Book(s)/Other Related -
Doctor Who Visits Pleasantville
Doctor Mysteria dia las Snooker Finals Morte
"The Public Are Sheep When It Comes To Artistic Appreciation" by Joseph Knobend and Vincent Poofarty
Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed to be day tripping for most of this story.
"Hey, C’Rizz, what... is the most RUUTHLESS thing... in THE BAKERY?!"
"What's a bakery?"
"Atilla THE BUN. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Maybe you need some more tabs of ecstasy to really appreciate the subtle humor..."
"Chocophobics... bunch a wankers."
Goofs –
The author is a comic creation of Adrian Edmonsen and not actually a real person. If he was, there is a chance he might have written something halfway decent.
Fashion Victims -
C’Rizz in his emerald green Zoot Suit and pink suspenders.
Technobabble -
The non-friction sex that Kim expounds relies on "non-Euclidean heavy mass-compaction petting".
Links and References -
Polly Wright, Charley’s niece makes her third appearance as the product of Charley’s disturbed imagination after appearing as similar hallucinations in "Zig-Zag-Gay-Ass" and "The Best Wife".
Untelevised Misadventures -
C’Rizz notes the TARDIS is regularly turning up in strange other-dimensional prisons of late, and composes a truly annoying poem about them using the phrase "Blatant Tremeloes Exploitation" no less than one thousand and one times.
Groovy DVD Extras -
The director’s commentary of "Star Begotten". For some reason.
Dialogue Disasters –
Mohawk: And you shall PAY for that mistake! BUT NOT BEFORE YOUR COMPANIONS DO! NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN STOP ME NOW!!! RESISTANCE IS TOTALLY AND UTTERLY USELESS! BWAHAHAHAH!
(The Doctor pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head.)
Doctor: I’m hungry. Who fancies a pizza?
C'Rizz: Perhaps, just for once, the voices can do something for me.
Kim: Like what?
C'Rizz: Sing "California Dreaming" without me having to accompany myself. It's a really pathetic sight to behold.
Kim: And it’s up against stiff competition.
Tom: Space Lego isn’t for girls. Girls like building hairdressers and flower shops, not rockets and satellites and all that good stuff.
Charley: What are you on about? Girls like science fiction! Hell, I use a light sabre for a vibrator – that’s how hardcore I am!
Tom: [starts drooling and then falls over]
Lest: How in the name of all that’s sane can you possibly defeat me?
Doctor: I shall use my super Time Lord powers and ask you to stop!!
Kim: Not being afraid of dying and not wanting to die aren’t the same thing. I think. It’s kinda like "jealousy" and "envy". There’s a difference, everyone knows there’s a difference, but no one gives a flying fuck about what it is.
Charley: What's inside the room, Doctor?
Doctor: I shall use my super Time Lord powers and look through the window to find out!
Polly: Oh, for heaven’s sake, Auntie! It seems as though never a minute passes without you sustaining an illegitimate pregnancy as a consequence of some reckless enterprise.
Charley: Huh?
Polly: Sorry, did I say that? What I meant to say was: KEEP YOUR LEGS TOGETHER, YOU DISGUSTING WHORE!
C’Rizz: How are you going to pay for those ice creams?
Doctor: I shall use my super Time Lord powers and collect suitable coins from my wallet! If there be a difference in cost, I shall collect the change and use it later!
C'Rizz: Whoa.
Dialogue Triumphs -
Argot: Funny shape for a female reproductive system. Still, that’s blondes for you.
Mrs. Braudy: Don’t hurry on my account. Stay and watch the end of the episode if you want.
Doctor: Really?
Mrs. Braudy: NO OF COURSE NOT! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FREAKS, BEFORE I CALL THE POLICE AND SET THE DOGS ON YA! OUT!!!
Doctor: Really?
Mrs. Braudy: Naw, love. Just joshing. Would you like a cup of tea at all? And I got some biscuits knocking about.
C'Rizz: You were watching TV and shagging each other senseless while I was out there, counting to a hundred and looking for you? In the cold, miserable rain?!?
Charley: We’re nothing if not consistent.
Kim: Are you brave? Or just tired of life?
C’Rizz: Stop playing hard to get. You’re just DYING to snog me.
