Saturday, December 5, 2009

8th Doctor - Phobos

Serial 9G – Deimos
An Alternative Program Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Thirty-Fifth Entry in the EC Unauthorized Guide O' Martian Sphinxes
Jared "No Nickname" Hansen has a hand in this, but not as much as others, so don’t get your hopes up. Stupid Hansen groupies...

D O C T O R W H O

Serial 9G – Deimos -

It’s a new episode of "Jackass 2589" as Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville travel all the way to another planet to do lame, suicidal stunts to the amusement of a bunch of stoners who only rent the DVDs. As Steve-O falls through an ice cave and plunges, screaming, into a giant underground chamber, the irritating twat is thankfully eaten by some hellbeast or another who was waiting in the darkness.

Jackass? Lameass, more like...


Parte the First

Lucie has humiliated the Doctor for the eighth-straight time in an arm-wrestling competition, and, due to one of the more obscure tenants of Gallifreyan law, THE TARDIS IS NOW HERS!

Lucie begins laughing maniacally and announces that, with the TARDIS only responding to her commands, she is now the Doctor, and the Doctor is but her companion! The Doctor points out that he doesn't actually have a name, so they could only be "The Doctor and The Doctor" or "The Doctor and ___ " if she followed through with that, which would make writing the rest of this synopsis a real bitch. Lucie reluctantly agrees that they’ll keep their current nom-de-plumes for convenience sake, but makes it clear that the Doctor will now have no role in proceedings but to hand her marital aids and tell her how fantastic her arse looks.

Now with all of time and space at her command... Lucie has no idea where to go. She asks the Doctor for a suggestion, and he suggests the year 1997. Lucie laughs, and says she wants the exact OPPOSITE year - so they’re going to 7991! The Doctor grins, saying that’s exactly what he'd like, and Lucie fumes and decides to just land the fucking thing in the nebulous thousand-year gap known as "the UNIT era".

They emerge from the TARDIS into what at first appears to be Cardiff, but is actually the barren quarry-moon Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars in the year 2589. The potato-shaped moon is smaller than a decent mountain and the gravity should be near zero. However, this would mean that to be completely accurate the story would have to spend the next half an hour showing the Doctor and Lucie jumping into the air, so Lucie quickly points out that the gravity is Earth-normal and therefore artificial.

"Since the tiny moon has ridiculously low gravity, it’s useless for extreme sport lovers. They must have changed Deimos’ most fundamental characteristics to improve the bunjee jumping, recrafting the entire landscape to attract tourists and only these gullible visitors could ever mistake the artificial world for something completely natural and unspoilt," Lucie muses thoughtfully. "Though why anyone thinks something completely natural and unspoilt should be exactly like rural Wales, I dread to think."

The Doctor is similarly horrified when he realizes that their role reversal is so extreme that Lucie now has the entirety of his wealth of knowledge, and his mind is now filled with nothing but supposed remedies for crow's feet and urban legends about cheating the breathaliser. Since these could be bloody useful, the Doctor jots them down so that he won't forget them if he recovers his old mind, only for Lucie to gone running off like a cat on ecstasy.

"Oh, great, now she’s found my stash as well..." the Doctor sighs, just as he steps into a pathetically obvious man-trap, and in moments is hanging upside down from one leg as three rather effeminate young men called Andrew, Hayden and Smith emerge from the mist to see what they have caught and are disappointed to find they haven’t captured a fit young blonde for them to prove their masculinity with.

Lucie returns and, after berating the Doctor for being an incompetent fool, helps the troika cut him down. "How many times have I told you about not rushing into predictable man-traps?" she snaps.

"Not once, you lying cow!" the Doctor retorts.

"Well, you should have worked it out on your own by now!" Lucie says, giving him a clip around the ear before turning and giving the troika a thorough dressing down for setting up animal traps in desperation to pick up a girl when it’s obvious even to smallest of intelligences – like, say, her bumbling companion the Doctor – that they all butter their toast on three sides and pick up acorns in the autumn.

The men hastily deny any homosexual urges on their parts and hastily claim they were actually trying to capture a monster and mistook Lucie’s nasal whining for its primeval mating call. They further insist that they’re only on Deimos for the strange gravitational anomaly forming a deep, black, bottomless pit – nicknamed the wormhole by someone who really doesn’t get Basic SciFi Jargon 101 – for the incredible frictionless bungee-jumping opportunities with absolutely NO homo-erotic subtext whatsoever!

