9th Doctor - The Parting of the Ways (i)

Serial 110 – The Parting of the Legs
An Alternate Program Guide by Ewen Campion Clarke
From An Entry In The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Misdirection

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


Serial 110 – The Parting of the Legs -


"So, what are we going to do tonight, Doctor?"

"The same thing we do every night, Rose! Try to stop evil aliens taking over the universe!"

"But I'm sick of watching you play Space Invaders."

"Shut it, Rose."


{Previously on Doctor Who – The Long Haul}
Some time ago, the Doctor and Rose visited Tri-Solar Speedway Championship Racecourse, a space station orbiting Earth in the year 200,000, and learned that the Fourth Grand Prix Gymkhana was being used by the evil Moxx of Baloon and his flunky Time Lord the Bastard to manipulate the pathetic empire of Humanity.
Then, the Moxx of Baloon buggered off, as did the Bastard, and the Doctor and Rose departed, not giving a fig if history was back on track or not...
{And now on Doctor Who – The Parting of the Legs}


Now, 100 years later, the Doctor materializes with a flash of light in a suspiciously neat lavatory. Awakening from a dream that resembles Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History Time but with more dancing girls and Rose Tyler eating a banana very slowly, the Doctor awakes seriously dazed and confused.

He stumbles out of the toilet into a badly-decorated common room marked with primary colours, pop art and a recurring symbol – K9's BB.

An even worse-decorated woman called Lynda meets him and helps him up, unsure if he is disoriented from being transmatted into 'the House' or whether he's just another Northern drunk.

Lynda cheerfully explains to the Doctor that he's been chosen as a housemate. Two other housemates hurl racist and homophobic abuse at the dazed Time Lord. At first they assume that he is a wasted intruder, but it becomes clear he is a new housemate and clearly the Davina Droid has forgotten to tell them.

Suddenly, a deep electronic voice of the Davina Droid orders the Doctor into 'the Diary Room'.

As he starts to recover from the effect of the transmat, the Doctor realizes that he's somehow become a contestant on Big Brother and finally starts vomiting everywhere.

Yes, really.

Big Brother.

Honest.

As the Doctor says, "You have GOT to be fucking kidding."


ACT ONE – ON THE GAME WORLD

Parte The First

Rose awakens in a dark room, and at first believes that Mickey is finally about to have his naughty way with her – but the curly-haired man in the long multicoloured scarf is actually named Rasputin.

Rasputin helps her to her feet and guides her to the central dais. Rose is struggling to work out what's happened to her and Rasputin admits he has a thing for a concussed blondes, but there is a time and a place and it sure ain't this.

Standing behind podiums on the platforms are four other ditzy blondes and Rasputin is delighted to have found the fifth he needs.

The floor manager, technicians and director finish their preparations and activate the Anne Droid. Rose has just become a contestant on The Weakest Link.

No, seriously, I'm not making this up.

Meanwhile, Jack has awoken found himself stripped naked by two robots who plan to change his wardrobe and then his face with some cosmetic chainsaw surgery.

Jack has no problem with that whatsoever.

As the Doctor tries and fails to break out of the House, Lynda introduces herself as a sweet, sexy 201st century girl and thus perfect companion material for the next series.

The Doctor remembers his strange abduction from the TARDIS by a bright white light and realizes that Big Brother must seriously be gasping for contestants if they've kidnapped him and his cronies. He also finds himself idly calculating the possibility that he might die of some vortex-related sexually-transmitted disease in a very cheap piece of foreshadowing.

Up in the broadcast control suite, the Face of Bond watches on as the Doctor addresses the camera directly, warning whoever's in charge that he's going to get out of the House, find his friends, and find out what's really going on here. And shag Rose while he's at it.

"Hmmmmmmm," says the Face of Bond enigmatically.

Down in the Weakest Link studio, the first round begins, and the Anne Droid begins to bombard Rose and her fellow contestants with trivia questions on a variety of pop cultural topics.

What subtle satirical commentary!

