Saturday, December 5, 2009

8th Doctor - No More Lies

Serial 9H – Tell Me Lies
An Alternative Program Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Thirty-Sixth Entry in the EC Unauthorized Guide O' Normal Guys

D O C T O R W H O

Serial 9H – Tell Me Lies -

In a nondescript corridor, the TARDIS materializes and Lucie emerges, delighted at the fact her breasts seem to be getting bigger the further she travels in time and space. The Doctor points out that they have much more important things to worry about, like the fact the corridor they are in is part of a time vessel. Lucie instead accuses the Doctor of staring at her bum, and the Doctor defends himself on the grounds he keeps finding it everywhere and tells her to face facts: she’s not a size five any more!

Elsewhere, in a secret control room, a sinister figure watches this on his security monitors. He zooms the scanners on Lucie’s breasts and hits "record" – when suddenly there is a tremor and an alarm goes off. The sinister figure swears violently.

Just down the corridor from the TARDIS a huge hole is ripped in the hull and a bunch of ridiculous-looking alien monsters arrive – curiously resembling silver, scaled kangaroos with elephant-heads and huge compound eyeballs. Amazingly, Lucie recognizes them instantly as "Tar-Modowk" and concludes they are hungry!

The leader of the creatures sniff the air and reveals that he can smell Time itself. Emboldened by this synaesthesia, the Tar-Modowk run off down the corridors like the shouty hooligans they are at heart.

The Doctor explains to Lucie – one’s he’s managed to drag her attention from down the front of her T-shirt – that the Tar-Modowk are heading for the temporal systems of the ship to feast on the engine powers. What’s more, he adds – again having to regain Lucie’s attention – some guy named Zimmerman is going to switch on those engines any minute to get the time vessel moving.

Lucie points out there is a whacking great hole in the hull and the Doctor congratulates her on her perspicacity, as the whole point he was making was that if Zimmerman tries to take off, the whole ship will depressurize and explode!

Lucie screams like a girl (for she is one) and runs away. The Doctor watches her go, sighs, loiters around the corridor a bit, sighs again, and then runs after her at top speed... only for a shutter to slam down, cutting the Doctor off from Lucie. Instantly chalking this down to experience, the Doctor prepares to leave before remembering he can’t actually pilot the TARDIS without Lucie and swears a lot.

Meanwhile, Lucie continues to mindlessly run up and down corridors screaming homophobic abuse at unspecified "creeps" and then turns around and runs off in a different direction. Amazingly she runs straight through a wall and into the secret control room where the sinister figure stands... now wearing a gold, hand-stitched lurex spacesuit with cufflinks.

Lucie pauses only to laugh at his ridiculous outfit before starting to randomly operate control panels as Zimmerman (for it is he) screams at her to stop before she blows them all up!

Suddenly the Doctor runs in through another wall... Jesus, what is this space ship made of, tissue paper?... and stops short as he realizes too late Zimmerman’s true identity.

"The VALEYARD!" the Doctor exclaims ominously.

"Who?" asks Lucie, nonplussed.

"He’s my evil future self who wants to kill me and claim my remaining regenerations for himself by extending his own share of our life cycle! And, yes, I know that doesn’t actually make sense, but we’ll only get in trouble if we try to ignore it."

The Valeyard produces a strange weapon designed to use raw temporal energy. It can send people back to their own place and time, erasing their memory of recent events to re-stabilize the time space continuum. He fires this MIB-rip-off thingy at Lucie... but nothing happens.

Muttering darkly that "this Arcadian shit never works", the Valeyard settles for beating the Doctor unconscious with some empty milk bottles. He shouts that he had a highly profitable arms trade working with the various powers of the Temporal Difference of Opinion until the Doctor turned up and casually sold all the Valeyard’s shares completely by accident. At this point, however, the Valeyard is distracted by Lucie’s breasts, and asks if she’s had work done on them?

The distraction allows the Doctor to remind everyone that the Tar-Modowk are eating the time vessel around then and the Valeyard reveals he’s thought of that and removed the furry dice from the time vessel’s cockpit. With the furry dice in the escape pod, he can turn it into a TARDIS and escape, leaving the Tar-Modowk to consume all the evidence he was ever there – and killing the Doctor and Lucie into the bargain.

"Wow. It’s like an episode of Hustle!" Lucie marvels at his plan.

The Valeyard leaves in the escape pod and the Doctor reveals he has a cunning plan – let himself get eaten by Tar-Modowk and allow the Valeyard to be retconned out of existence. However, even LUCIE can see this plan for the stupidity it is and so instead they run back to the TARDIS like ninjas soaked in napalm.

Alas, they instantly bump into the Tar-Modowk leader, who can tell that the duo are time travelers from the distinctive nicotine scent of the vortex. However, the fumes from the departing escape-pod TARDIS incredibly tubular, and the lumbering silver aliens immediately get incredibly high and start marveling at Lucie’s tits.