The Doctor doesn’t think that sounds particularly natural, and Lucie tells him to shut up, since they’re inside a Martian Lunar Park environment dome. "EVERYTHING’S artificial, you dozy ponce!" she sneers before slapping her companion over the head as if she were Benny Hill and he a bald guy.

At that moment an Incredibly Slow-Moving Ant-Shaped Buggy comes to a halt outside Lunar Park, carrying a fit-looking blond in a burgundy leather tracksuit and a hulking green reptilian Ice Cream Vendor called Ssard who bitches about the cramped seating and how he’s risking deep-vein thrombosis – the Silent Killer of Martians everywhere! His hetero-life-partner Stacy Townsend tells Ssard to just stop whining, build a bridge and get over it.

This touching moment of interspecies domestic hell is ruined when an old hippie chic called Eris wanders over and buts into their conversation without any by your please. She’s noticed the crap suspension on the Incredibly Slow-Moving Ant-Shaped Buggy and is willing to give it a butcher’s and, without waiting for permission, rips open the bonnet and starts mucking about with the innards. When pressed, Eris admits she’s not OFFICIALLY the camp’s engineer, in fact she’s no kind of engineer at all but got up this morning with an all-consuming desire to repair things.

When Ssard tactfully tries to ask who IS officially the camp engineer, Eris cheerfully reveals that there isn’t one and nobody is actually in charge of the Lunar Park: it’s been left to look after itself, and the locals have gained squatters rights and turned the combined hotel and botanical garden into marijuana crop and doss house while the builders of the environment dome mysteriously vanished.

"Great. Banjo-plucking rednecks," Ssard minces. "Some honeymoon THIS is turning out to be! Mother was right!"

Leaving Eris to pull apart the Incredibly Slow-Moving Ant-Shaped Buggy to find out exactly how it works... or rather doesn’t... to develop her new vocation as a mechanic, Stacy and Ssard consider running back to the economy class space shuttle and trying to save their deposit. This course of action becomes more and more desirable, especially as Ssard proves to be completely useless at assembling a tent.

They are soon assaulted by another aging hippie clutching a bottle of meth-amphetamine vodka and swearing about "those goddamn Drennies" as he throws soiled tissues at passer-bys. This is Kai Toby-Ass, but everyone calls him Creepy Old Man and runs away. Finally, Stacy’s keen mind is able to decipher his ranting about the 'adrenaline-junkies' who get off on extreme sports, often quite literally and spreading nasty little yeast infections that require antibiotics.

"AND they sting like a bitch!" Kai gabbles, before spitting on their tent and idly asking if they saw any of the sinister wormhole monsters up on Certain Death Mountain?

Stacy and Ssard say they haven’t and, disappointed, Kai shambles off, mumbling that he’s not making it up at all and the monsters are REAL strange animal things that happen to look completely unconvincing and sound like a cow mooing. He then runs back to the couple and screams right at their faces that one day, out of the blue, the monsters will attack and slaughter them all unless they get the hell out of here right now while they still have all their internal organs intact!

Eris wanders over and says, "You’ve not been listening to HIM, have you? He tries that shit with everyone! He can’t even keep the descriptions straight! If he wasn’t a demon in bed, I would have chucked him long ago..." she mutters as she wanders off.

"Yep," Stacy sighs. "Your mother WAS right, this IS a big mistake."

Lucie, Andrew, Hayden and Smith head to the top of the mountain as the trio struggle to prove their masculinity with an unimpressive hole in the ground. Lucie looks at this and dubs it "deeply Freudian", before telling her companions to double the fist and bunjee jump into the bottomless anomaly which the Doctor is awed to realize does not echo.

Everyone stares at him like he’s a retard, so he shuts up.

The troika prepare to do the challenge to use the longest cord and go the furthest down into the hole to get them the fistworthy respect and heterosexual street cred that they so desperately desire. Hayden jumps first with his 3000 metre long rope, while Andrew confides in Lucie, "I never go down first because I still get nervous!"

Lucie laughs uproarishly and tells the Doctor to hand over some binoculars and shouts at him when he points out that it’s too dark in the hole to see anything. Fed up with his new role as an undistinguished and disposable piece of totty to shadow Lucie, the Doctor stalks off to annoy some other people he sees lying in the snow and not doing anything. The once-formidable-Time-Lord recognizes the duo as Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville from TV’s "Jackass 2589" and immediately rushes over for an autograph.

When Lucie and the trio of repressed homosexuals turn up some fifty-eight minutes later, the Doctor is still trying to get Steve-O’s attention when Lucie rolls her eyes and points out that the former celebrities are quite obviously stone dead. "I’m glad I’ve shocked you into silence for once, young lady," she sneers.

