INTRODUCTION

To start with the obvious ‘Doctor Who’, the Doctor and all associated stuff are and remain the property of the BBC. This shameless fanfic won’t be monetised in any way. (And I doubt it would work if I tried.) 

Though as I’ve said before now, ‘Doctor Who’ is also a piece of folk culture. Everybody instinctively gets it doesn’t have some delineated cannon. But that just makes it ‘fanficable’. (Or it would do were there such a word.) It doesn’t explain where the motivation comes from…

How Come?

So why write fanfic? There are, I suspect, two poles around which the majority orients itself. One is to scratch the perpetual itch. What do you do when you have all the DVDs, the New Adventure novels and the new season isn't on until the Spring? One natural response is to make more yourself. The premise is more of the same.

The other is as a kind of fix-it, like computer nerds hacking out a patch for shareware or writing in your own candidate on election day. If certain elements seem sidelined or undeveloped, add them in yourself. Not enough Ood stories? Tardis unexplored? They’re skipping over the science? That's something you can sort out yourself armed only with a keyboard and an attitude. 

Much fanfic of course chooses to play up the wrong elements, bringing out subtext that was better left buried. The Doctor's origins would be a classic example, which were better left mysterious. But if much fanfic is bad or misguided, then so is much fiction. That doesn't invalidate the whole idea.

And of course these are poles, not antagonistic camps. But here I was leaning much more towards the second one. I first had this idea so long ago it was the end of the… yes, really… the first Davies era, and I invented a whole new Eleventh Doctor for myself quite separate from Matt Smith. (Hence the header An Alternative Eleven.) Yet something in my mind wouldn’t let go of the idea...

Much of my intention was to course correct from a lot of what I saw as problems with the later years of that era. (I wasn’t as anti-Davies as some, but did think he’d gone on too long, which had magnified his weaknesses and minimised his virtues.)

It’s not just formatted as a script, its intended to be one. You’ll need to visualise as you read, even if inside your mind’s the only place it will ever be shown.

Where we come in:

Here’s the thing. We don’t come in just where Davies (first) left off. But, at the time of watching, where I assumed it would be left off. Which went something like…

First, some retro-continuity is revealed. To defeat the Daleks in the Time War the Doctor has to enlist the Time Lords, but then comes to realise that his only chance to kill the Daleks off means wiping them out as well. Traumatised by slaughtering his own species, he suppresses this memory in his mind. He also leaves himself unable to do anything similar again, inserting a kind of mental circuit-breaker in his thought processes. (Which is why he is unable to set off the bomb he himself assembled in ’Parting Of the Ways’, claiming “coward every time.”)

But this conditioning starts to break down, and this suppressed memory reawakens. (Perhaps he is also forced into a similar position again.) This time the Doctor responds more radically, regenerating while developing fully fledged amnesia. He takes off in the Tardis and lands on a wild and windy beach, later revealed to be the remote Scottish island of Presbarrah. The Tardis follows its homing instinct, leaving him…

The New Doctor:

This new Doctor is a mystery to everyone, including himself. He constantly says and does things which take even him by surprise. He’s not at all talkative, charismatic or tricksterish like the Tenth, but spectral and spaced out, a fractured visionary, forever on the borderline between breakdown and revelation, between gibberish and insight – a figure like Syd Barratt, David Bowie in ’Man Who Fell to Earth’, an older version of Sky from the old Seventies series, Brian in ’Still Crazy’, or Fiver in ’Watership Down’. People are consequently always underestimating him, again including himself. But when in danger his old survival reflexes come back. The show’s new ‘puzzle logo’ (up top) reflects this fractured self.

Given his condition, his dependence upon Isobel (more of who anon) is greater than with any previous companion. He’s continually forgetful and impractical, which tries her patience. Yet while one moment he’s burning their breakfast, in the next he’s demonstrating some flash of genius. The gender roles become reversed, when what’s required is fisticuffs then it’s left to Isobel.

He’s colour-coded white and pale blue, with the general effect to convey someone spectral, not quite here. As the season continues and he recovers, the blues he wears darken – finishing on a Tardis blue.

