Monday, December 7, 2009

8th Doctor - The Beast of Orlock

Serial 9U – The Breasts of Warlock
An Alternative Program Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Entry in the EC Unauthorized Guide O' Cuckoo

D O C T O R W H O

Serial 9U – The Breasts of Warlock -

The years is 1827 and the place is, with depressing predictability, Cardiff. And Baron Von Truffle is trying to sneak past the city limits after being run out of town some twenty years earlier, when his bachelor pad was found to contain 14 dead bodies nailed to the wall and the Baron himself idly throwing darts at them.

The Baron’s explanations that this was all "a rather funny misunderstanding" were ignored, as were his claims that it was the legendary transsexual predator of Wales that killed all those people. The fact that no one else had ever heard of the "Big-Breasted Warlock" and the fact that all the killings stopped the night the Baron left mean that he wasn’t believed.

Now, with a bitching scar on his face, the Baron intends to return and claim the ground-floor apartment in Cardiff Castle that isn’t his by right and prove his story true!

He manages to get halfway down the road before a tree falls across the road and hits him on the head, knocking him unconscious. And, as the baron lies there a terrifying creature with a shiny bald head, a midnight blue tuxedo and toothbrush emerges from the woods...


Parte the First

The Doctor and Smelly Ed are once again travelling through time and space with Lucie Bleedin Miller – but why? Why hang around with duck-voiced argumentative pregnant cow when they have a choice in the matter? Well, contractual reasons mainly, but it’s mentioned in some podcast somewhere that the duo allow Lucie to join them so they can laugh at her stupidity and blonde dizziness.

Indeed, her strange maternity mental problems mean that the effort required to remember who the Doctor and Smelly Ed have destroyed her short-term memory, which can be very amusing as they can convince her she’s become a pre-natal moped racer and has developed a deep abiding love for eating rubber bands.

Leaving Lucie to munch raw bacon and try to develop a nesting instinct to deal with the "rancid pool of filth" that is the TARDIS control room, the Doctor and Smelly Ed land the time machine and head off.

In order to communicate with the locals, the Doctor gifts the floating sentient cloud a gorilla gram outfit for Smelly Ed to "speak" through. But said suit has not been washed in such a long time and the rancid odor causes Smelly Ed to go temporarily insane. Indeed, the Gelth is unable to do anything else but sing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" at the top of its voice.

The Doctor is more annoyed that instead of Alton Towers the TARDIS is once more stuck in fin de siècle Cardiff, just off a road where Baron Von Truffle lies sprawled under a fallen tree. A young backpacker called Hans Knees-Shoulders-Toes on a nature ramble happens to passing and pokes the unconscious Baron with a stick.

Unaware they are being watches by two figures in the trees (since this is audio, they were hardly likely to be spotted now, were they?), the Doctor and Smelly Ed wander over to gawp at the accident scene until it starts raining. The Doctor mocks the Baron for being so bloody stupid as to let a tree fall on his head when a random lightning bolt strikes a tree trunk behind the Doctor, causing the tree to crash onto the Time Lord’s head and knock his lights out.

Just then some butch Welsh coppers arrive, and throw the Doctor, Smelly Ed and Hans into a cell and wander off, justifying their presence in the narrative. Meanwhile, the Baron finally wakes up, rescues himself from the fallen tree and flees to Cardiff Castle.

At the Cardiff Civic Centre Burger Master restaurant, Otto Puss-Pecker the Dull, calls together a crisis meeting of the town councilors and tells them they’re facing a crisis! The councilors once again wonder why the hell they put Otto in charge as they mutinously eat their burgers and chips.

Otto rants that he heard from the milkman about the curious tree-collapses on the city limits and announces that the Big-Breasted Warlock is obviously to blame! The councilors challenge him to show how he came to this conclusion, whereupon Otto bursts into tears and then hides in the toilets in shame.

Finally, in desperation, Otto runs to the police station to get the prisoner to corroborate his story – or else he’ll KILL THEM ALL!! With a GUILLOTINE! Yes, his reputation for stupidity bordering on suicidal insanity is well-founded, I think you’ll agree.