"...what?" the Doctor boggles as Lucie tells the trio to dump the bodies on their own Incredibly Slow-Moving Ant-Shaped buggy and hitch a ride back to the main camp. There they meet Eris and Kai making out over a pile of unsold CD-ROMs of The Big Issue. Once again, Lucie continues to take charge, introducing herself and her klutzy assistant as time travelers and explains that the Jackass team have perished.

Unsurprisingly, Kai immediately starts frothing at the mouth and screaming that Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville were killed by the senseless and vicious attacks of the evil monsters he’s going on about, but Eris manages to shut him up by snogging him.

As Andrew, Hayden and Smith agree to 'handle themselves' to stay safe while snowboarding in lethal monster-infested hills, the Doctor spots Stacy and Ssard. He remembers them from his wild days in the Radio Times comic strip and immediately runs over to the odd couple who have no idea who he is and assume he’s Kai in an unconvincing Louis XIV wig. But worse, they DO recognize Lucie as the immortal time traveler they fought Cybermen and Bygones and Victorian cliches together!

The Doctor watches the trio head off for a coffee to chat about their graphic adventures. In desperation, he breaks away from Lucie and decides to track down Kai and make the bastard talk.

Unfortunately, Kai is more than happy to discuss everything over a cup of herbal tea and no intimidation, psychology or playing "Stuck in the Middle of You" while slicing lumps off him with razors is necessary. He explains the reason WHY a bunch of stoner hippies took over Lunar Park is because the monsters killed off the original owners. However, everyone assumed it was cosmic karma and thought no more about it.

The Doctor calls Kai "a sub-functional moron" for staying in a place of such obvious and incredibly violent danger, but the old man points out that the Doctor hasn’t left either.

The Time Lord realizes with horror he can’t even think up a witty retort and moans in despair, realizing that his loss of power is now utterly complete!!


Parte the Second

At the coffee bar, Lucie and Stacy chat about Stacy’s marriage to Ssard after a lengthy and intricate intrigue in the courts of the Ice Cream nobility on Mars. Stacy reveals to Lucie that she’s pregnant with Ssard’s child and is now really regretting the April Fool prank of telling him she was rendered completely infertile by a purple horse-headed alien with yellow spots.

"So he STILL hasn’t twigged to that one yet?" Lucie surmises.

This soap opera bull crap is thankfully interrupted by some agonized squealing from one of the Drennies who is ripped apart around the corner from where everyone else is and the Doctor immediately rushes to investigate! Lucie calls out for the incompetent fool to stay back, the Doctor runs into the fray in a particularly witless and girlish moment of thoughtlessness, and manages sprain his ankle falling over the corpse. He then loses consciousness when Lucie smacks him again.

Kai screams that it’ll be the evil monsters behind all this, mark his words and to prove his point in a suitably ironic postmodern manner, the action cuts to Andrew, Heyden and Smith’s snowboarding being interrupted by a huge black and hairy thing with huge claws.

Just then Lucie arrives, with the Doctor slung over her shoulder, intending to dump his body somewhere where he can’t hurt himself. As the monster roars, she spins and drop-kicks the creature with her Venusian Aikido and sends it over a cliff. When the creature manages to crap the edge and tries to climb back, Lucie begins throwing house-bricks into it. Where did she get the house-bricks? How should I know, I just have to transcribe this shit...

Suddenly Lucie’s amazing Time Lord powers allow her to realize that the hairy monster is just a Scan-Droid in a gorillagram outfit that has been disguised, Scooby-Doo-style, as a hideous monster! The concussed Doctor leaps to his feet and screams that he knows precisely who is behind it all, and then runs off before anyone can catch up with him on their Incredibly Slow-Moving Ant-Shaped Buggies.

In a tedious subplot, Ssard is overcome with paranoia when a group of young Drennies start making crude Ice Cream jokes at him and challenge him on what flavors he can provide. So Ssard kills them all and buggers the loudest hothead to death with his own severed arms.

Meanwhile, Lucie is swears her head off as she tries to drag the Doctor bag by the ear, yelling abuse at the bumbling fool. The Doctor shakes her off and sneers that he isn’t intimidated by her threats, as he’s seen things that would freeze the blood of someone whose blood would be damn difficult to freeze. He’s witnessed solar systems being destroyed and whole civilizations being annihilated – and those were the ones he DIDN’T blow up deliberately!