Lest: I’m very grateful to you, Doctor. I honestly thought I’d never escape from a life of servitude to the evil Mohawk. Excuse me, I thought I might go and find something to eat.
Doctor: I shall use my super Time Lord powers and ask you to make me a cheese and mustard pickle sandwich.
Lest: Do it yourself, Hippy.
(The Doctor pulls out a gun and shoots Lest through the head.)
Doctor: What a tragic waste of human life.
UnQuotable Quote -
Doctor: DAMN IT! I JUST LOVE MY SUPER TIME LORD POWERS!
Viewer Quotes -
"I do so hate that annoying habit of 21st century scriptwriters to include friends and relatives of major characters. Charley’s niece, Polly Wright, has appeared in practically every episode! Well, a few episodes. In three stories. And she mentions she has sisters! Okay, so the original series featured Victoria's father, Leela's father, Adric's brother, Nyssa's father, Tegan's aunt, cousin and grandfather, Turlough's brother, Peri's stepfather and Ace's grandmother and mother (as a baby), but these only ever appeared in one story. They weren't regular fixtures! WHY WON’T ANYONE TAKE ME SERIOUSLY?!?"
- Gabriel Chase, The Discerning Who Fan (2007)
"Baker Street is a little bit odd and a lot of fun. Like hiding in the locker in the girl’s shower room and watching them all come in and strip off slowly, exposing smooth skin to the cool damp air, soaping each other with mounds of foam... Sorry, man, I gotta go."
– Nigel Verkoff (2000)
"Not as shithouse as Touchwood 2: This Time It's Personal."
– Chris Chin-Balls (2009)
"This story was so bad it made me want to pull the bed sheets over my head and suffocate myself to death with my own farts. Which midget tosser wrote this drivel? Which foul little troll produced this audio enema? Oh, I despair even describing it! It’s so uncouth! And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's someone loud, annoying, obnoxious and uncouth! That is the exact opposite of how I've lived my life! Speaking of which, what a horrible state my life is in!"
– Sir Richie Richard Esq. (2008)
"I'm sure that some people may disagree with me, but there was no Holocaust. It’s just a journalistic invention." – Austen Tashous (2004)
"More bloody repeats." – Father James O’Malley (2006)
"Hey! This is just like The Unholy Error! Those bastards totally ripped me off! HOW VERY DARE THEY?!??" – Rob Shearman (2007)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"Baker Street is in my ears and in my eyes! There beneath the blue suburban skies I sit, and meanwhile back! Penny lane is in my ears and in my eyes! There beneath the blue suburban skies, Baker Street!!"
Paul McGann Speaks!
"No summer can ever quite be as glorious as the ones you remember from when you were young, when a sunny afternoon seemed to last forever and all there was to do was ride your bike. Well, ride your bike and eat ice-lollies. And play with Lego. Oh, and listen to the Beatles. Well, Liverpool, 1963, they were the big thing, they were.
I wanted them to call this story Penny Lane instead of Baker Street. But no. John Lennon was my hero. Like him, I’ve sung in bands, in choirs, Latin masses, rock’n’roll, and once, when I was very drunk, I appeared in "Doctor Who and the Chorus Line". But you won’t have heard of that, because I destroyed every copy.
...that sounds like something out of a Christmas cracker, doesn’t it?
Piss off."
India Fisher Speaks!
"My friends send me reviews or tell me that I have to read something that’s written on Outpost Gallifrey – usually an incredibly vulgar biological suggestion by one of my many obsessive admirers! In the world of Doctor Who, people do stalk me. To the rest of the world, I am sexy, full-breasted fertility figure worshipped by the Royal College of Physicians!! It’s a strange dichotomy, my life – fan mail one side, giving executive relief on the other..."
Conrad Westmaas Speaks!
"There are a lot of stories made up about our work at Big Finish, and they really should be put to bed. One, I really am as stunningly gorgeous and attractive as the DWM previews state – the exoskeleton is just a skin condition I’m getting help for. Two, Paul McGann is with us in the studios during recording. It isn’t any kind of editing trick, he’s in there, with me and India. This is also why he takes half his bodyweight in tranquilizers during recording. And finally, the claims that C’Rizz is getting his own spin off series are unfounded. In fact, I shall simply be doing my definitive version of Shakespeare’s Othello, portraying him less as a tragic, betrayed figure and more as a psychotic Eutermisan wannabe poet."