In the cells he finds the Doctor has finally recovered consciousness and is thoroughly embarrassed by this mess. His mood does not improve as Otto bursts in and, now a bit confused, accuses them of being bandit assassins trying to execute Baron Von Truffle.

Rolling his eyes, the Doctor shows Otto his handy-dandy psychic passport and claims it is from Grand Duke Albrecht, giving him full authorization to take over the investigation and thus the Doctor now outranks everyone in Wales.

Even the sheep.

...ESPECIALLY THE SHEEP!!!

Otto’s godlike idiocy means he totally buys a blank piece of paper accredited to some German magistrate no one’s heard of and immediately releases the Doctor, Smelly Ed and Hans from the cell. The Doctor threatens to report him to the Grand Duke anyway, just to see the stupid bastard squirm, and decides to return to the TARDIS after getting a bite to eat at the Burger Master restaurant.

Meanwhile, those two mysterious figures who were watching from the shadows earlier (another triumph of audio exposition this bit) silently come across the TARDIS and, communicating via sign language, recognize the police box for what it is and wordlessly load the time machine on their caravan and then sneak off, throwing bill posters at everyone they pass. I tell you, you could TOTALLY lose any idea of what the hell was going on without guides like this, couldn’t you?

Some of this bill posters – with their distinctive font and offer to "HAVE YOUR FORTUNE READ BY THE WORLD FAMOUS MYSTIC TRAVELLER YOU STUNTED HIGHER ANTHROPOIDS!!!" – are soon all over the windows of the Burger Master, and the staff are chatting excitedly about the palm reader who has patronized nine royal families and three Popes until they got sick of the twat and told him to piss off.

The Doctor decides the food in the Burger Master is terrible and the service is pretty atrocious too – he was waiting ten minutes in line for the waitress to stop gossiping about the fortune tellers pitching up at Mermaid Bay. When Hansel defensively notes that the waitress was actually his sister, Gretal Knees-Shoulders-Toes, the Doctor decides he doesn’t want to hang around with any of the loser family.

Leaving Smelly Ed to his karioke in the burger bar, the Doctor breaks into Cardiff Castle and demands Baron Von Truffle get him a damn drink as recompense for saving the miserable git’s life. Being hit by a tree has given the Baron amnesia and, since he can’t prove the Doctor DIDN’T save his life, is forced to cook and clean for the Time Lord.

The Doctor is delighted, realizing he can screw over the Baron for years until the scarred fugitive gets his memory back. Telling the Baron that before his accident he was going to let the Doctor move into the Castle, rent-free for the rest of the century, the Time Lord idly notices a door marked "SECRET EVIL LABORATORY" and ducks through.

Inside is the usual Frankenstein lab and en suite bubbling tar pit. Clearly the Baron was either dabbling in state-of-the-art technology to create life itself... or he is a dangerously intense fan of the Peter Cushing Frankenstein franchise!

A huge diagram showing a plan for lowering a cadaver into an electrically-charged vat of amniotic fluid could point either way, if we’re honest – but it means that the Baron also murders, mutilates and robs graves in his spare time for fresh body parts.

The Baron realizes that, actually, yeah, he WAS a pretty badass kind of guy and probably invented the idea of the Big-Breasted Warlock to cover his gore-spattered tracks. Furthermore, the Baron suddenly gets all his memory back... and realizes the Doctor’s been bullshitting him all day and doesn’t deserve any of the footrubs he’s been given!

The scarred stereotype becomes hostile and says he’d expected more from a Time Lord! The Doctor demands to know how Teufel knew he was a Time Lord, only for the Baron to laugh evilly and explain he has tricked the Doctor into revealing the truth. "Cunning son of a bitch," the Doctor says admiringly.

But the Baron announces that from this moment on he now wishes to be called Commissioner-General Dru-Zod son of Cor-Zod, formerly the head of the Kryptonian Council and legendary politician leader from the planet Krypton! Thanks to the ongoing Temporal Difference of Opinion he’s got his amazing powers back and ditched those losers Ursa and Non!