Rose and the other blondes can answer very few of the questions, but they enjoy themselves in any case. By the time the first round is over, one of the blondes is voted the weakest link. Actually, it was a different blonde who got the most questions wrong, but the others just get confused.

Anne Droid skewers the weakest link, who instead of the Walk of Shame does the Vaporization of Shame. The robot then disposes the genuine weakest link for being annoying.

Rose, proving herself as being slightly more intelligent than the scenery, decides to play to win.

Rasputin cackles evilly.

In the Big Brother House, the Doctor is forced to join his fellow housemates on the sofa to wait for the next eviction notice – like he cares. As he's a new arrival, he has no chance of eviction whatsoever and when Crosbie gets evicted, he couldn't give a toss.

Admittedly, his attention is gripped when Crosbie steps into the exit chamber and is machine-gunned into white dust.

The Doctor shrugs – after all, housemates have freedom of choice. Lynda points out that they don't, as demonstrated by the Doctor's surreal kidnapping. As there are plenty of other Big Brother houses and other such lethal reality TV shows, the Doctor realizes that Rose is in equal danger. He refuses to let her die before she has sex with him.

The Doctor has a cunning plan – he will destroy a camera with the sonic screwdriver and thus get automatic eviction.

Lynda reminds him he will evicted to death and the Doctor starts swearing very, very loudly. As he is live on TV, this expedites his eviction immediately.

The Doctor is forced into the exit chamber, then realizes that as everyone else has been stupid enough to wait for death, no one has ever actually tried to escape. The door is in fact unlocked and so the Doctor and Lynda run for it.

"Fry my nuggets, that was a close one," the Doctor admits.

Strood remains where he is, now confident he has won this round of Big Brother and can soon land a record contract, exercise video and appearance on Gimme-Gimme-Gimme – The Next-Next-Next Generation.

Suddenly, Strood notices an all-white figure step from the shadows, look around, stamp its foot, check its invisible wrist-watch and hurries out of the house after the Doctor.

Back in the B plot thread, Rasputin votes off another blonde and explains over a jelly baby he ensured that he was up against a bunch of mindless airheads so he couldn't help but win.

Rose realizes Rasputin's jelly babies are 'K9-sponsored variety assortment' and has an LSD flashback to the other times that she's heard about K9, overlaid over the title sequence in true JST fashion.

The Doctor and Lynda realize that they are aboard Brand Hatch racetrack in the year 200100, a century after his last visit. The racing car/Gymkhana feel has been abandoned and the orbiting space satellite is now called the Game World, or – to give it its proper name – K9's Kennel Club.

The Doctor broods on the significance of this for a full three seconds before offering the single, unattached and clearly up-for-it Lynda a permanent place aboard the TARDIS.

Watching this with a rising sense of disbelief is the Face of Bond, who decides to complain to the Controller that the station security guards are bloody noticeable by their absence.

The Controller – a familiar-looking robot dog in a Ming the Merciless-style cloak – is wired directed into the computer systems and monitors everything that takes place on the Game World.

And he does it doggy style!


Parte The Second

Meanwhile, Jack has finally sobered up to find himself in bed with two robots who he has unintentionally killed with a compact laser gun stuck up his arse. Happens all the time where he comes from.

Dazed, the Captain puts on his new outfit of a giant raisin and wanders off in search of the Doctor or at least some booze. Using his incredible power of smell, he begins to search for the patchouli-oil scent of the Time Lord.

Lynda and the Doctor step out onto an observation deck, where the Doctor is mildly amused to learn that due to the intervention of one Adam Mitchell a century ago, the end of the Fourth Grand Prix Gymkhana caused Earth society to collapse and allowed the rise of reality TV.

Jack stumbles in, mumbling he's heard something incredibly heavy from two decapitated robots about the name 'K9' getting scattered throughout the universe.

The Doctor realizes that whatever is responsible no doubt has Rose in its evil clutches. He smells plot resolution and decides for no apparent reason to check out Floor 400. By way of explanation all he says is that he loves the smell of jelly babies in the morning.

