10th Doctor - The Lazarus Experiment (i)

Serial 305 – The Lazarou Experiment
An Alternate Program Guide by Ewen Campion Clarke
From An Entry In The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Pure EVIL!!

"YOA's Discontinuity Guides - Inaccurate But Caring."


Serial 305 – The Lazarou Experiment -

Martha is not exactly pleased when she discovers that when the Doctor says her one journey promised is over, he actually MEANS it and the TARDIS has NOT arrived in a fabulous magical time and place but rather in her rather squalid and poorly-decorated fact. In fact, Martha has gone from "not exactly pleased" to "dangerously twitchy".

The Doctor, is of course, totally oblivious to her and her feelings and merely congratulates himself on getting her home the morning after she left and not, say twelve months later by which time everyone would think her dead and she’d have no choice but to keep travelling with him.

"It’s not too late!" Martha suggests hopefully, spirits buoyed slightly when the Doctor examines her laundry and idly plays with her knickers... but he’s just curious about what detergent she uses and whether or not she’s getting her money’s worth.

Martha’s pleas that maybe they can work something with some champagne and edible contraceptives are interrupted by her answering machine playing a litany of phone calls from her horrid family – prompting the Doctor to leave right away as they really irritate him. It seems their latest reason for pestering her is that Martha’s sister Tish is on television right now!

Assuming she’s been found whoring herself out to Hugh Grant again, Martha wearily turns on the TV to see what at first glance appears to be a deeply unamusing League of Gentlemen sketch about an old man promising to reveal a device which will change what it means to be human as his Colostomy bag gently weeps. He promises that he can redefine the world of humanity with a single button, that the destiny of mankind will be refashioned in an instant, and there will be lots of free champagne.

As Tish seems to be the septuagenarian’s nursemaid, Martha realizes that she’ll be able to smuggle her entire family into the press conference at the Cardiff Millennium Centre and witness history unfold in upper class wealth, splendor and decadence!

In the meantime, however, the Doctor has got bored and left in the TARDIS without even saying goodbye. Martha watches, heartbroken as the police box fades away... and then seconds later reappears and the Doctor sticks his head out the door to ask:

"No, I’m sorry. Did he say there was going to be free booze?"


Parte the First

At the Millennium Centre, Professor Dicky Lazarou and his pimp Lady Frosty Thaw look out into the night until they finally remember what the hell they are doing and idly discus whether or not his experiment will work or most likely convince all the guests never to invest billions of pounds in the finished product. The only person willing to finance them is media celebrity and up-and-coming politician Alan B’Stard, who has promised that Lazarou and Frosty will 'come over all sort of dead' if this changing humanity shebang doesn’t work!

Awkwardly, Lazarou tries to change the subject by flirting with Tish, but she rejects his amorous advances – which truly crushes the spirit of the little old man because Tish is a total slut who’s already slept with everyone in security and considers Frosty "more than a friend". It seems that after 76 years, Lazarou has finally lost his mojo.

Anyway, enough self pity – Dr Who has turned up with Martha; her in a sophisticated evening gown and he in that shameful glam rock outfit he wore in that Cyberman story last year. This sartorially painful pair enter the Lazarou Labs part of the Millennium Centre and find it rather blandly decorated bar what resembles a giant shining blender set to "puree" with some lightning conductors added on.

Tish, Leo and Francine "Ballcrusher" Jones are already present though Martha’s dad was still recovering from the make-up sex session with Analisse the previous night and unable to attend. The Doctor warmly greets Martha’s mother and with this incarnation’s usual lack of human people skills accidentally ends up implying that he jumped Martha after the party in a dark alleyway and repeatedly violated her until dawn.

"Oh, if ONLY..." Martha sighs wistfully.