The distraction allows the Doctor and Lucie to bolt into the TARDIS just as the crippled timeship depressurizes and blows up in a cheap CGI explosion scouring the corners of the time-space continuum. The Tar-Modowk are flung out across time and space, incredibly pissed off.

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor jumps around the steaming console and slamming down controls as he tries to find the Valeyard’s lashed-up TARDIS somewhere in the universe. It would be a hell of a lot easier if Lucie didn’t have her iPod on full blast as Madonna’s "Hung Up" howls around the control room.

Finally the Doctor gives up and sets the controls for Earth only find hundreds of Tar-Modowk flying into orbit on the backs of Dommervoy, which looks incredibly stupid and kinky simultaneously. The Doctor muses that all time is relative and so they’ve always been ahead of them while simultaneously been being blown up on the time vessel.

Suddenly the creatures become aware of the presence of the TARDIS and begin turning their attention towards it instead. The Doctor muses this is probably just a coincidence until he realizes that the Tar-Modowk are being lead by a worryingly familiar-looking Seal Cub.

"SERGE!" the Doctor is aghast.

"Who?"

"A psychopathic furry animal I used to hang out with back in the days when life was worth living and the Dustbins weren’t fighting the Time Lords for all of creation," the Doctor explains.

"Do you know ANY normal people? At all?" Lucie asks.

The Doctor clips her over the ear, and her head bounces off the console. Miraculously, somehow all the Dommervoy flee from the TARDIS, which instantly relocates itself to the exact location on Earth where the Valeyard’s TARDIS had fetched up.

Exactly how this works... I dunno. In fact, I have absolutely no idea what’s actually happening in this story. What the hell is going on? How the hell have the Doctor and Lucie been fighting Zimmerman across whole star systems for months without realizing he was the flipping Valeyard? How the hell did Serge escape from Nowhere-Land Outside Continuity? Why are the Dommervoy Tar-Modowk bitches? Why? Why?!? WHY?!?! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?!?

I’m just getting this out of my system because at this point, the plot storms out of the room, slamming the door behind it...


Parte the First

Elsewhere in time and space, guests start to arrive for a garden party in the grounds of a mansion in Cardiff. As everyone makes polite conversation over their champagne glasses, the hostess Lorelei finds her brother, Dougal has been getting very, very drunk and taking a piss in their father’s mousoleum. Lorelei kicks him in the false hip and he falls into the fountain.

At this point, her husband Nigel Havers arrives and asks why she is beating up her miserable brother. She responds than it’s easier than digging out one of the old target pistols and shooting Dougal in the other hip and Nigel Havers is unable to argue with this logic.

Finally, Dougal is dragged back to the party to mingle with the guests as Nigel Havers starts treading over everyone’s cues as if he’s confused as to which part of the script he’s in. Dougal and Lorelei call him a drunken moron and change the subject.

Lorelei then takes the stage, speaks in Hungarian for about three minutes and then starts singing silly songs.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS materializes behind some topiary on the other side of the garden and the Doctor and Lucie watch Lorelei on the console screen, mistakenly assuming it is an MTV broadcast rather than what’s outside. When they spot Nigel Havers, they come to the conclusion this is some kind of BBC period romance drama and rapidly get bored and pop outside.

There, they are stunned to discover they are actually in a Welsh garden party and that the Valeyard chose HERE of all places to go to! So gobsmacked are they, they ignore the alarms, the sirens, the Cloister Bell and the console monitor saying "WARNING: TEMPORAL RECURRENCE!! LEG IT!!!"

The Doctor advises Lucie to try to be unobtrusive, but she seems determined to asks total strangers about her breasts at the first opportunity. The Doctor can’t shake the feeling there's something wrong here... and moments after they move off, another TARDIS materializes and another Doctor and Lucie emerge. They have a similar-but-not-identical conversation and wonder off... just as Serge the Seal appears atop a Dommervoy with two Tar-Modowk stooges.

Still inside the Vortex, the other Tar-Modowk realise their leader has successfully achieved a bridge through to Earth and they can finally attend all sorts of gala functions and garden parties after years of social deprivation and media obscurity!

As the two Doctors and two Lucies admire the scale of the party, with marquees and live music, waiters and waitresses, Nigel Havers and Lorelei retire to their mansion for a bit of rumpy-pumpy. One of the Doctors suggests they try mingling with the other guests and look as though they’ve been invited, before cursing his lack of handy-dandy-all-purpose-telepathic-psychic-paper which would be just perfect for this sort of thing.

Dougal happens to bump into one of the TARDIS crews, and immediately asks to see their invitations, and his suspicions are immediately aroused when the Doctor swears loudly and Lucie tries to brazen it out by showing him her breasts. Dougal goes pale, as if seeing Lucie’s naked body has had a strange effect on him.

"Yes, sorry about Janet Jackon’s wardrobe malfunction here," the Doctor sighs, tugging down her singlet.

"You all right there, Dougal?" asks Lucie. "You look like you’ve just had a bucket of cold water thrown over you, and normally that doesn’t happen until AFTER you lose it and try to ravish me."