"Frankly, you bitch, some bit of arm-wrestling doesn’t change THAT so you can shut your damn Northern mouth and remember who is the REAL Lord of Time round these here parts! Look upon my works and marvel!" he challenges Lucie, before bursting into Kai’s hovel and flatly states that if, at any point in the ensuing discussion, Kai says "What the fuck?" he will burn the house down.

He then goes on to explain that the entire planet is ruled by a six-year-old girl trapped in a point of singularity that has manipulated the entire universe to draw together a bunch of 2-dimensional human beings and create the ultimate B-grade movie.

"What the fuck...?" gasps Kai, before the Doctor punches his lights out and burns the tent to the ground in a spiritually-uplifting act of pointless arson.

"Hah! Weren’t expecting that were you, BIOTCH?!?" the Doctor screams to Lucie, before hot-wiring the nearest Incredibly Slow-Moving Ant-Shaped Buggy and drives off, laughing like a madman.

Lucie just sighs and kicks Kai awake. Dazed, Kai reveals that it was him who set all the evil robots to slaughter people. Lucie yawns and challenges him to possibly justify what he’s done, and she is rather put out when he can...

The Doctor has driven up to the Wormhole intending to dive into it to confront the six-year-old girl and discover what the hell a godlike entity from another plane of reality is doing wasting their time terraforming moons into extreme sport holiday destinations. Moments later, Lucie, Stacy, Ssard and Eris arrive on another Incredibly Slow-Moving Ant-Shaped Buggy.

Lucie tries to talk the Doctor out of his suicidally-insane course of action. She points out that the Doctor actually has absolutely no reason to believe that there really IS a six-year-old girl inside the wormhole. In fact, there are plenty of reasons to NOT believe it, given that it’s the most retarded idea she’s ever heard. "And I’ve had nobody to talk to but you for the last month, remember?"

"What are you trying to say?" demands the Doctor, folding his arms.

"I think your problem is that you’ve simply been watching too many low-grade horror flicks."

"Oh, is that your hypothesis is it? Well, anyway, this is all perfectly academic. There’s no real way of getting conclusive proof that there ISN’T a six-year-old girl inside the wormhole, is there?"

Lucie corrects him, by pushing him into the wormhole. Or kicking him in the balls causing him to fall into it, the sound’s a bit dodgy... No, wait, she just kicked him in the balls because at this point Kai runs into view demanding Lucie throw the doctor into the bottomless pit forever more!

Kai reveals that the wormhole is a genuine wormhole, linking to a collapsing universe full of ungodly monsters that feed on fear itself – the Adrenalinerushmonger. The creature (which may or may not take the form of a six-year-old girl, as the Doctor insists) inside the wormhole used its amazing powers to shape Deimos so it would lure Drennies and other fistworthy extreme sportsmen to their doom. Kai has been indulging in his Scooby Do scheme to scare off the tourists and stop the flow of feed-fear to the monster in the pit!

"Fear is a powerful thing," Kai slurs, "but it’s difficult to digest, and if the subject doesn’t enjoy being afraid then their fear has a poisonous effect on the entity. Euphoria is the spoonful of sugar it needs, and pure fear actually harms the entity!!"

"Whatever next?" Lucie muses. "Peanut Butter monsters with nut allergies? Still, I guess it makes a difference from the other ten-a-penny emotional vampire types who need to be starved, overfed or given the opposite emotion. In fact, we’re bleeding lucky that this GODLIKE creature was laughed out of its own realm and we didn’t get something halfway dangerous like Gogomosh the Banshie-Banjo!"

Stinging at Lucie’s full recall of the more A-list of the Elder Gods, the Doctor decides he must try and regain control of his life once more, defeating the monsters, saving the day and NOT sprain his ankle while doing so! After relating his thoughts and fears at the top of voice while everyone else stares at him, he rugby-tackles the possessed Eris and both plunge into the wormhole.

The Doctor’s cunning plan is simply to do exactly what Kai the brain-fried hippie loser was going to do! Since the wormhole is a magnet for fear, the Doctor can use genuine fear of death inside the emotionally-amplifying wormhole to cripple the evil Adrenalinerushmonger via the law of increasing returns.

The only problem is that he forgot to actually attach any bungee equipment to himself before diving in. "On the bright side," the Doctor notes, "I don’t have to fake being utterly terrified. Brutal!" and decides to show Eris the things he doesn’t enjoy, the thing’s he never wants to see again, as well as stuff that Evils from the Dawn of Time find completely inappropriate for dinner table conversation.