Mercifully at that moment, Lazarou interrupts everyone to make an announcement. "Ladies and gentlemen, I am Dicky Lazarou and tonight I am going to perform a miracle! It is, I believe, the most important advance since Rutherford bragged to his pals he could split the atom, the biggest leap since Armstrong stood on the moon because Aldrin had pissed himself with terror, the biggest turn-on since that tennis girl scratched her bum on camera. I have developed a device which offers us a future free of disease and affliction, a future where we can control our fate and realize our potential! Oh yeah, this is the BIG ONE! Tonight, you will watch and wonder and maybe even drool slightly. Tomorrow, you’ll awake to a world which will be changed FOREVER!"

The old man then runs and hides inside the blender screaming at his lab assistant, a German exchange student called Helga, to "switch the fucker to 11" and stand well back. As everyone wonders if they’ve only come here to watch a rather silly suicide attempt, the blender is activated and five million volts rip through Lazarou as the blades slash him to trillions of wet sloppy pieces.

As the audience wonders whether or not it should start clapping, alarms ring out and Helga fiddles away unconvincingly with knobs and levers, not understanding a word of English or what the words "PLEASE DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON AGAIN" mean. The Doctor deduces that the system is overloading and will most likely explode and kill them all – and though normally he’d be happy to end his pain-wracked existence, he’s not got nearly drunk enough on free bubbly so the Time Lord saves them all by unplugging the blender.

To the amazement of all, when the blender stops spinning it reveals its occupant – a completely unharmed, startled blond man in the slashed ribbons of the elderly Lazarou’s clothes.

"Jings! It’s Adam Faith!" the Doctor marvels.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the young man announces as he emerges from the blender. "I am Richard Lazarus. I am 76 years old; and sweet Roysten Vasey I am LOOKING GOOD!"

As lots of photos are taken and boring stuff like that, the Doctor confirms to Martha that this is no trick and Lazarou has shed 45 years to make him young and strong while simultaneously changing what it means to be human. The Doctor then decides to get completely pissed and drain the champagne supplies with his alien liver.

By the time the Doctor moves to the finger buffet he is startled when Lazarou shoves him out of the way and tries to eat all the nibbles. The drunken Doctor assumes that the rejuvenated Professor is spoiling for a rumble before suddenly telling Lazarou that he’s his bestest ever friend. "Energy deficit, eh, am I right? Always happens to me, I get ravenous. Last time I was so hungry I ate Jackie Tyler’s cooking! Course, where I come from I see this sort of transformation every day but normally without giant stainless steel blades! Jings man, you might as well have stepped into a blender! Jings, you DID step into a blender! A blender that NEARLY EXPLODED!"

"No experiment is entirely without risk, and what happened to me was exactly what was supposed to happen. No more, no less. I’m all the proof you need that it works perfectly," says Lazarou as he buries his face in the smoked salmon canapés and gorges himself on caviar.

"In a few years, you’ll look back and laugh at how wrong you were!" Lazarou adds as Frosty drags his mashed-potato-stained ass upstairs and out of sight, on the way trying to cop a feel off Martha.

This not only leaves Martha needing therapy but also with a handy DNA sample that the Doctor can use to check using the Lab computers. However, the Doctor is too drunk and full of food to think of such things and soon is chatting up one of the cello players and asking if she could dedicate the next song to "that peroxide whore, Rose Tyler".

Martha nevertheless suggests checking Lazarou’s DNA but the Doctor rejects the idea – even if it IS constantly changing and the process of renewal unleashed something lying dormant in his genetic code, it’s far too late to do anything about it NOW, isn’t it?

Upstairs, Frosty fights off the increasingly randy and hyper Lazarou. Offended, he announces he will cut her out of the profits and will personally ensure she can NEVER be rejuvenated and die of old age while everyone else gets young and fit. Frosty threatens to tell Alan B’Stard everything, but is forced to admit he’d probably just laugh in her face and kick her down the stairs, so that plan’s not up to much at all.

Suddenly, Lazarou begins to contort unnaturally and falls falls to the floor. Frosty laughs as he writhes in agony and sarcastically suggests that maybe his retarded blender-based fountain of youth has screwed him up for good before she’s realizing Lazarou is changing into something inhuman... and very, very nasty.