"Well, it’s stupid really, but seeing you in the nip, miss, it’s well, well it’s like the first time in years someone’s shown their tits to me. Something... unexpected. New."

Lucie suspects this is Dougal’s attempts to chat her up, but the Doctor muses that it feels like she’s been showing her naked torso a million times over already and frankly she’s giving everyone a curious sense of déjà vu.

Meanwhile, the other Doctor and Lucie are getting drunk on champagne, when the Time Lord inexplicably screams, "Of COURSE! We’ve landed inside a time loop! This is all YOUR FAULT, damn you!"

Lucie is understandably baffled, especially given her usual state of utter idiocy. Why would anyone want to time loop a garden party? The Doctor is unable to answer, so we cut back to the other two.

The Doctor wishes to speak to Nigel Havers on a matter of vital importance, but mainly because he’s a real fan of the man who has the best timing on television, even better than Paul Eddington! Lucie rebukes the Doctor for the way he manipulates people into getting him autographs.

At that moment on the tennis courts of the mansion, a blond-haired Aborigine is putting the moves on a Welsh tennis champion called Beryl despite her not-so-veiled-threats to turn him into catgut.

Suddenly, Serge emerges from the nearby bushes demanding to be allowed to join the competitive game. The seal is gripped with another psychotic episode and declares the party guests were the ones that clubbed his mamma and pappa to death.

"IT... WAS... YOUUUUUUUU!" he screams, pulling two submachine guns out of hammerspace and opening fire...


Parte the Second

As the criminally-insane Serge goes on a machine gun rampage, killing everyone not quick enough to get out of the way of his bullets, ominous thunderclouds gather across the sky and the party guests head indoors before the rain begins to pour and a seal cub shoots them dead.

One of the Doctors has moved on from eating the salmon-liver pate and started on the cheeses, but Lucie is far more concerned about the Tar-Modowk in the vortex. Well, she’s slightly concerned about the Tar-Modowk in the vortex. She’s still pretty occupied with taking her top off to total strangers and asking them "Do you think this is normal?"

Nevertheless, she is right to suspect that a bunch of time-anomaly-eating monsters who can make the Dommervoy their bitches might be interested in a whacking great time loop, which is why the other Lucie has at this very moment suggested it to the other Doctor.

The other Doctor quickly suggests that Lucie piss off while he gets to talk to Nigel Havers, so she storms off inside the house to steal anything not nailed down. Because, heh, she’s NORTHERN! Ah, cheap offensive stereotypes make the world go round...

After she leaves, the Doctor greets Nigel Havers and they decide to head for the Summer House by the stream where they can sit down and talk about the wonderful experience of filming "Chariots of Fire", "A Passage To India" but above all "Don’t Wait Up".

Meanwhile, one of the Lucies – I think it might be one with the dusky pink areolas, but I couldn’t swear to it – is furtively running around the house stealing all the drugs from the bathroom cabinets she can find. When she is caught by Lorelei, Lucie claims she is Nigel Havers’ jailbait mistress, then decks the older woman.

Suddenly, Lorelei transforms into a hideous emaciated skeletal creature with huge wings, and backhands Lucie with enough force to fling her out of the second-story bedroom window to fall onto the hard paving stones below... whereupon Lucie is immediately machine-gunned to death by Serge in the belief she murdered his parents.

At the Summerhouse, Nigel Havers reveals he is... in fact... the Valeyard!!

"Get away," the Doctor boggles, amazed that his insane Thirteenth Incarnation is actually the most respected British character actor of his entire generation.

The Valeyard explains that his TARDIS-pod crashed in Wales years ago and since then he has become wealthy and famous with the health of a race of skull-faced angel-shaped life-draining parasites from Swansea. Since then, the years of stage, screen have film have lead to him turning over a new leaf and no longer sadistically craving his previous self’s regenerations to further his pointless existence.

"Besides, the Dustbins are going to kill us all anyway!" the Valeyard shrugs with a goofy grin, missing the sounds of gunfire and explosions from the garden maze nearby. The Doctor however points this carnage out to the Valeyard, who simply sips a glass of lemonade and notes that it’s not HIS problem, so who cares?

The two aspects of the Doctor thus simply sit and watch as the Tar-Modowk run around the war memorial and start to repeatedly headbutt the stone block, trying to break it open with their tusks and screaming that they want their dinner and they want it now.

Inside the house, Lorelei is floating around the place and being generally shit-your-pants terrifying when she finds the OTHER Lucie in her master bedroom popping bills and complaining that she hasn’t got a single buzz yet.

"Two Lucies?!" hisses the angel wraith. "What is this shit?"

Back at the Summer House, the Doctor and the Valeyard watch more innocents being slaughtered by the Tar-Modowk and Serge the Seal and discuss how meaningless life is without forgiveness. Has the Doctor ever had to forgive himself for something? The Doctor suggests the Valeyard forgive him and that would count, and they both laugh jolly laughs and enjoy a round of cucumber sandwiches.