The Adrenalinerushmonger refuses to believe the memories of C’Rizz can possibly be real, but the Doctor points out he could hardly have made up and genuinely lived with the poetry-spouting wanker for years. The entity demands to know how he could possibly have survived, and he explains that instead of denying or giving into his fears, he just got completely drunk and had lots of sex with Charley Pollard to take his mind off things. Terror from the past is one thing, but the Doctor’s seen the future too. And it’s Welsh.

The post-RTD universe scares the living daylights out of him, but what will it do to the entity? It cries out in agony and the Doctor shows
the entity the things he’s afraid he himself might do one day. The sight of him nuking Gallifrey and wiping out the Time Lords is positively restrained compared to how he dreads spending the rest of his life with Lucie Miller as she ruins his street cred...

Finally, the godlike emotional parasite screams and disperses, leaving the Doctor plummeting into infinity and it finally strikes him that he really, REALLY hadn’t thought through this bit of the plan at all!

At the last, Lucie appears on a bungee cord, grabs the Doctor and they return to the top of the wormhole, hurling abuse at her idiotic and incompetent comic relief sidekick. As they emerge, the Doctor ignores Lucie, having already practiced a pompous regret-filled speech to Kai about how Eris was an exceptional person with a remarkably strong will whose sacrifice probably saved them all.

"Don’t try and fob me off, Lucie. I killed that monster rather than just weakening it like you could only dream of. It just goes to show that the ancient Gallifreyan law is bunk! I’m still the planet-saving, tax-dodging, time travelling and incredibly lucky son of a bitch that I always WAS! Only I could turn my own battles and fears into a weapon making me more powerful than a demon. I was actually enjoying myself. How baddass is that?"

Lucie smacks him around the head and reminds him that the ancient evil force was the only thing keeping Deimos terraformed and inhabitable and now the stupid Doctor has stupidly killed it, nature will revert back to its basics and they’re all dead meat.

"What are the odds of that happening?" the Doctor demands before suddenly the atmosphere vanishes and he, Lucie, Kai, Stacy, Ssard and the rest of the speaking cast all float off into space to rapidly choke to death. The Doctor suffocates as Lucie tells him that all this is actually HIS fault...

...

At this point, we discover that the whole thing was just a concussion-induced nightmare by the mysterious leather-clad biker moll in mirrored shades who materialized on Deimos and tripped over her own feet upon leaving her time machine and knocked herself into a coma. She’s been unconscious for days and her plan to lay a trap for Lucie has been completely screwed – even if the TARDIS crew visited Deimos, they’ve buggered off again.

Her cries of "I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME, MILLER! NEXT TIME!!!" echo feebly across the plateau.

"Bloody tourists.." sigh Kai and Eris as they walk past.

---------
Next Time...
---------
"Hello? Hello, is this thing on? What kind of professional audio drama is this if the microphones won’t work?!"
"This is a bit Welsh isn’t it? Marquees, live Hungarian rock music..."
"Thank you all for listening to this and hopefully paying for it as well. Paul Sutton needs a new car!"
"He must be REALLY great in the sack."
"He is."
"...ew."
"A funny thing happened on the way to the garden party involving Tar-Modowk and Serge the Seal of Death..."
"That’s worrying."
"Hello? Hello! Seriously, is this working?"
"...and so the Tar-Modowk Leader says, 'You shoulda seen her daughter!'"
"You all right there, Dougal?"
"We’ve materialized inside a time loop. I JUST LOVE DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN!"
"You’re preventing the catharsis of spurious morality, Doctor!"
"YOUR JOURNEY ENDS HERE, VALEYARD!"
"You made me remember Season 23, you total bastard!"
"Lucie, I don’t care if your tits are getting larger. SO SHUT UP!!"
---------
...Tell Me Lies...
---------

Book(s)/Other Related -
Dr Who & The Dramatic Cop-Out Ending
Doctor Who Fobs Off Phobos (Canada Only)
Doctor Who Discovers Extreme Interplanetary Sports!


Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed extreme for most of this story.

"What’s that coming over the hill? Is it a monster? Is it a monster?! I love quoting song lyrics instead of dialogue, don’t you?"

Goofs –
...where the hell am I supposed to start? This story EXISTS! Going into any further detail seems incredibly petty when you think about it. Why the hell did they set it on Deimos rather than say, Phobos which as we all know is a damaged Ice Cream Vendor delivery van full of space-warping technology? Don’t you think that might explain why there’s a freaking wormhole on a Martian moon at the very least?!?!


Fashion Victims -
Ssard’s anorak, nylon shirt, vest, cardigan and white socks with plastic sandals. It’s not fitting clothing for a Martian warrior. Hell, it’s not fit clothing for a train spotter.