The Doctor manages to realize he’s managed to put his foot into a turd of truly Godzilla proportions before Zod kicks him in the balls and the Time Lord falls towards the bubbling tar pit below... only to freeze frame as the credits roll in!!


Parte the Second

Luckily, it turns out the bubbling tar pit is in fact just the outlet of the Burger Master grease trap, and the Doctor is totally unharmed. After laughing at General Zod’s gullibility for 48 seconds, the Doctor smashes the git unconscious with a length of heavy metal chain and wanders off, bored... only to fall through a trap door into the Cardiff Castle sewage outlet.

This actually turns out NOT to be the bad news.

The bad news is the source of the loud roaring in the dark tunnel: a huge creature with even huger tits that chases the Doctor up and down several side tunnels. After repeatedly throwing rocks that bounce off its mighty cleavage, the Doctor finally realizes this monster is not trying to kill him but merely make sexual advances, and embraces the creature with melancholic seduction as they are both swept down an overflow pipe and out of sight... or out of mind. I forget which.

Back at the town centre, Smelly Ed’s continual rendition of Tight Fit songs have made him a more popular tourist attraction than the tent of the Mystic Traveller, which pisses the Mystic Traveller off no end. But both are losing customers as Otto runs around shouting about death haunting Cardiff!

Otto easily whips a mob up into a frenzy... who immediately beat Otto up, hang him upside down from a lamppost and then beat him with stinging nettles. He’s really NOT very popular about town, I can’t stress this enough.

The cold, wet and mud-spattered Doctor crawls out of a storm drain and demands a cup of coffee from the Burger Master. The manager, Frau Todd-In-The-Hole, breaks down ad confesses that her staff Hansel and Gretal are actually the last children of Krypton, whom she found in a space pod that crashed in the woods one night! She’s raised them as her own ever since but deep down knew that other superhuman beings would eventually come to remove her permanent and underpaid staff!

"Yeah," the Doctor says slowly, "look, this is fascinating, but I could REALLY use a coffee right now..."

Just then General Zod flies in and threatens to use his mighty Krypton powers to trash up the joint unless the kids are handed over. Just then, by a string of bad luck I haven’t been arsed to type up, Zod is trampled by a mob of flaming-torch-wielding Welshmen, and then again by the Big-Breasted Warlock. Who then runs back and jumps up and down on Zod’s head to make sure he’s dead.

The mob then casually destroy the fortune tellers as well despite their protests they’re undercover Kryptonian CIA, before dousing Otto with petrol and setting him alight. The windbag explodes in a fireball that causes the Burger Master Inn to collapse on top of the Doctor’s head – and the only person who could possibly help is too busy dancing around the burning remains Otto singing, "Awimawe, awimawe, awimawe..."

Buried underneath piles of rubble several floors below ground level, the Doctor bemoans the fact that he’s about to die just before reaching his millennium, before remembering he past that centuries ago, before getting into a vicious argument with himself over whether or not he lies about his age to pull chicks.

Just then, he hears the sound of the TARDIS engines and his ship materializes a few feet away from him. The door opens and he’s amazed to see Lucie emerge – well, amazed to see she can fit through the doors at all, if he’s honest.

Lucie explains that while she was tidying up she accidentally hit the big red button that programs the TARDIS to automatically focus on the nearest Time Lord heartbeats. The Doctor assumes Lucie is just being stupid again – the button that does THAT is actually green!

In the TARDIS, Lucie has tidied up... well, she’s shoved all the crap into one spot and is cheerfully ignoring it, and even THIS amount of effort impresses the Doctor. "Nothing says nesting like a good doily," Lucie opines, throwing one onto the console.

The Doctor ignores Lucie’s claims that she is "a proper mammy" now. Not even the doily can lift his spirit as he pilots the TARDIS outside to collect Smelly Ed.