Finally, Martha manages to get the Doctor interested in what happens to Lazarou by reminding him of how he ate all the cheesy snacks. The Doctor immediately heads for the loony scientist’s office but Lazarou is gone, leaving the wizened husk of Lady Frosty Thaw lying on the ground. Truth be told she doesn’t look much different and it takes a few minutes even for Martha to realize she’s dead.

The Doctor muses that Lazarou’s desperate desire for vol u vents shows he needs energy to keep his smooth and youthful good looks stabilized, and now he is draining all the moisturizer out of people to do it and thus he is now a serial killer. "Or maybe not, I haven’t a clue, I’m just throwing ideas around the place," he admits to Martha before tripping over a table and knocking himself out.

Whether the Doctor is right or wrong is irrelevant as Lazarou (in his young and good-looking Peter Davison wannabe form) returns to reception and whisks Tish away. As he suspected, Tish is easily able to forget all the disgust she had for him as he looks good, rich and might be a demon between the sheets. The duo head for the roof, just missing the Doctor and Martha heading in the opposite direction in the best traditions of French Farce and Pertwee-era padding.

Realizing this, the Doctor and Martha immediately turn and head back after the duo, the Time Lord accidentally flipping Francine into a waiter and getting her soaked in champagne. Just then, a mysterious and sinister man who happens to look exactly like John Simm appears and helps her up.

"Do you know that man?" he asks her.

"No, but he seems to be nobbing my daughter."

"Jings. Perhaps she should choose her boyfriends more carefully," the sinister and mysterious man says in an appropriately sinister and mysterious manner. "The Doctor is dangerous. There are things you should know."

"What things?"

"It’s all on the website, www.voteb’stard.co.uk under the webpage 'Enemies of the State'..."

As this scene clearly has no lasting import of any kind, the narrative instantly cuts back to the roof where Tish and Lazarou are about to get naughty with each other as the Doctor and Martha arrive.

"I wouldn’t have thought you had time for romance, Lazarou, what with you being busy defying the laws of nature and all that sucking the life juices out of innocent women," the Doctor mocks.

"You’re right, Doctor," Lazarou mocks. "One lifetime’s been too short for me to do everything I’d like. How much more would I get done in two or three or four?"

"See, give a bloke an extra lifetime and he gets all lazy, putting off to tomorrow what he can do today? Jings! Who’s fault is it you didn’t live the last 76 years as extremely as you want? Not bloody mine, pal! Look what you’ve done to yourself, you cowardly geneticist!"

"Who are YOU to judge me?" spits Lazarou furiously.

"Who do I have to be?" the Doctor retorts. "Someone who isn’t stupid enough to shove his head into a blender because he’s gotten all old and frail like a spineless goon!"

Suddenly, Lazarou convulses and transforms, his face darkening, his hair turning frizzy and strange gibberish emerging from his throat while his teeth turn yellow – a hideous monster halfway between a gypsy circus member and a black and white minstrel who starts croaking "DAVE!" in a sinister throaty voice.

Professor Lazarou has become PAPA LAZAROU!!!

Realizing the monstrosity before her is her boss, Tish quits.


Parte the Second

The Doctor, Martha and Tish race inside and the Doctor seals the lock with the sonic screwdriver, but this is no match for the spring-heeled, black-up refugee from a time warped gypsy carnival! He kicks down the door which immediately causes Lazarou Labs to lock down... apart from the door that’s already wide open... kind of a stupid security protocol actually now I come to think about it.

Downstairs, the Doctor tries to get attention from the other guests: "Listen to me! You people are in serious danger! You need to get out of here right now! Professor Lazarou has gone absolutely fucking ape shit crazy and he’s trying to kill us all!"

Alas the rich and pampered high society of Cardiff have no truck with such fanciful notions... even though Cardiff was demolished in an alien war crossfire less than six months previously. Nevertheless, they don’t believe the Doctor and indeed throw olives at him on the off chance he might choke to death on one and shut the hell up.

But this is when Papa Lazarou arrives and the olive-throwing women are his first victims. "YOU ARE MY WIVES NOW!!" he hisses, stealing wedding rings from the fingers of their corpses.

