show,” I’d said after reading it. He said words like “acceptance” and “scholarship” and “SATs” and “paying dues” and other irrelevancies, but I’d made up my mind.

They did a second television series in 1996, but I’d just arrived and I hadn’t had the right classes yet…and I didn’t like the script. My education was bifurcated, working my way through the Radio-TV-Film curriculum on one hand and reading everything by J. Michael Straczynski that I could find on the other.

Sheridan’s being overwhelmed by the light, going beyond the rim.

I’m writing a script. It’s called Slayday, set in a world where a national holiday is celebrated by murdering someone for the benefit of society. It’s a dystopian bureaucracy begging for—

Doctor Who has rewired my brain. I tried to find a technical manual, of the kind that proliferate in Star Trek publishing, but I ended up with a book about the making of the show. There were interviews with designers and producers and writers and directors and I was learning what they all did, the making of the show becoming as important to me as the product itself.

1982: As we walked out of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, I turned to my mother and said, “I want to do that.”

“You want to work in a movie theater?” she asked.

No.

Douglas Camfield. Terrance Dicks. Robert Holmes. Barry Letts. Philip Hinchcliffe. Chris Boucher. Roger Murray-Leech. Douglas Adams. Graeme Harper. Andrew Cartmel. Ben Aaronovitch.

What do they do? How do they do it? How can I do it?

I’m writing a script. It’s called A Study inSanity, about a man who’s grown up ignorant that his father was God, who dreamed up the universe he inhabits, only to die, setting in motion—

The end.

“Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations…

“It changed the future. And it changed us.”

An understatement, though it didn’t work its magic alone.

2010: We’re sitting in the hall at Gallifrey One, and a guy dressed as the Doctor notes my shirt. “Babylon 5…that’s obscure!”

I smile, remembering Doctor Who’s demise, eight months after I discovered it.

Babylon 5 was built to end, and it did. Beautifully.

Doctor Who was designed to regenerate. And it has, more times than I could have imagined.

“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea’s asleep and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold.”

I’ve forgotten more about one than I’ve ever known about the other, but I won’t say which is which.

Doctor Who Literature: Chris Boucher & Harlan Ellison

On 19 February 2022, I recorded material for two episodes of the Doctor Who Literature podcast.

For my first episode, I told host Jason Miller how my love for Doctor Who led me to Harlan Ellison, who wrote the 1978 introduction for the U.S. editions of Doctor Who novelizations published by Pinnacle Books. (I share the segment with Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe, who returned to pay tribute to writer Chris Boucher.)

You can listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

Rain

Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in The X-Files Pilot (1993).

Rain appeals to my melancholic inclination, and makes me think of many things I love: seeking refuge from the storm in The Old Dark House; sheltering at the Rashōmon city gate to stay dry; the debate on the Declaration of Independence in 1776; seeking refuge from a different storm in The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Roy Batty’s last words in Blade Runner; Billy Kinetta’s revelation in “Paladin of the Last Hour”; Claudia comforting Lisa in the aptly titled “A Rainy Night”; the smell of a Labrador having shaken the rain off her fur; Rob McKenna in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; the pelting of Collinwood (and/or the Old House) in Dark Shadows; Mulder and Scully at any given moment in the first five years of The X-Files; Charles and Tommy’s talk in Four Weddings and a Funeral; Andy Dufresne’s freedom in The Shawshank Redemption; my first two rain-soaked short stories, “After the Fall” and “Last Night”; Billy Shipton’s last hour in “Blink”; and others that aren’t coming to mind.

Charles (Hugh Grant) and Tom (James Fleet) in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

I used to love the rain, and it saddened me that I lived in place where it doesn’t happen as frequently as I’d like. But now, when it does happen—as it’s happening right now—I worry about something completely out of my hands, a vestigial obligation of friendship that will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. The once-pleasant melancholy inclines to inescapable despondency, and I wonder if a favorite has slipped away…