As they prepare to leave, the Doctor looks longingly for the Big-Breasted Warlock and feels as if he’s leaving a large part of his life... at least his sex life... behind in Cardiff. As the romantic cliches come thick and fast, the Doctor tries and fails to extinguish the grief at losing the first woman he’s met worthy of his libido NOT named Charlotte E Pollard. But he does not cry. HE WILL NOT CRY!!

And yet a cold whiteness floods his soul – Oh Chipmunk! he weeps in his mind! If only you weren’t Welsh!

With this small hiatus in the intensity with which he was sick of travelling with companions he didn’t fancy, the Doctor will never know if he stood outside the TARDIS for a single dramatic close-up or a lengthy emo montage. Was this numbness within more unbearable than pain and the Big-Breasted Warlock leaving black holes in the Time Lord’s hearts? Have all the things of the world that have given the Doctor delight crushed into heaviness, contracted to a nothingness from which no light could emerge?

The Doctor yawns. "OK, the moment has passed – moving on!"

Returning to the controls of his ship, the Doctor is annoyed to discover a sticky puddle on the TARDIS pilot chair and bitches at Lucie for not cleaning up... until he realizes exactly HOW she made this stain and what this icky fluid signifies.

"Oh no, not AGAIN," the Doctor sighs as Lucie goes into labor...

---------
Next Time...
---------
"The birth was near. No one knew why this particular incarnation kept getting lumbered with pregnant companions, but it’s not like any of them were canon to start with, was it?"
"Long before the great BBC Top Quality purges, they forged out into competing species’ TV licenses – and there were many battles to fight for survival on opposing networks..."
"Sounds like you’re an anthropomorphic duck, darlin."
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
"You have a stupid voice that makes you sound like a duck!"
"Wirrrn and Human Kind locked together in a deadly struggle for the ratings shares – the audience appreciation index invariably leading to heavily-armed spaceships. It’s just showbizz, you know."
"Don’t hold her hand, I fell for that with Charley and I still can’t do the Vulcan salute properly!"
"WIRRRN! THIS IS THE WAY TO GO! ROGUE TRADER STYLE!!"
"Now, Lucie... are you sure you’re not just drunk?"
---------
...Wirrrn-Born...
---------

Book(s)/Other Related -
John Crichton’s Guide To Hammer Horror Sonovabitches
Dr Who: Putting on the Titz (Canada Only)
The Idiot’s Guide to TARDIS Hygiene by L.B. Miller


Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed Bavarian in this story.

"I shall clean this TARDIS with gusto! Or maybe Domestos!"


Goofs –
I can understand that a floating sentient pink cloud that’s been lobotomized is rather hard to write for, but surely there are better uses for Smelly Ed than animating a gorilla-gram outfit and singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" in a falsetto? I mean, what kind of weirdo goes, "Hmm, I need to give a companion a really good role in this story, I know, I’ll have them sing Tight Fit covers! That’ll do instead of characterization and plot, won’t it?" What a loony!


Fashion Victims -
The now-absent-minded-to-the-point-of-senile-dementia Lucie is wandering around with a boxing glove, a pair of scissors and a glass of cold oxtail soup for reasons not even SHE is aware of.


Technobabble -
"Mein Gott! Electro-static generators! Bi-electric field dampeners! You filthy little pervert, what sick game are you up to? And, more importantly, can I join in?"


Links and References -
The Doctor crosses numerous Time Lords out of his address book as they all died from the uncontrollable Bloodfire Virus used in the Temporal Difference of Opinion including Magnus, the Tinkerer, Godzilla Rodan, the Mangler, Cristeal, the Manicurist and that black guy with no dialogue in a couple of Peter Davison stories.

This is another reason why no one wants to see the Temporal Difference of Opinion on TV.


Untelevised Misadventures -
The restored Krypton was, funnily enough, almost immediately destroyed yet again in the Temporal Difference of Opinion when the Felona and the Time Lords use the deadly Bloodfire virus they got cheap from a Goablin salesman against the Tudor-Era Cybermen.

This is yet another reason why no one wants to see the Temporal Difference of Opinion on TV.