The Valeyard feels as if he and the Doctor have missed out on so many years of possible friendship, and offers him a leaflet about a Christian Rock Mass that he’s organizing.

"If YOU are my future, I’m not sure I want to have one," the Doctor says in disbelief.

Realizing that this is a bit rude, the Doctor changes the subject and wonders if the Valeyard has realized that he is trapped in a time loop. He suspects that the Time Agents – that debauched gang of drug-addled sex-crazed theatre critics from the 51st Century – have tracked the Valeyard down and trapped him inside a time bubble. And with typical shoddy workmanship, the time barriers are breaking down and all of creation is at stake.

The Valeyard laughs in the Doctor’s face at this conspiracy bullshit, though he notes that he DID get offered a couple of dodgy vortex manipulators at retail by some staggering drunk called Captain Jack...

"Every time loop has a focal point," the Doctor explains as they share cigars, "something that creates the energy and limits the temporal horizon, and if I destroy that, the loop will dissolve and the Tar-Modowk will lose the scent and bugger off home."

The Valeyard agrees that this plan makes sense, then pulls out his temporal eliminator and threatens to kill his former self right here and now and then Lucie, only more slowly and with infinitely more attention to detail.

"B...but that’s monstrous!" the Doctor wails. "I won’t get to watch her horrible death agonies!"

Dougal wanders over asking if anyone has any of the salmon-liver pate left, and finally recognizes the Doctor as that "curly-haired fuckwit with the scarf" from an embarrassing incident in Paris 1979. He lunges at the Doctor and tries to break his arm as the Valeyard lets out a peal of evil laughter and skips off back to the house.

On the way, he passes the Tar-Modowk tearing apart the memorial to feast on the temporal energies within. The Valeyard stops to say hello and they exchange small talk, complain about the weather, and part company again. It’s all frightfully polite, even as the flocks of Dommervoy charge to the Summer House and attack Dougal as he tries to choke the Time Lord to death on a grapefruit.

The Dommervoy similarly charge through the walls of the house, just as Lorelei is about to annihilate the remaining Lucie. They both leg it and bump into the Valeyard coming in the opposite direction, and they flee further into the house as the Tar-Modowk start vandalizing the furniture and stealing the prettier bits of artwork.

Lucie manages to escape certain death, even though she is always deliberately attracting the attention of the nearest Tar-Modowk by showing them her breasts and asking their opinion. Finally they escape the house and Lucie suggests that Lorelei sing in Hungarian – surely THAT will frighten off the Tar-Modowk and Dommervoy?!

As the Doctor and Dougal flee into the garden, only to come face to face with the bloodstained Serge the Seal!

Luckily, Serge has ANOTHER violent mood swing and immediately gives the Doctor a big hug, says he’s missed the girly-haired hippie beatnik, and idly asks if Charley had a boy or a girl?

Serge immediately offers to take the Doctor and Dougal to the focus of the time loop and save the entire world as they know it. Predictably, they head straight to the war memorial where the Tar-Modowk are being repeatedly zapped by the Valeyard as he shrieks "GET AWAY FROM HER YOU BITCH!!" at the top of his voice.

He reveals that he actually put himself in a time loop deliberately as he enjoyed the party so much he wanted to live it for the rest of his life. Serge tries to top that by reveal that the Tar-Modowk are the devolved descendants of the owners of the time machine in the pre-credit sequence who have been searching all of time and space trying to find out what turned them into such ridiculous scaly idiots.

The Doctor tops this by revealing he does not care and uses his sonic screwdriver set to "flambe" and shoots the bunch of printed circuits and technobabble inside the war memorial. The time loops snaps and in a puff of light all the Tar-Modowk, Dommervoy and Serge fade out of existence.

Dougal and the other surviving party guests instantly age after being trapped forever in the same moment in one eternal evening, together in perpetuity. Lorelei’s species only lives for thirty five minutes and dissolves as the Valeyard breaks down in blubbery tears and screams that life is worthless. He thus turns to eat the salmon mouse which is lethal and with no more regenerations, drops dead...

...falling right on top of the Other Eighth Doctor, who was hiding under the table, accidentally snapping his neck. As the Eighth Doctor and Lucie watch on, he glows brightly transforming into a swarthy, brown-hair-parted-on-the-left, rubber-faced being. "Oh, GOD," it groans as it gets to its feet, "it feels like my head’s stuffed full of Adric’s underwear!"

"A different Ninth Doctor!" the Doctor marvels. "My destiny to become that pathetic loser face down in the catering table is not fixed! Free will is NOT an illusion after all!"

"Oh, sod off you wet ponce, I’m about as much in the mood for one of your philosophical rants as I would be for a root canal performed by an epileptic dentist. In your case, silence would not only be golden but positively healthy because if you DON’T shut up I shall be forced to stuff you in a large pot, boil you to a soupy consistency, and feed you through a strainer to a contingent of Portugese sailors!" the Other Ninth Doctor retorts, storming off to sit out the rest of the Temporal Difference of Opinion on the planet Dronid in the vain hope it won’t be the focal point of the conflict like the LAST three time wars.