As they head for the lift, Jack points out he saw a strange all-white figure watching them. The Doctor is rather skeptical, saying if he paid any attention to various spectral figures Jack claims are watching him all the time, there simply wouldn't be enough hours in the day.

In The Weakest Link, Rasputin and Rose are head to head and must answer five questions correctly if they are to win.

Rose loses. Quelle surprise.

The Doctor, Jack and Lynda arrive and as Anne Droid swerves to gun them down, Rose decides to run for it. Well, either that or save the Doctor (which do you think is more credible?)

Either way, she gets reduced to ash and incredibly sad music plays over slow motion shots of security teams arriving and beating up the trio of intruders with such violence even Rodney King winced.

"Damn it!" the Ninth Doctor screams. "I'LL NEVER GET LAID NOW!!"

Rasputin (really the Fourth Doctor) runs for it, arguing that in five regenerations' time he'll feel the Ninth Doctor's pain, so karma at least is satisfied.

Watching all this is the strangely-familiar-but-head-scratchingly-mysterious white figure, which mimes yawning with boredom as security guards close in around the Ninth Doctor, Jack and Lynda.

The trio are captured, have their belongings stolen, are stripped naked and attacked with high-pressure hoses, photographed, incriminated, put to work in a call centre and finally get sent to the tacky-looking penal colony Desperado, where only the worst TV offenders are sent.

This horrible fate seems to snap the Doctor from his dullard trance and one bad edit later the trio are free, armed, and storming up Floor 500. The Face of Bond sees the Ninth Doctor's face and starts to panic, but the Controller tells him to grow up and act like a severed head.

The Doctor, Jack and Lynda arrive on Floor 500, bursting through the doors armed to the teeth. "Any of you fucking pricks move, and I'll execute every mother-fucking last one of ya!" Jack says calmly.

The Doctor is horrified to learn that the Controller is K9 – one of a job lot of robot dogs he was given by a strange man called Bi-Al.

The Face of Bond explains that K9 customized Brands Hatch into K9's Kennel Club Space Hotel and soon dominated the airways with the likes of the severed heads of Keith Chegwin, Christopher Biggins and Buck's Fizz. After the first eighteen years, humanity grew tired of comedy sketches, game segments like In The Doghouse and guest stars like Bernie Clifton, Bob Carolgees and the Krankies.

Since then, K9 had been forced to tackle reality TV and game shows for over 10, 000 channels to keep humanity watching. It was then the little robot dog had a cunning plan.

In flagrant disregards to the Laws of Time and Plot Development, he decided to make the Face of Bond wait until the year Five Billion and the Earth was being destroyed. When the Doctor turned up, the Face of Bond released a swarm of nano-cameras to follow and record the Doctor's screwed-up adventures. All the K9 references were just station idents and cutting, fourth-wall-breaking in-jokes.

"Of course!" the Doctor exclaims. "That's why I've never been able to steer the TARDIS since Milliways!"

"Negative, Master. You are a shithouse driver," K9 replies.

The Face of Bond explains that after a while, K9 would simply re-start a time loop around the TARDIS, and so have the Eighth Doctor fighting the Temporal Difference of Opinion and start the whole chain of events again. "It's cheaper than repeats," the Face of Bond explains, before showing an isolation tank containing the Eighth Doctor playing a GameBoy and eating crisps.

However, even the mindless viewers of the 201st century have tired of these re-runs and so K9 came up with the idea of creating retro TV shows and then placing incredibly famous TV celebrities into them and watching them die horribly. The robots staffing the project are actually Cybermen in poor drag outfits.

Jack, bored, wanders into a cupboard and finds the TARDIS sitting there. He enters it and pauses upon catching sight of Rose's denim jacket draped over a nearby railing. Struggling for about five minutes to remember who the jacket belonged to, he shrugs and wanders off, scratching his arse.

The Doctor demands K9 reveal exactly how the hell he survived the destruction of Gallifrey in the Temporal Difference of Opinion and just why he is so interested in TV ratings.

Gamesworld then powers down momentarily then cut out as the energy from the solar flares reaches Earth, interfering with transmission and every TV screen in the cosmos is shown a test card while 'Green Onions' plays in the background.