Meanwhile, Martha, her family and all the important speaking parts have sensibly run like hell as far away as they can get, leaving the Doctor trapped alone with this hideous form of horror cliches. Still feeling a tad suicidal, the Doctor decides to make fun of the strange creature with a rapidly rising kill ratio: "You sad, pathetic wanker! 'Ooh, I’m going to defy nature, aren’t I cool? I sure hope nature doesn’t get her own back and turn me into a mutant freak!' You’re a JOKE, Lazarou! An unfunny footnote in the history of failure! YOU MAKE ME SICK!"

To rub in how monumentally worthless Papa Lazarou is, the Doctor jabs him in the stomach, shouts "TAG! You’re it!" and then runs off into the depths of the Millennium Centre. Papa Lazarou chases the Time Lord into a boiler room, babbling in his stupid, made-up gobbledygook giving the Doctor more than enough time to set up a McGuyver-style improvised death trap for the unwary carny freak!

Having cunningly tampered with the wiring of the lights and all the methane gas taps turned on, the Doctor needs only to wait for Papa Lazarou to enter before flicking the light switch because the ragged creature is caught in the epicentre of a massive explosion.

Papa Lazarou isn’t harmed in the slightest, but this does not in any diminish the fact it’s STILL a brilliant plan on the Doctor’s part.

Realizing that dealing with the freak amongst freaks is not going to be as easy as he suspected, the Doctor decides to run for it – only to bump into Martha who has run back into certain death rather than risk losing a chance at some half-decent sex for once.

The Doctor has a cunning plan – they should hide inside the giant blender! He is convinced that Papa Lazarou will dare not attack his own masterpiece, especially as it isn’t insured. On the down side, this has left both he and Martha in a death trap which can easily be activated from the outside and at the mercy of said Papa Lazarou.

"So," surmises Martha, "We’re NOT hiding, because he knows we’re in here. And we can’t get out. And this thing can kill us at the press of a button. OK, can *I* come up with the cunning plans from now on?"

However with no further plan the Doctor is left to improvise and begins crawling around with his head up Martha’s skirt. Before this can develop into ANYTHING worth further discussion, the cackling Papa Lazarou slams down the activator and...

...is electrocuted by five million volts, and slumps to the floor, restored to his less creepy and more Caucasian human form. Yes, Helga the incompetent intern’s poor electrician skills have saved all humanity! YAY STUPID GERMANS!

Much to Martha’s unutterable disappointment the Doctor finds this far more interesting than her legs and climbs out of the blender to examine the corpse. "This is just like that amateur production of The Diary of Anne Frank," he muses. "The one that really, REALLY deviated from the plot and had naked corpses on stage."

Suddenly, Lazarou lets out an insane peal of laughter and runs off, naked into the night. The Doctor and Martha try to follow but are intercepted by Francine who has decided to accept all the hearsay told to her by that odd and mysterious fellow and demonstrates on the Doctor exactly how she got her nickname "Ballcrusher".

"STAY AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER!!" she shrieks, kicking the Doctor repeatedly in the ribs until there is blood on her high heeled shoes. "YOU’RE DANGEROUS! I’VE BEEN TOLD THINGS!"

"It shows!!" the Doctor sobs, crawling away from her.

This frippery allows Papa Lazarou to reemerge and go on a killing spree, slaughtered lots of innocent Welsh bystanders as he runs all his way into the nearby Church of Scientology and kills everyone there. Thus, truly the audience must muse if the evil of Papa Lazarou can lead to a greater good in the long run.

The Doctor, Martha and Tish (for some reason, probably because the actress is amazingly hot) enter the church and find Lazarou has temporarily reverted to his human form so there can actually be some dialogue worth mentioning.

The babbling Lazarou insists he changed the course of human history like this is going to somehow impress anyone. "Jings, get over yourself!" the Doctor jeers. "You lived a good fifty years more than all the people you’ve killed! You’ve got nothing to complain about! And what do you do, turn yourself into a circus freak! Is that what you call a success, Lazarou? Sucking the life out of people so you can spend up to three seconds at a time looking a bit younger? Is that a good deal in your philosophy?"