The Doctor’s symbol is a spiral. Which can be used as a sun symbol, but also suggests incompleteness. It therefore suggests at his true nature while reinforcing his fragility. There’s also frequent images of emptiness.

He’s frequently shown with his hands passively in his pockets. Which we later discover contain impossibly large amounts of strange objects, like they’re mini Tardises. 

There should also be surreal dream sequences. The normal show tradition has been to stay out of the Doctor’s head. However, in this case the dreams will be just as much a mystery to him! The dreams could be used to drop plot points, but equally could be ‘fever dreams’, a repository for some crazy imagery!

He goes on a quite literal journey to find himself, as he no longer knows who he is. This becomes akin to a pilgrimage, which you embark on one not to reach somewhere but for the journey to change you, to be transformative. (Traditionally pilgrimages purged the travellers of their sins, made them ready to enter the holy site at their end.) And he finds clues and pieces on the way, both without and within.

So the more adventures he gets involved in, the more his old instincts come back and the Doctor ‘returns’. A standard story formula is to split the Doctor and the companion up, to build tension by cross-cutting. This will be delayed until later episodes to create greater impact. They’ll become a sign of the Doctor’s recovery.

Language is not normally something that comes up in this show. Originally, it was simply assumed aliens would speak the Queen’s English, perhaps learning it as part of their invasion plans. This was later given the retcon explanation of a ‘gift’ imparted to anyone who’s been in the Tardis, a gift somehow extended to anyone watching the show. This time, the Doctor isn’t himself and the Tardis is gone, so instead there’s an emphasis on different languages as a kind of background babble.

At the same time the Doctor is shown to possess a facility with language. To those previously unfamiliar with the show, this will become part of his mystery, and suggest he’s a traveller of some kind. It will also work paradoxically against his amnesia in an intriguing way, he seems to know every language there is and yet not his own name.

Isobel:

Isobel is the main companion figure. Though Scottish, she’s not native to Presbarrah. Her hippy traveller parents settled there after a long time roving – a clapped-out camper van still stands beside her solid but basic bungalow.

Her character is a mixture of, and collision between, the dour but strong Presbyterian sense of right and wrong which she has picked up from growing up on the island (her name means “my God is a vow”) and her parents’ more carefree and anti-authority worldview. Emotionally reserved, choosing to express herself through actions, she’s level-headed and practical - though qualified as a Nurse she’s as much Matron. Strength of personality means she’s good at getting people to do what she wants.

Though dour of temperament, she has a sardonic sense of humour, and is scathing to those she regards as fools. She has a defiance of authority which is not angry or hot-blooded but calm, resolute and resilient.

But she is also at war with herself, frustrated at this ordering side of herself and with a suppressed desire for more adventure in her life. Despite growing up with stories of her parents’ travels, she’s never even been to the mainland very often and has channelled a simmering resentment about this into breaking out of her self-set confines with a forthcoming trip. Exotic-looking posters of Thailand adorn her otherwise simply functional home. She comes to see in the Doctor the freely associative wild card she needs to play.

She’s tall, stern-looking and imposing. Red and black are her defining colours. She wears black clothes, boots, has long red hair which she normally ties back. Her clothes should make her look cool (in that effortless way some people seem to have) but also sensible. In her late Twenties. She may or may not be played by Isobel Eadie.

Given the Doctor’s amnesia, Isobel plays more of a role than the traditional companion. She’s perhaps similar to Leela in 'Futurama', and at times has a similar outward disdain to the Doctor as Leela has for Fry. However, when female companions for the Doctor are not simply demure they tend to become fully-fledged fantasy figures. Isobel should always appear as a believable character in her own right.

Both Isobel and the Doctor have identifying  symbols. (Though these do not appear until the end of the first episode.) Isobel’s is of the sun. In a contrast to her black clothing, it stands for her desire to escape and adventure. (As does her desire to leave the rainy Scottish island.) The sun symbol also looks strong and dynamic, with its radiating lines.