Technobabble -
The Headhunter’s vivid nightmare is caused by "null astro gorgonzola displacement" energy.

Links and References –
The Doctor thinks nostalgically of his encounters with the Fishmonger (The Fishmonger), the Lustmonger (The Lust) and rates them quite highly when compared to the frankly rubbish Adrenalinerushmonger.


Untelevised Misadventures -
Apparently these adventures aren’t successive and that there are other adventures between the ones we get. But ANYONE will say any old crap like that if they think they might get a Missing Adventure published. I mean, look at Terrance Dicks and Season 6b.


Groovy DVD Extras -
No idea. I never bothered to check this thing before now.


Dialogue Disasters –

Lucie: Why do you always land halfway up a mountain?
Doctor: Because I know you’ll just run straight out and hopefully plunge to your death?
Lucie: But without me, the TARDIS is knackered.
Doctor: Oh. Yeah. Good thing you reminded me, actually. Better stick to mercury swamps from no on, I guess.


Kai: I would have got away with it, too...
Lucie: If it hadn’t been for us meddling kids?
Kai: Yes. And I shall now kill you all, Scooby Gang!


Stacy: Drennies? What a cool name for a sub-culture! Radical!


Dialogue Triumphs -

Lucie: I haven’t seen such a cynical enterprise since my incredible encounter with Tom Petty.
Doctor: Um, excuse me? Firstly, you didn’t encounter Tom Petty, I did. Secondly, Tom Petty was sort of on our side, and, thirdly it only happened two weeks ago!
Lucie: Your point being?
Doctor: I’m just saying that that whole statement is in fact singularly unimpressive. It’s like saying "I haven’t eaten baked beans on toast since last week", isn’t it?
Lucie: ...so?
Doctor: Well, it clearly shows that you, Lucie really are still an amateur at this kind of thing.
Lucie: Fortunately, when it comes to a "dead Northern bollocksing" the same cannot be said.
Doctor: Oh? What do you mean by thARRGRHGJHHH!!!!!


Lucie: DAMN IT, I JUST LOVE BUNGEE-JUMPING!!!
Doctor: Whoa, do I really sound that deranged? Woulda thought someone might have mentioned it by now...


Andrew: What was that weird noise?
Hayden: What weird noise?
Andrew: A sort of wheezing, groaning?
Smith: Ah, that’d be a wheezing, groaning noise.
Andrew: Oh. Yeah, but what is it?
Smith: What? The wheezing, groaning noise?
Andrew: Yeah.
Hayden: Obviously the sound of something wheezing and groaning.
Smith: Ah, right.
(long pause)
Andrew: We’re totally not gay.


Doctor: What’s the penalty for punching a smug bint on the nose?
Lucie: Tsk. I’ve literally met Scousers with better manners. Not many, I grant you, but it DID happen.


Doctor: I’ve seen things that would freeze your blood. Well, more than it’s frozen already. If you indeed DO have blood. And not some kind of chocolate sauce. So don’t threaten me, don’t ever threaten me. Oh GOD, I have completely lost my mojo, haven’t I?
Ssard: Yeah, looks like.
Doctor: NOOOO!!!


Lucie: If you say ‘what the fuck are you talking about’ during this conversation I will break something!
Kai: Awesome. What’s this, like, a Japanese game show?


Doctor: Maybe you’re scarier than the monsters. Or maybe they’re just really, REALLY easily-spooked?
Lucie: Doctor?
Doctor: Yes?
Lucie: Shut up!


UnQuotable Quote -
Headhunter: It was SUCH a strange dream, Aunty Em!


Viewer Quotes -

"How appropriate that this story features a bottomless pit as neither seem to lead anywhere and the whole things feels unexplored, leading up to a revelation that then never arrives." – Droll Review Weekly (2006)

"This story was great when it was called The Santa Tip and had the Tenth Doctor, Rose, Touchwood and the Slitheen. Here, with the Eighth Doctor and the most annoying sons of bitches ever caught on audio and the bottomless pit with demonic monsters is flagged up for the total crap it is. It’s very lucky RTD didn’t fall into that trap when he was lying to everyone and saying he was actually Matt Jones."
– Ewen Campion-Clarke (2008)

"The unrewarding and disappointing Deimos doesn’t even reach the lowest depths of the worst Big Finish productions since it is too bloody unmemorable. I myself only remembered it existed on Remembrance Day!"
– The Memory Man (2010)

"So now we know what a female Doctor would be like. Pathetic."
- Germaine Greer (2006)