"I’m more now that I was! More than just an ordinary human!"

"That says more about you than it does about the rest of humanity," the Time Lord sneers. "You REALLY want to live forever? Take it from me, it’s overrated! In the end, you just get tired. Tired of the struggle. Tired of losing everyone that matters to you. Tried of watching everything turn to dust. If you live long enough, Lazarou, the only certainty left is that you end up alone. Alone. And NOT ginger."

"That’s a price worth paying!" Lazarou croaks.

"Yeah," the Doctor whispers in a way you would really prefer he didn’t because it scares the living shit out of me, "and you haven’t even BEGUN to pay it, Lazarou!"

With this, the Doctor turns and walks off which rather kills the mood somewhat. After a puzzled and awkward pause, Lazarou once again transforms into a blacked-up, hollow white-eyed zombie refugee from a time warped carnival and chases after Tish and Martha.

"DAVE! HELLO, DAVE! IS THAT DAVE? IS DAVE THERE? I WANNA TALK TO DAVE!" roars the monster as it races after the duo through stone passageways. "I’VE GOT A HUNGER, DAVE! COMING FOR YOU, DAVE! THIS IS JUST A SAGA NOW, DAVE! PAPA LAZAROU CANNOT BE STOPPED!"

The Doctor arrives at the church’s giant pipe organ, and as Martha, Tish and Papa Lazarou ascend to the bell tower he begins to play a tribute to the Kaiser Chefs, turning everything up to eleven!

Papa Lazarou ALMOST succeeds in dropping Martha through the tower and onto the stone floor far below, but the funky tunes of the Doctor overcome the creature and it plummets down into the abyss with a final scream of "DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

The Doctor laughs evilly and continues to play the organ as Lazaru’s naked body first reverts back to his young human form, then his elderly human form. He dies an old man, the one thing he spent his life avoiding and Martha and Tish take turns in spitting on his corpse.

"Who’s your wife NOW, bitch?!" Martha shouts.

A very poor bit of dramatic editing later leaves the Doctor and Martha back in her flat beside the TARDIS. The Doctor offers one more trip in time to Martha, who folds her arms, turns away and says no.

"What do you mean?! I thought you liked it!" the Doctor protests.

"It’s not fair this 'one more trip' bollocks! I’m not a passenger, someone you take along for a treat because that tart Rose dumped you. You need to move on in your relationships, put aside the past and look to a future of ebony rather than ivory!"

"Okay, then," the Doctor says. "I will."

Martha instantly embraces him and thanks him in an embarrassingly childish manner and hangs onto him as he awkwardly enters the TARDIS. "I need to find someone new," the Doctor agrees. "And with your help, Martha, I might just find them..."

"OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE!" Martha can be heard screaming as the TARDIS dematerializes from the flat and out into the universe.

As the ship fades from view the telephone rings. Switching to the answer phone Francine’s voice is heard: "Martha, it’s your mother. Please phone me back I’m begging you. I know who this Doctor really is; I know he’s dangerous – I’ve read his wikipedia entry! You’re gonna get yourself killed like the last jailbait tart he was with! Please trust me! This information comes from Alan B’Stard himself! And yes, this IS important to the ongoing story arc!"

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Next Time...
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"I’m Martha on an intergalactic scavenger quest with the Doctor to stop the scourge of the universe, the Bastard, getting his hands on a lethal weapon. You know, same old, same old."
"If the Bastard gets those fish and chips..."
"...he’ll get his hearts’ desire: the destruction of you, me, the Earth and whatever else he needs to keep him happy."
"Well. Yeah."
"Look at me now, Borusa! I’M THE KING OF THE FUCKING WORLD!"
"It WON’T be easy stopping him inside of 45 minutes!"
"We’re running out of space and running time!"
"Martha! Look out! ...and, you know, do something!"
"Join me for the whole adventure from start to finish and maybe a bit more if you’ve taped it, rewound it and watched it again!"
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...The Infinite Jest...
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