"Sniveling little rat-faced git!" the Doctor shouts after him.

Left alone with nothing but corpses, the Doctor gets bored and returns to the TARDIS. Lucie pauses to check the corpse of her temporal doppelganger, and after comparing breasts sizes becomes utterly CONVINCED that hers are getting bigger... but why?!

Suddenly, a mysterious leather clad biker moll in mirrored shades emerges from the shadows and startles Lucie. The woman cannot believe that after all she’s been through to find Lucie Miller, she finally catches up with the bimbo in 2007 Cardiff, EXACTLY the same place and time this whole mess started out.

Lucie, unsurprisingly, wouldn’t recognize a story arc if it pulled a gun and shot her through the head – which, coincidentally, is exactly what the lady with the shades does. Picking up the lifeless form of Lucie, the woman strides up to a black minicab with freakishly huge monster truck wheels and climbs inside.

Her cries of "I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME, MILLER! NEXT TIME!!! Oh, wait. Sorry, force of habit. Hey, have your boobs gotten bigger?" echo as the disguised time machine dematerializes.

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor checks the console monitor and realizes that Lucie has vanished off the face of the Earth. He shouts angrily that this is just typical of the arrogant bimbo to let herself get kidnapped when she KNOWS he’ll be unable to use the TARDIS to leave without her.

And now he is marooned in Cardiff, 2007!!!!

---------
Next Time...
---------
"Hello. Lucie Miller speaking. No, I’m not wearing any underwear..."
"You’re my PA now, Miss Miller. And like all office equipment I can’t be truly sure you’re mine until I’ve screwed you on the desk."
"I’ve got four French Letters and some bubblegum. Do you want to be careful or take a chance?"
"Is it working now? Lucie? You all right babe? What are you doing with that novelty telephone? Oh my god, that is DISGUSTING!"
"It’s a bit like The Office this place, isn’t it?"
"Think about the last time we actually did any work. Think about it. We never did any work. We just thought we did."
"Hello, I’m looking for an epic season finale featuring a returning monster. Have I come to the right place?"
"Something isn’t right here. Lots of things aren’t right here. Is this story arc supposed to make sense? Or is this all a conspiracy against non-subscribers specifically? What the hell does Bad Wolf mean anyway?"
"Tune in next week to find out!"
"Ha fucking ha, Lucie. Break the fourth wall why don’t you..."
---------
...Hostile Takeover...
---------


Book(s)/Other Related -
Dr. Who & The WHAT THE HELL? THIS CAN’T BE SENSIBLE!?
Two Pints of Lovely Lucie
Lucie Miller – Thanks For The Mammaries (Pictorial Autobiography)


Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed Hungarian for most of this story.
"Now, look at that monitor, Charley..."
"My name’s LUCIE, ya pillock!"
"SHUT UP! I don’t CARE what you think you’re called, blondie, so do us all a favor and answer to the name of someone who isn’t so utterly annoying they crystallize bitchiness into a substance as yet unknown to science! Where was I? Right. That monitor..."


Goofs –
We never get to see Lucie’s breasts. What, therefore, is the POINT of the whole subplot with her wondering if they’re getting bigger then? It’s not as if we can miss the plot holes big enough to fit whole universes in when the audience can’t admire her chest area, IS IT?!?


Fashion Victims –
The Valeyard embraces his life of crime by discarding his Time Lord robes for a pink shirt with flower patterns, a black tie with large white question marks, a black smoking jacket with a fake leopard-fur collar, tan slacks, brown shoes and sunglasses. As with his previous incarnations, this gives the evil Doctor an air of indifferent eccentricity... and a disturbing love of question marks.


Technobabble -
The Doctor says that the Tar-Modowk feed by "sorbetsynthesis".


Links and References –
This story manages to reference to 1220 separate Doctor Who stories and not a SINGLE one of those references is accurate!


Untelevised Misadventures -
The Sixth Doctor, Frobisher and Glitz ruined one of the Valeyard’s numerous tax dodges selling Mandrel droppings to the Galactic Federation as a herbal aphrodisiac. This story is told in the BBC Past Doctor Novel, "Mission: Implausible".


Groovy DVD Extras -
The whole episode translated into Hungarian and then into Japanese, rendering it surprisingly comprehensible and easy to understand.


Dialogue Disasters –

Tar-Modowk: It will taste good to enjoy these vol-u-vents!


Lucie: Oh, that’s great, isn’t it? I have a Northern accent ergo I must be a self-absorbed texting bimbo, is that it? And, by the way, do you think my tits have gotten a bit bigger lately? I could murder some chocolate chip cookies and gravy...


Tar-Modowk: Give me your canapes!


Doctor: Isn’t this the third time this season I’ve had a character trying to keep his lover alive indefinitely?
Valeyard: A mere detail!