"I like how baddass the Eighth Doctor is getting, all dark and aggressive and nuking the alien bastards and directly antagonizing people in the search for answers. With the leather jacket and the big bad regional accent, it’s a pity we know what it will lead to when Mickey Smith accidentally kills him in a hit and run."
- Andrew "Foreshadowing Is Cool" Beeblebrox (2006)

"I was looking forward to this one. Immoral Bedfellows wasn’t complete crap and I really like Hitler’s other work, Baker Street. Naturally, my new-found optimism was mercilessly crushed as I listened to this which just isn’t very good at all. Wow, this was crap. All I could do was think, 'where’s the off button?'" – Jared "No Nickname" Hansen (2007)

"This explores a new angle on why the Doctor lives the life that he does. Is saving people his rush? Or is it just he’s got into such a self-destructive behavior pattern he can’t get out of it?"
– Amateur Psychologist Monthly (2006)

"Wow. A big trans-dimensional demon from before time. That’s what, the third this month, isn’t it? After all this in Doctor Who on TV, audio, Sarah Jane and Touchwood, people STILL complain about quarries! I despair, I really do..." – Dave Restal (2006)

"This story was killer awesome, babe!" – The Bogan Review (2007)


Psychotic Nostalgia -
"It’s like I’ve always said: do not bungee-jump into the abyss lest the abyss bungee-jump into you!"


Paul McGann Speaks!
"Well I have to say I’m a bit confused as to the negative reviews these stories get. I mean, all right, they’re not the fresh blood Doctor Who needs and they’re not so much going from strength to strength as ripping off everything they can from the new series... but hell, who cares? I’m getting paid, and getting laid and Conrad Westmaas is nowhere in sight. This season is the most satisfying one I’ve done, and I can’t wait for the next episode. Unless Briggsy is involved. In which case, not only can I wait, I’m confident that I can outsit eternity."


Sheridan Smith Speaks!
"Lucie immediately jumps out from the page if you take some of those little tablets with little rabbits printed on the side. And, you know, the scripts are so well written. Well, I can read them, so they must be. They’d be plain rubbish otherwise. It’s kind of in the words the way Lucie is, because otherwise she wouldn’t be part of the script and as we go along with the different stories, different sides of her come out. She becomes annoying and irritable in new ways and drinks dangerous amounts of interesting cocktails. At first she kind of vomits on the Doctor, but then she takes control of herself and calms herself down when she’s frantic and had too much to drink. It’s a tale of one girl learning to control her digestive tract."


Eddie Hitler Speaks!
"You know, I think Paul might be finding his feet. I mean, he’s done over 100 audio episodes over the last six years, but still. Course, not everyone was aware of how I revolutionalized Doctor Who, they just got those two CDs of what critics have dubbed 'tedious drivel'. I’ve always got time for constructive criticism, though I do love destructive criticism as well. That really cheers me up. Like when my story came bottom (oo-er) on a poll on Outpost Gallifrey, so I shoved Shaun Lyon’s face through a coffee grinder. The trouser monkey. I mean, none of those fat, sweaty OG bastards could write a fully fledged decent audio script if their fucking lives depended on it."


Trivia -
The guy getting beaten up was an uncredited Jake McGann who the cast found incredibly irritating one day when the microphones were left on.


Rumors & Facts -

Oh, Big Finish how the mighty giveth with one hand and then snatcheth back with the other! As the adventure of the Eighth Doctor and his anthropomorphic duck for a companion flip-flop between excellence and utter crap, it becomes obvious to all that if every second story was ditched, it wouldn’t be complete crap. If only they’d worked this blindingly obvious fact our before they recorded it, huh?

Originally the sixth story of the season would be by Alan Barnes, a story based about a futuristic Welsh theme park and the incredible thrill of roller-coaster rides. It was entitled Helter-Skelter and would generally pad out the season until the season finale.

Eddie Hitler immediately rejected Helter-Skelter for various reasons. First of all, it was completely unoriginal, uninteresting, tedious and paralyzingly dull, especially when compared to the Sixth Doctor tale The Care-Bear Nightmare Fair. He was also worried that a CD marked Helter-Skelter could inspire Charles Manson to "go off again".

Barnes suggested the story be reworked to focus more on extreme sports, but this was similarly unsatisfying given the Double the Fist plotline of earlier seasons. At this point Hitler realized that Barnes had already written a story in this season (The Girl Who Never Was A Virgin) and in a fit of paranoia that Barnes was trying to usurp him, fired him on the spot. This was "very much a reflection on the writer’s abilities, ambition and poncy haircut" according to Hitler.