Groovy DVD Extras -
The infamous cut scene where Nick Briggs switches on "Stuck In The Middle With You" and begins to threaten the Baron with a razor blade.


Dialogue Disasters –

Zod: Come to me, Time Lord! Kneel before Zod!
Doctor: You’re REALLY not my type.


Lucie: What if something happens to you? What if you were on the Titanic with some minging blonde Kyle Minogue and I was on an iceberg?
Doctor: I’d be enjoying myself and you’d be freezing to death.
Lucie: Would I?
Doctor: Yes.
Lucie: What a horrible thought. What were we talking about again?


Otto: Comfort! Security! Family! Everything we hold dear is under threat! Doubtless you’re wondering "Why us? What did we do to merit this horror?" Such speculation is fruitless!
Grinsen: So shut the fuck up then!


Doctor: What do you think, Lucie?
Lucie: I think... nope. It’s gone.
Doctor: Do you even remember who I am?
Lucie: Do... Dobbin? Is it Dobbin?
Doctor: Give me strength.


Smelly Ed: Do you want your complimentary HostessTM Apple Pie, Doctor?
Doctor: No... You know what they say, Ed.
Smelly Ed: Oh? What?
Doctor: An apple a day keeps the Doctor away.
Smelly Ed: ...and what does that mean?
Doctor: It means, Smelly Ed, that three apples every five days keep medical students confused and medical lecturers employed. CLEAR?!
Smelly Ed: ...kinda. You can have my nuggets.
Doctor: Cool.


Dialogue Triumphs -

Otto: Why did you have to come here, Doctor? Why not try a holiday in Sweden this year?
Doctor: Sweden?
Otto: Yes! See the lovely lakes, the wonderful telephone system and many interesting furry animals including the majestic moose.
Doctor: The moose?
Otto: Yes... A moose once bit my sister.
Doctor: Yeah, right.
Otto: No, really, she was carving her initials in the moose with the sharpened end of a toothbrush given to her by her brother-in-law, Svenge, an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian movies like "The Hot hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Molars of Horst Nordfink"...
(Long pause)
Doctor: Mind you, moose bites can be pretty nasty.
Otto: Oh yeah. I know. Even the ones trained to mix concrete and fill out complicated insurance forms.
Doctor: Preaching to the choir, bud.


Gretal: And if Hansel fails, try feet!
Hansel: MUM! Gretal’s taking the piss again!
Todd: Don’t make me come back there!


Lew Gerrick: Fourteen unexplained deaths, Baron Von Truffle! Fourteen dismembered bodies found nailed to walls of YOUR apartment; limbs, sometimes even HEADS missing! And then, in the 20 years since you’ve left Cardiff, nothing! That’s a bit suspicious, wouldn’t you say?
Baron: It was the Big-Breasted Warlock. Not me. Ask the townsfolk.
Lew Gerrick: Oh yes, the fabled Breasts of Warlock! Born of libido, harbinger of lust, harvester of virginity! Odd, don’t you think that a creature last heard of in the Middle Ages should suddenly reappear after an absence of FOUR CENTURIES? Odder still that it should then choose to disappear just as suddenly the very same night you leave town for good?
Baron: ...maybe.
Lew Gerrick: And no one but you ever saw this monster.
Baron: Oh Christ I’m totally screwed, aren’t I?!


Hansel: With pink nipples, tits enormous in size
The Breasts of Warlock smother lives!
With minty fresh breath and eyes aglow,
She’ll bonk your body – and do it real slow!
Doctor: ...I don’t suppose you have her number by any chance?