Dialogue Triumphs -

Lucie: You’re always looking at my bum, you.
Doctor: I am not, Charley!
Lucie: STOP CALLING ME CHARLEY!
Doctor: Whatever. You teenage blonde nymphos are all the same...


Nigel Havers: I love you like a brother-in-law!
Dougal: I **AM** your brother-in-law!
Nigel Havers: So what the hell is your problem?
Dougal: But do you have to be so blatant about it?!!


Lorelei: Do you know, Lucie, what the strongest human emotion is?
Lucie: Um... is it calcium?
Lorelei: ...what?
Lucie: Calcium?
Lorelei: What the hell are you on about? Calcium isn’t an emotion!
Lucie: Oh, just because YOU ain’t felt it yet. By the way, you think these are a bit bigger today? I can barely see my feet...


Dougal: Aliens! Screwdrivers! Time-loops! I meant plenty of your sort when I was in Paris in the 70s!


Lorelei: Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies! Tell me lies, tell me, tell me lies! Oh, no, no you can’t disguise! You can’t disguise, no you can't disguise... Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies!!


Valeyard: Ah. Doctor. I always knew this day would come when we would meet again. (long pause) So. How are you?
Doctor: How am I? Still sober.
Valeyard: Dear me. Have a champagne cocktail.
Doctor: Thank you.


Dougal: My god, she’s right! Her breasts ARE getting bigger!!
Doctor: Yes, Dougal. That’s because she’s moving closer towards us.
Dougal: Oh, right.


UnQuotable Quote -
Lucie: Let’s take me bra size up to eleven so I can flash Gordon!


Viewer Quotes -

"The sort of love story that Paul Sutton seems fond of, with some unusual touches like a complete lack of narrative and a truly disturbing obsession with Lucie Miller’s boobs. Is this, mayhaps a story arc in the making? Admittedly, the Tits of Time are sufficiently interesting to make this more than just a romance. The ending is quite poignant, as the Headhunter turns up and finally does something."
– Dave Restal (2007)

"Nigel HAVERS, eh? Makes a change from Nigel VERKOFF. And not a moment too soon, in my opinion." – Andrew Beeblebrox (2007)

"Drop dead, Andrew." – Nigel Verkoff (2007)

"Multiple Doctors. Multiple companions. Time loops. Dommervoy. Heartbreaking deaths of loved ones. Yes, it’s my favorite Ninth Doctor episode... on audio... with the most annoying companion anywhere. And the Valeyard. And why the hell did I pay for this?!?"
- Ewen Campion-Clarke (2007)

"I never thought I’d live long enough to see someone write a Who story that’s more confusing than Goth Night. Quite an achievement, I suppose." – the author of Goth Night (2008)

"Whoa-ho, her tits are getting bigger." – Mental as Anything (1979)

"THIS is supposed to be challenging? You’re kidding me. I know challenging. James Joyce is challenging. Phillip Glass is challenging. Quantum physics is challenging. OK, maybe Phillip Glass isn't challenging. Still, Lucie has very nice tits." – Amanda Freeman (2009)


Psychotic Nostalgia -
"Well, after two thousand unsuccessful attempts to listen to this for more than 5 minutes without forgetting it was on and doing something else, usually snuffing drifters and eating them... I’m going to write this one off. So let’s pretend this never happened. Everyone who says otherwise is buried in my yard. And not in one piece."


Paul McGann Speaks!
"Will Doctor Who always be a part of my life? ALWAYS? Bloody hell! The REST of my life? You know, I think it’s time I divorced myself from Doctor Who. I don’t care if a divorce needs mutual consent, if this pre-empts a spat, that’s great. I wouldn’t be an actor if I could see six months ahead. If I could see six months ahead, I wouldn’t have accepted the bloody job in the first place. Of course, you don’t know what’s going to happen six week away, even six DAYS away. So I might get lucky and escape this madhouse. Hope springs eternal. So there. That’s what I think. You can piss off now, Ewen."


Sheridan Smith Speaks!
"I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but I was fabulous in this one, wasn’t I? Strongest script yet. Everyone says so. It’s really important to maintain that sort of delicate balance between being headstrong and being feisty but still having my head screwed on. It’s amazing the number of people who listened to this and said that they think I overshadowed the Doctor himself with my somewhat overbearing personality. I would have thought my somewhat overbearing cleavage did that by causing a kind of solar eclipse, but each to their own, eh?"


Nigel Havers Speaks!
"What a messed-up story. It’s very retarded. This is my first brush with anything to do with Doctor Who, so it’s quite a historic moment. It’ll be in my CV and my autobiography – I’ll be using this material to blackmail the rest of the cast for some time. I actually watched the first episode, back in 1963. To be honest, I wasn’t very impressed. It didn’t turn me on at all, unlike others at my school who fell in love with Susan 'Full-Frontal' Foreman. But I loved the whole time travelling adultery concept, so I said yes before bothering to read the script. In retrospect, that was a mistake. On the other hand, NOT reading may have saved me from a brain aneurysm."