The Boss:

Every drama needs a bad guy. The third most recurring character is a shadowy figure, somehow in control of UNIT, who wants to capture the Doctor. Picture the worst employer you ever had behaving as if there were no constraints on him - domineering, witheringly sarcastic, merciless about mistakes, completely devoid of consideration. Physically large he works like a block, the dominant still centre of the screen as his underlings scurry around him. When he does move it’s suddenly and decisively.

The series formula:

The Doctor and Isobel are forced to go on the run, just one step ahead of authority figures. It becomes clear there is someone who wants the Doctor who is powerful and knows who he is – the only person within the series who knows this.

With the Doctor not even knowing where or what the Tardis is, all these adventures happen in Britain. It would be something of a cross between the Pertwee Era, and ’The Fugitive’. Like ’The Fugitive’, their constantly having to move on will propel them into fresh adventures all the time. (The otherwise inexplicable Sonic Screwdriver turns out to beep when in the vicinity of alien technology, like a geiger counter of weirdness, drawing them into story situations.)

The theme would be modern paranoia and technofear, black helicopters and covert government plots, buildings that don’t appear on maps. Technology would always be a step ahead of what you suspected, governments and authorities just fronts for shadowy institutions never up to any good. Unlike the invasion-every-week of the Pertwee era, any alien influence would be more indirect – more akin to 'Quatermass'. There’d be an emphasis on the mental and the psychic, rather than the literal.

Despite this through-line, each adventure would itself be standalone and comprehensible in isolation. (If always expounding upon the theme given above.) Setting each story in a separate environment will allow it to have its own look and feel. However, the through-line should be regularly alluded to.

It should be comprehensible as a mystery story to those watching who’ve not seen the show before, so have no more idea who the Doctor is than he does, and come to a resolution at the end. While the more longstanding audience see the pieces slowly getting pulled together.

Advantages to this approach:

Advantages of this new direction would be the firewalls it would create against some of the problems of the old series recurring:

The ‘Lonely God’ stuff is now literally written out of the memory of the show. Added to which, the New Doctor is much humbler and unsure of himself.

A whole house of get-out-of-jail-free cards came to be stockpiled, dampening development of any dramatic tension. These are toys the show has behaved so badly with up till now that they need confiscating. Now no-one knows where the Tardis is. The Doctor has his sonic screwdriver and psychic paper but no knowledge of how to use them – they become clues not devices.

While the previous series didn’t suffer overly from continuity obsession, this format would insist that anything referred to from a previous series, even the most recent ones, would need explaining – making for a better jumping-on point. The seasoned viewer might recognise, say, the psychic paper, but nothing within the show would expect them to do so. To the new viewer, it would merely add to the mystery – a mystery which would be fully explained later.

On a similar note, the Doctor should as much as possible be a stranger, dropped into situations he knows no more about than the viewer. Any references to who he is or where he’s from, beyond “a traveller”, should be shrouded in mystery rather than explained.

Science fiction can suffer from hyperinflation of scale, until audience ability to connect to events is left behind. And New Who has suffered from that. So rather than continually shifting around galaxies, or shifting galaxies around, let’s ground things - literally bring them down to Earth, feel the scrunch of soil beneath our feet. The episodes loosely follow a map format, from the Scottish islands off the North coast to South Wales.

…a map which bypasses London and the Home Counties, historically the places the show always reverted to. (Where Earth always meant the Uk, which meant England, which meant the Home Counties. Even when they were pretending it was an alien planet.) Only the last episode, when Cardiff is finally reached, do we see anything that might be called a landmark. This is part of the shift from place to non-place.

The visual style: 

The style would borrow a lot from the current crop of ‘paranoid thriller’ films and TV shows – ’Children of Men’, ‘Minority Report’, ‘The X Files’, ‘Survivors’, ‘Lost’ and the notorious ’Torchwood’.