For just a few moments, the station is not broadcasting - and K9 reveals he was saved at the last moment by an evil being who wired him up to the station, hiding, watching, waiting and guiding humanity behind the scenes for centuries.

However, as the being can easily be beaten by the Doctor, K9 has engineered the arrival of his former owner.

The solar flares end, and as the station begins transmitting again,
Jack stumbles out of the TARDIS, remembering that one of the robots he was having sex with earlier explained the disintegration beams are actually rather poor transmats and all the 'dead' contestants are being placed in a confinement centre. In Cardiff.

K9 confirms this and reveals that Rose, is, in fact, alive and well and tells the Doctor that he must strike a fatal blow against the enemy within Cardiff at once before the robot dog is transmatted away...

...and encounters his controllers. K9 triumphantly announces that the dipwad fell for his story hook, line and sinker! Their evil plans cannot be stopped now!

Back on the Game World, Jack mentions seeing that strange white being in the TARDIS, just standing there and watching the Doctor before disappearing the second Jack took his eyes off him.

"You've got one weird stalker, mate," he slurs at the Doctor.

Suspecting that it might be a red herring in the plot, the Doctor decides to ignore it and gets Jack and the Face of Bond to help him. Together, thy set the Game World's scanners down onto the surface of Cardiff and discover that it in fact is a mass of gigantic, Independence-Day-sized spacecraft forming the word 'K9'.

The Doctor is startled when the scanner switches on to show his old enemy, former roommate and ex-wife, The Bastard! He has in his clutches Rose Tyler and K9 and if the Doctor so much as thinks of trying to end this evil master plan, he'll reduce them both to action figures.

However, the Doctor stands up to him, and vows to rescue Rose, save the Earth, defeat the Bastard all within 45 minutes.

The Bastard points out that before the Doctor declares hostilities, he should be aware this twisted anniversary special contains the Doctor's oldest, deadliest and most merchandisable foes.

The DUSTBINS!

Three of the golden-plated cleaning machines glide into view, and the Doctor blows them a raspberry and promising to wipe out all three of the Dustbins under the Bastard's control.

"No, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna rescue her. I'm gonna save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dustbin fleet, and then I'm gonna save the Earth, I'm gonna wipe every last fucking Dustbin out of the sky!" the Doctor screams in his best Absalom Daak, Dustbin Killer impression. "And then - just to finish off – I'm going to get Rose into bed EVEN IF IT KILLS ME."

"But you have no weapons! No defenses! No plan!"

"Yeah. And doesn't that scare you to death?"

"Not as scary as the thought you actually believe this macho crap."

"Rose?"

"Yes, Doctor?"

"You better not be ovulating tonight."

The laughing Bastard challenges the Doctor to do his worst and switches off. He turns to address the three Dustbins and tells them to prepare to enter the endgame.

He also tells this to the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of the Dustbins in the corridor. The vacation on Earth will now begin...

"THE DOCTOR IS INITIATING HOSTILE ACTION WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE! THE STRATAGEM MUST ADVANCE! BEGIN THE VACATION OF EARTH! THE DOCTOR WILL BE EXTERMINATED! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! AND I'LL REPEAT THAT... EXTERMINATE!!"

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Next Time...
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"LAUNCH AJAX MISSILES. DUSTBINS CLEAN AND TIDY!!!"
"We've got incoming Ajax missiles! This is it, ladies and gentlemen – we are in a ratings war! There's an army about to scrub clean every last inch of Brands Hatch!"
"Uh, Jack – defenses have gone off line."
"OK, time to start screaming in panic, I think."
"Well, I'm dead – or about to die at any moment with no chance to escape at all. Please leave a message and I will get back to you after I have regenerated." *beeeep*
"How did you survive the Temporal Difference of Opinion? Was it the Moxx of Balloon? I bet it was the Moxx of Balloon!"
"No, actually. It was me. The Dustbins survived through me."
"Well, shave my arse and call me Denise! YOU!!!"
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...the REST of The Parting of the Legs...
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