Eddie Hitler Speaks!
"Is it on? Alright, here we go. Smooth, suave and sophisticated -- you got it! Hello! Eddie Hitler here. You know, matey-dokey-skip-catflap-young-fella-me-lad-cockney-rhyming-bollocks, I only listened to this the other day, only a year or so after we actually made it. I thought it was GREAT! The most well-rounded story so far and, to me, the most interesting. The Hungarian stuff was brilliant too, adds interest to it all, nice to have our horizons broadened. The incidental music was very good generally, something different for sci-fi - a good thing! The guest cast were all top notch and Paul and Sheridan were excellent again. More people deserve to hear it!! Come and get it cause red-hot Doctor Who brilliance like this won’t stay on the shelves forever! Yep, that ought to get those wankers buying the CDs."


Trivia -
This story was released on my birthday, therefore proving the existence of God and more importantly that the bitch is out to get me.


Rumors & Facts -
I’m getting the impression Paul Sutton’s material just doesn’t interest me – this is the third of his absolutely huge non-events. Like Engagements that Bore or Thicker Than Two Short Planks or even Xtro 4, it’s about forty-seven rewrites away from a script coherent enough to be rejected. And like them I wasted a huge, irreplaceable chunk of my life trying to listen to it...

After four stories of being the most utterly annoying and frustrating of all possible companions, it was decided that Lucie Miller needed a bit more "spraining ankle and asking stupid questions" and a lot less "giving the Doctor the finger and running off on her own". A story was needed to develop the relationship beyond a series of bitchy arguments that make two seasons of Tegan moaning feel like a bath of cool calamine lotion in comparison.

Script Editor Edward Elizabeth Hitler knew they needed a story to make Lucie intelligent, resourceful, flirtatious, romantic at heart, capable of fighting her corner and most importantly NOT make the entire audience instantly want to throttle the bitch to death every single time she opened her mouth.

Hitler decided that the last story before climactic two-parter was to be a story that showcased Lucie as the proactive non-contentious companion, a story that showed them all at their best, a story that was an instant classic and categorically did NOT have an unnecessarily convoluted script and some questionable sound design and direction.

It also had to have Nigel Havers in it – so ideally the script would need to be the best of the series so far, really hitting home on an emotional level. And focus on Havers to the point where Paul McGann himself could be listed as this week’s special guest star.

No one was exactly sure why Nigel Havers was needed but there some rumors going round that the BBC expected Big Finish to produce an audio version of The Quatermass Saga Of Self-Hatred And Paranoia with Havers as the depressive and cynical Professor Bernard "I Seriously Need To Switch to Decaff" Quatermass. Since Havers’ audition for the role of the Ninth Doctor was rejected by RTD on the grounds he was "past it to the point of decrepitude", Hitler had a brilliant idea of getting Havers to play the oldest Doctor ever.

This, of course, meant the return of the only Doctor Who villain dubbed so utterly rubbish it was written into the BBC Guidelines For All Media On Earth that he never, ever reappear ever...

...the VALEYARD!

The sheer IDEA of tackling a story with Nigel Havers as the Valeyard was enough to drive Hitler to drink. Mind you, getting out of a chair suddenly was enough to drive Hitler to drink, but this time it was serious. Downing a refreshing bottle of bleach, Hitler admitted he found the whole idea of the Valeyard "quite difficult to follow" and continuing the story of this incredibly complicated character on audio for an audience of newbie fans was "beyond a joke even as funny as Thatcher’s 1979 election promise to cut unemployment".

He thus grabbed the nearest writer (uncertainly referring to them as "Your Majesty" as his brain cells curdled inside his skull) and asked them to come up with this story of freshness and superb quality.

Unfortunately, that writer was Paul Sutton.

Recent stresses had lead to Sutton discovering the wonders of recreational narcotics and auto-erotic oxygen starvation and was now considered by three separate psychiatrists to be "insane". He grew a moustache in the belief his facial hair had powers of extra-sensory perception, and wanted his boots credited as co-writers of the script. He consulted his boots repeatedly on a variety of matters, later confiding in McGann that his boots were violent sadists who were having an affair with his wife and would give him bunions at the first sign of resistance. This lead to McGann smiling charmingly and backing away from Sutton very slowly before running for his life.

Hitler gave the brief to Sutton in the time it took for him to crack open a bottle of Malibu. He wanted nothing loud or indistinct, a well-structured plot which adequately communicated what was happening from the beginning to the end, no overused incidental music. "Apart from that, you can do what you bloody like and strength to your arm as you do so!" he cackled, and soon had drunk enough alcohol to lose the power of recognizable speech.

Sutton had a dangerous gleam in his eye unseen since the Hanover Vampire and whispered that his story would be quite unlike ANYTHING else in the season or indeed Doctor Who as it was understood by humankind. His story would focus on personal relationships in general and love stories in particular, and the main narrative thrust of the story would driven by the love affair between the Valeyard and his tart Raquel Welch which climaxed with a sacrifice avoiding mawkish sentimentality by taking a circuitous route to this climax that takes in a non-linear narrative, monsters, technobabble, and much wit.