One problem was this left a big hole in the schedule and no one was allowed to fill it bar Hitler, who downed an entire pint in two point three seconds and decided to rip off Alex Garland’s The Beach word for word and focus the story on young, obnoxious and above all Australian thrill-seekers searching for an ultimate high in a fabled location.

When it was suggested to Hitler that this extreme sport business was identical to the proposal he’d rejected from Barnes, Hitler punched the suggestee’s lights out and hastily changed the place names so the lawyers would notice the abject plagiarism. Alas, the suggestee was none other than Paul McGann, who’s dark moment of retaliation inspired the bleak ending the play.

Hitler also decided to try and make the character of Lucie more appealing to the audience, or at list put a limit on the amount of death threats Sheridan Smith received each day. Thus, the story would be told from Lucie’s point of view with the Doctor not as a clever, wise father-figure fighting the forces of darkness, but in fact HER embarrassing and tragically unfashionable comic relief stooge SHE is stuck with for the foreseeable future. Exactly how this lead to the idea of the Doctor and Lucie swapping personalities after an arm wrestling contest is unknown. And perhaps that’s for the best.

At first, the story was set on Europa where the TARDIS lands on a subsurface research centre that crawls around the interior of the outer crust only to find some ex-pat She Devils and Bilurians who don’t want the humans to live long enough to report news of their presence back to Earth. The Doctor manages to settle a orgiastic peace treaty with them, despite factions on both sides wanting to keep the peace by NOT shagging the other side.

This idea was abandoned after two minutes because Hitler’s short term memory was shot to buggery and he forgot ever thinking of it. When he DID find out, several months later, he was furious at losing such a brilliant plot. Before he forgot why he was angry, and then decided to simply crash out on the sofa of his Hammersmith bedsit once more.

Tragedy struck when it became worryingly obvious that the story was a complete rip off of that year’s Doctor Who epic The Santa Tip, making the story twice as over-familiar and predictable than before. Hitler was of the firm opinion that this allowed the audience to be in the same position of the Doctor and finding it all so tedious and obvious, and pointed out that the Eighth Doctor stories had been ripping off the Neoverse of Doctor Who since 2005!

Terri’s Firmer was Parting of the Legs, Sail Away was Shell Shock, Other Lies was The Presuming Ed, Clock Works was The Nun in the Lift-Shaft, Rubik’s Cube was The Long Haul, Baker Street was The Idiot Box, Ablutions was The Santa Tip as well, not to mention Horror of the Music Industry as Presuming Ed, D-Day AND The Idiot Box, and indeed Hitler was currently plagiarizing Dustbin -vs- Cyberman! for the epic finale of this very season!

Apart from everything else, Hitler noted, there was little to no publicity for the season so hardly anyone KNEW about the audios and thus could not possibly be disappointed by them. Satisfied at this ultimate argument, Hitler had a Friday Night Fry Up which triggered to coronaries, a heart attack and a two-week stay in an intensive care unit which, tragically, allowed Nick Briggs to sink his toothbrush-wielding talons into the series and these ramifications would be long and crushing and devastating... if he had been able to do a damn thing for five minutes before being shuttled back to BBC Wales to provide Cybermen Voice Changer techniques for the Christmas market.

Nevertheless, the series was continuing to present Doctor Who on a grander scale than anything provided by RTD and his milk-fed, barely hominoid gimp assistants at BBC Wales. The concepts in this story would, even now, be a struggle to realize on television without a big screen budget and doing what cannot be done on television is still an important remit of audio! Of course, few of this mind-blowing concepts are actually any GOOD, but, hey, these stories are free and you pretty much get what you pay for.


"Incredibly Stupid Things" by the Hitler Hormone Quartet

Welcome, strangers, to the show
I’m the one who should be lying low
Saw the tourists, turned them back
And more of them came down the track
In the middle, in the middle of a Headhunter’s dream
I lost my girl, it fed on my fear
I do not want to be here.

There’s something nasty inside this moon
Thought I was safe, but it’ll be here soon
Started killing, made no sense
Thought my friends would run to my defense
In the middle, in the middle of a Headhunter’s dream
I lost my girl, it fed on my fear
I do not want to be here.

When you reject all my good advice
Even when I really try to be nice
Saw the tourists, turned them back
And more of them came down the track
In the middle, in the middle of a Headhunter’s dream
I lost my girl, it fed on my fear
I do not want to be here.

Life gave me a kick in the rear
I do not want to be here.
I sold my soul for a pint of beer
I do not want to be here.
I lost everything I have held dear
I do not want to be here.

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