The surreal scene as the Doctor and Will Scarlet from "Robin Hood 2005" are punting down the Cam and getting wasted on cheep booze:
Wil: Doctor?
Doctor: Hmmm.
Wil: I was just wondering, how old are you?
Doctor: 900 years... not bad... might have been nice to crack the millennium... Hang on, I did that back when I was Scottish, wasn’t I? No, wait, gimme a second. I was 956 when I dumped Mel... so plus those 600 years and I must be coming up to 16 hundred! Bloody hell!
Wil: Really, when's your birthday?
Doctor: Tomorrow.
Wil: We should do something.
Doctor: Wil, you start getting sick of birthday parties after the first five hundred. Unless there’s going to be a decent stripper and some banana bomb cocktails. DAMN IT, I JUST LOVE STRIPPERS AND COCKTAILS! So Wil, how old are you?
Wil: Ah. How long have we been traveling?
Doctor: One year, three weeks, two days, sixteen hours.
Wil: I guess about 19 and a bit, then
Doctor: You know, I don’t even remember when I was 19. And I don’t remember travelling with a professional jester like you. Come to think of it, the last thing I remember was being in a Burger Master Inn that was being demolished... Oh God, this is a dream, isn’t it? It’s a bloody dream! I’m not really having a nice holiday in the Obverse with Wil and Jadi and Angela AT ALL!
(With the sound of harps, the Doctor wakes up in the rubble.)
Doctor: FOR FUCK’S SAKE!


UnQuotable Quote -
Smelly Ed: Well, I’m following fate FOR I KNOW SHE KNOWS BEST! I’ll follow, she leads, AND IT’S NORTH BY NORTH-WEST!


Viewer Quotes -

"Pathetic." – Tim Burton (2010)

"I can’t complain about any aspect of Breasts of Warlock, apart from there not being enough breasts... but THAT theme tune mix - still bloody awful and I really hope they never use it after this series. It’s so bad it detracts from my listening experience! Indeed, it makes the plot seem good in comparison!" – Nigel Verkoff (2009)

"Long may Lucie continue! She makes me laugh like a nutter."
– a nutter (2009)

"This was perfect to listen to on a cold, rainy afternoon. It just makes me want to die all the more." – Emo Whenever Magazine (2010)

"The Breasts of Orlok was an awful listening experience. Mind you, I did have my head jammed into a front-loading washing machine at the time." – Alexei Sayle (2008)

"This story above all others is probably the best example of epic fail. Listening to this was a chore with rushed, near incomprehensible drama. I was distracted from trying to follow the story by having to work out who the various characters were or where the scenes were supposed to be taking place because bits of time were disappearing and informative explanations were skipped in favor of pace. So we had the characters teleporting to different locations, golems out of nowhere and no convincing motives or courses of action action being taken; and me really not caring either way cause by then I’d lost all interest in any of the proceedings anyway. I HATE YOU ALL!" – Dave Restal (2010)


Psychotic Nostalgia -
"Really enjoyed it. Very Hammer Horror. Not enough hammers, and not enough horror, but you’d be amazed at what you can do with these CDs once you’ve snapped them into jagged shards. The details on the runes you can carve into living flesh... I cannot emphasize how cool it looks when the blood finally stops flowing and it gets that nice grey-white hue to the folds. Genius."


Paul McGann Speaks!
"The thing about these audios is that we can take the Doctor where we like, in never-ending multifaceted creativity and who knows where this is gonna be in 10, 20, 30 years? Yeah, we’ve taken my Doctor to places... usually placed Tom Baker went first... but I’m more interested in the Doctor’s own sex life. What happens when this person is alone? How does this character live with such fetishes? What is this character’s view of their own expertise as lover? This is the world of the interior, and I tell you what, if you think that this present universe that we fly around in spacecraft is big, it’s just peanuts compared to that!"


Sheridan Smith Speaks!
"Was I in this one? If I was, I didn’t do much. Next!"


Miriam Margolyes Speaks!
"Doctor Who is an iconic part of my childhood, and I was sleeping with Tom Baker in the late 1970s. He tried to make me his companion as a talking cabbage on his shoulder, but the idea never took off. Pity, really. I didn’t think much of the script, or the other actors, or Big Finish in general, if I’m honest. So I put on a German accent to frighten people. Works well on radio. The sound effects are extraordinarily specific, so I really do sound like a giant, triple-breasted thud-and-blunder golem that could have her wicked way with the Last of the Time Lords. I over act. I’m an over-actress."