There’d be particular emphasis on the ‘fractured self’ films, such as ‘Memento’, ‘The Bourne Supremacy’, ‘Eternal Sunshine’, ‘Resident Evil’, ‘X-Men 2’ etc, which would reflect the Doctor’s amnesiac condition. The underlying theme of such films is the general seeping into the particular, as if the overbearing atmosphere of urban paranoia had seeped into the individual self. As Mark Fisher has argued in ‘Capitalist Realism’: “In conditions where realities and identities are upgraded like software, it is not surprising that memory disorders should have become the focus of cultural anxiety.”

Reflecting both these influences and the Doctor’s state of mind, settings should be achronic. No time periods are ever given and what we see is deliberately jumbled. As said above there’s CCTV cameras, but they co-exist with elements from much earlier decades. Dislocated time reflects the jumbled self. The contemporary and reassuringly old-world co-exist.

The pace of the show would be much slower, reflecting the characters being forced to travel everywhere by normal means. The viewer should feel the earth beneath their boots. They would steep in situations rather than just charge through them. (This would also befit the budgetary constraints of British TV, which always plays a losing game when trying to compete with Hollywood blockbusters.)

There’d be no magic maguffin solutions to problems, but instead a renewed emphasis on teamwork, on their winning the day by forging friendships and alliances with the people they run into. Isobel is but the first of these occurrences.

But it would borrow as much from the old espionage thrillers such as ’The Thirty Nine Steps’. (Whose theatricality is in itself similar to original ‘Doctor Who’.) Filming devices should also be achronic, in the sense of using the classic but rarely used devices from these films.

One would simply be the held shot. Another (which would also feed back to those classic thrillers) would be montage. Montage only seems to be used in contemporary films for ‘time-montage’ (inevitably, used to speed events along, as in the song from ’Team America’) The more traditional ‘frame-montage’ – where different elements are thrust into the same frame, in a style more similar to collage – is much less often used. (For example in ’Suddenly Last Summer’, where the recaller’s face shares the screen with her memories.) This form of montage is so rarely used it would appear almost as something new. Again, it will reflect the Doctor’s fractured condition.

Also, those old films have a tendency to make even quite minor figures into characters, an effect achieved mostly by drawing them in a larger-than-life fashion.

There’s become a tendency with dystopias to desaturate the colours, to go for a plaid palette, for example in ’The Road’.  Whilst we could use this, it would be effective to also go the other way - with the dream sequences and over-saturate the colours, as if making the scenes ‘hyper-real’.

As the Doctor struggles with identity loss, ‘nothingness’ should also be a visual theme, with the screen frequently fading to white or black.

The setting:

Locations should explore the overlap between the liminal and the transient. Liminal places of art such as mist-covered seas, but also transient non-places, border spaces, waste ground. Mist-enshrouded seas but also motorway lay-bys and patches of waste ground on the edge of industrial estates. Places we pass through in real life we’re asked to stop and look at. We should stop pretending quarries are alien planets, and instead focus on places with are strange-looking in themselves.

The screen should have space on it, not be cluttered with objects.

On-screen credits for places (whether London, Cardiff or Metebelis III) shouldn’t be used. They don’t exist in real life and so have a distancing effect. Instead it should feel it’s been set in real places, as if it’s a journey which could be followed on a map.

Music & sound effects:

Similarly, music and sound effects would be less invasive, and not at all bombastic or Hollywood. Murray Gold will, I’m sure, find employment elsewhere. It should be more in line with the Radiophonics Workshop of the classic era, which often used music concrete - distorting and defamiliarising natural and familiar sounds, rather than trying to sound full alien. But also with the ‘haunted machinery’ sound of post-industrial, dark ambient, drone, spectralist and electroacoustic music – Zoviet France, or Pan Sonic. It should be implicit and underlining rather than dominant, having a more subliminal effect upon mood.

Audiences should be unable to guess the source of any sound. There should be times when diegetic and extra-diegetic get confused, when ‘alien sounds’ are used in the narrative. More conventional music would work as punctuation to the narrative, emphasising points and so on.

‘Significant’ sounds are accentuated - the click of a clock, beep of a card reader, ping of an email being sent, a camera snapping.