That Hitler fell for this deluded pitch, and the claims that Sutton could include believable, engaging characters after he had listened to the two Sixth Doctor tales in question, is a testament to the power of the industrial-strength oven cleaner he was drinking at the time.

Indeed, Hitler was in a deep coma when the script was handed in and not even its intense overblown gibberish could rouse him from his slumber, and so the astonishingly, hilariously awful story was accepted and produced even though any passer-by could tell it had somehow become the anti-matter opposite of what the script editor had asked for.

The cast and crew were amazed that, despite being utter bollocks of the first order even amidst Sutton’s usual swamp of mediocrity and indeed Gareth Jenkins was on record as asking if this load of crap was a sign that the apocalypse was at hand. Sutton responded by calling them all "sniveling losers" unable to appreciate his strange, fucked-up rancid icing of uncooked cake mixture. And they thought his script was rather terrible as well.

The brain-meltingly-bizarre end result was a technobabble laden plot that wasn’t actually terribly interesting: and considering it featured the completely random return of three little known characters from both the TV and Big Finish audios while simultaneously adding to the story arc people had been bitching about for weeks is undoubtedly the strongest candidate for the strangest, stark-raving bonkers Doctor Who disappointment of all time.

Although Tell More Lies is a disturbingly fanwank-stained story, don’t run away with the idea that it is the sort of intriguing outright-insane self-introspection that might make SENSE. Not only is the logic-landmine of the Valeyard involved, but the return of occasional Big Finish companion/baddy Serge the Seal and a bit part character from that Tom Baker story everyone likes – and none of them have any call to be in the story, so the brilliance must lie in the fact that they ARE in the story. So there is something to utterly baffle pretty much everyone here.

Indeed, I’ve listened to it fourteen separate times and still can’t figure anything out of the plot bar the fact it SEEMS to be a story with the Eighth Doctor and Lucie, and I’m not even certain of that! What the fuck was going on? Even Zig-Zag-Gay-Ass made more sense!

To be sadistically, soul-destroyingly frank, a stinker like Tell Me Lies was the last thing the BBC7 audios (already considered mostly 'easier to bankrupt than Paul McCartney' by fans and others unfortunate enough to hear them) needed, especially due to the complete lack of any publicity that might have got the large section of the population apathetic to the audio medium to even know they existed at all.

Worse, the fans of the Welsh hit TV series unanimously revealed that they listened to the opening scene of Lymph of the Dustbins, thought it was shit and didn’t bother to listen further. After Nick Briggs’ fabulously awful attempt to crossover Doctor Who and Dustbin Umpire in Hellbound to Fargo, Big Finish and BBC7 had once again managed to get a huge project to live up to expectations... expectations that it would completely fail to have any potential whatsoever.

Of course one fairly-poorly-received doesn’t ALWAYS mean a whole radio series designed as a showcase for what Big Finish is capable of to the BBC has gone belly-up. But it IS a good indicator.

And this is tragic as the season has been as good, if not better, than anything RTD had to offer throughout the entirety of 2006! The scripts were average, the casting fantastic and the CD covers weren’t made out of used toilet paper this time round. In the seven stories of this season so far, Doctor Who has visited more alien worlds, crafted a better-established story arc, and improved on central conceits than RTD was even willing to discuss when a gun was pointed at his head.

...why is life so fucking unfair?

Why is this story so utterly brain-damaged?

Who the hell are those Loony Tunes aliens and what do they want and why did the Valeyard spitefully remove them from the guest list?

What were all those enormous gaps between scenes for? Was this one under-running?

And as for the completely pointless time-wasting song in the middle of the story.... That song caused me physical pain, it was so horrendous! It was like polystyrene screeching across the fibres of my soul!! I thought only Ian Levine could orchestrate such horror as this when the lead character breaks into a Hungarian folk song in some deranged attempt to create a somber mood...


"No More Me, No More You" by Pentacasta Pinocothica Placebos

Number thirteen’s mostly spent
At the end, shoulda used that time vent
I called myself the Valeyard to pay the rent
But now my body’s broken, my mind is bent.

Once went evil, now redeemed
Nothing is ever what it seemed
Cuz there’s nothing left to do,
No more me and no more you!

Pseudo-TARDIS, police box I choose
No other box I choose to use!
Tar-Modowks I would abuse,
Surely circumstances could excuse?

In the shape of things to come
My long term relationships come undone
Cuz there's nothing left to do,
No more me and no more you!

All my life, I’ve been known to swing,
Prone to cling and waste these things
Now it’s the end, for heaven’s sake
There’s never been so much at stake!

Lorelei and the angels in paradise
It was really easy to turn nice
Cuz there’s nothing left to do,
No more me and no more you!

Like the naked leads the blind
I know I’m kinky and unkind
At the end I always find,
Someone to bruise and leave behind.

All alone in space and time!
There’s nothing here that is mine
TARDISes borrowed, TARDISes blue
No more me and no more you
No more me and no more you...

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