Eddie Hitler Speaks!
"...no I don’t remember this one at all. You sure your got your facts right? The third story of the season’s the one with the Wirrrn! Not some bollocks about General Zod and a burger chain! And to all the anoraks who say otherwise – SHUT YA FAT GOBS, YOU TITS! Yakkety bloody yak! Day in and day out! Slime in this ear! Slime in that ear! No wonder Gay Russell quit this lark!"


Trivia -
Nick Briggs’ cameo in the pre-title sequence was not planned. Or even realized at the time. When they played it back, he was suddenly on the recording even though he was nowhere in the studio. Spooky, huh?


Rumors & Facts –

Barnaby Edwards had been a regular in Doctor Who stories with Paul McGann, playing all the parts that Nick Briggs thought beneath his dignity. His roles have been Wishbone the Seth Efriken, Captain Thinnes of the Greasy Bastard, Peitro the Venetian loser, one of Mayor Wilkin’s flunkies... and many others I can’t be arsed to look up. This glorified extra even made it onto TV where his on-screen presence, naked charisma, and undoubted acting talent was immediately recognized by BBC Wales. Who immediately nailed him inside a Dustbin casing and threw it into Mermaid Bay. They CLAIM this was a scene for Touchwood, but I dunno, sounds a bit dodgy to me.

With Eddie Hitler vomiting up his kidneys after one drinking binge too many, and Nicholas Briggs missing presumed even more missing, Edwards had been forced to take over the day to day running of the series. Desperately juggling cast availability, complaints from Cardiff about the content of the scripts, sorting out the story arc and trying to convince Sheridan Smith that if she couldn’t be arsed to turn up for recording, could she let them dub in her dialogue from some random Two Pints of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps episodes instead?

As with these things, power corrupts and soon Edwards was corrupted as much as being an unpaid production manager and script editor could provide. He was power-mad, emphasis on the "mad", especially in regards to his own writing talents as he decided this season of epic returning enemies, monsters and Lucie’s reproductive cycle NEEDED something that only he, a bald dwarf with a creepy foreign accent, could provide!

Once in a lifetime, there comes a Doctor Who story which changes the whole history of Doctor Who – a story so stunning in its effects, so vast in its impact, that it profoundly affects the lives of all who see it. One such story was The Wank Games. Another was Genocide of the Dustbins. Or anything by Steven Moffat, natch. But then there are the more run-of-the-mill stories like The Snugglers, Underwear or The Periot Costume of Death.

Stories that have some funny moments, a fairly engaging story, some low-budget psychedelic adventure but compared to something like Rob Shearman’s The Unholy Error... it’s all a complete waste of time that would only appeal to nostalgia-junkie intellectual midgets. Who may or may not have written The Idiot Box.

And so Edwards set out to write this story, a disposable bit of frippery that even hardcore Who fans would have genuine trouble remembering, a story that made the average C’Rizz story look like an epic of Midday proportions.

Yes, as long as enough people described the finished product as "gruesome", "gothic" and "something ripped off the early Tom Baker years", Edwards was certain of success! Yes, even though he brings in a freaking supervillain from Superman II for the love of Eccleston!

Of course, Edwards might have twigged what a loser he was onto if he wasn’t just the writer but director, co-producer, sound-designer, composer and main star. Edwards thought this meant that he could rightly take sole credit for the ultimate style and ambience of the production of 19th Century Cardiff with a fable-like quality and perverse sense of realism. Which means that he and he alone is responsible for this heap of forgettable crap I’ve had to sit through to compose this guide when I could be out there snorting drugs, shagging prostitutes or stalking Matt Smith and Karen Gillan!

WHERE HAS MY LIFE GONE?! WHEREEEEEEE??!?

Ahem.

Anyway, this suffocatingly traditional particularly after following such revolutionary tales involving fish girl orgies and underwear fungus that could destroy the Earth. But then, did we expect anything well-crafted from the man responsible for The Bride of Paddington that wrote out the coolest companion ever by having her marry some wimpy alien prince she’d known for three minutes on a planet of Pertwee nostalgia?

The difference between this and Season 13 is that this sucks.

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