Trivia -
This story’s cover art used up the final photo of Paul McGann playing the Doctor in the TV Movie 'Dr Root & The Enema Within'. Rather than simply re-using photos, Nicholas Briggs took the easier route of completely redesigning all Big Finish covers and lay outs to a cost of thirty six thousand pounds.
Which, in those days, was a lot of money.
Rumors & Facts -
I'm impressed that they had the nerve to make this story, a tissue
thin plot that relies on suspicion and paranoia alone to keep the
story running for 100 minutes of karioke, sex and exploding gas ovens.
As 2006 began was becoming painfully clear that the public were rapidly losing interest in the ongoing adventures of the doomed Eighth Doctor, his stale sex slave Charley Pollard and the depressed beatnik lizard poet C’Rizz. Especially since they no longer tackled interesting villains like Cybermen, Snotarans or even the Garm.
After four releases of this ill-matched trio wandering around boring places, bitching at each other and occasionally breaking BBC policy repeatedly by chatting about the events of RTD’s TV series, enthusiasm for the adventures were at an all time low.
Thus, Producer Gay Russell decided to end the fifth season of Paul McGann adventures with a rip-snorting, skull-crushing extravaganza of fast women, loose cars, returning monsters, and a heavy dollop of Split Endz music at incredibly inopportune moments.
Thus, the original closing story – Jonathon Creek’s "All Hallow’s Eve" Halloween special, which had the Eighth Doctor, Charley and C’Rizz experiencing the events of Halloween: H20, but instead of Michael Myers as the psychotic serial killer stalking them, it would be Jonathan Pryce in a cape shouting "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name!"
However, Jason Haigh-Ellery knew if Russell himself attempted to pen the replacement "epic", Big Finish would be firebombed before they even started recording, and all the really good writers had already been nabbed by Russell T Davies to remake their stories for his own personal, and high canonical, empire.
Thus, Russell turned to the homemade possibility generator Rob Shearman built entirely out of plastic coffee-stirrers one lunch time. With this he was able to visit parallel time lines and manifest them in this reality... but for some reason, this simply caused 1980s British comedy characters to pop into existence.
After being repeatedly kicked about the head by the cast of Not The Nine O’Clock News, assistant producer Ian Farrington approached Neil Weedon Watkins-Pye, a drug-addicted hippie philosophy student with impotence.
Pye’s outline for this special story was "The Myriad Consequence of Mystic Dreams When The Lords of Existence Restore The Bastard To Life To Become The New Urban Celtic Pagan, Because The Ayatollah Was Right!", but was also known under the titles of "Oooh, My Back!" and "Elfin Digger Cutaway".
The story, such as it was, revolved around the Doctor receiving a series of dirty phone calls from the Planet Freak-Out. Arriving in Straighte City, the Doctor, Charley and C’Rizz find a rubber plant named Wayne has taken over Nillalldraw castle, while the dragons of Westmonster and the DHSS Gremlin are now working for the Bastard, who has inexplicably survived a space/time enema that flushed him out of existence, and maroon him in Insainsbury Swamps!
However, Russell and JHE were devastated to discover that the draft script sent in was actually supposed to be sent to RTD about a potential spin off entitled "The Tylers Fight The Breadhead Conspiracy!" and featured Rose and Mickey enjoying a lovely alfalfa casserole, and impressing Yvonne Hartman with a mighty fine joint, but forced to share it Jackie and Pete who live next door and are trying to impress Harriet Jones with the same joint (since some passing Cybermen had been at the family’s communal stash).
Big Finish were, to say the least, unimpressed.
Pye insisted he had no intention of being 'a total breadhead', unlike the 'sell-out arch conspirator in the military-industrial complex' like the 'whalocidal killers' that ran BBC enterprizes. He just refused to write a proper script without either an overall buyout free granting Big Finish the franchise for a period of eighteen months maximum for all trade and media spots (including online promotion) but excluding basic merchandising articles such as clothing, mugs and videos, for which he would receive or a flat 39% royalty.
Russell struck Pye over the head with a frying pan and told him to get back to work or have large chunks of his femurs violently removed.
Pye responded by offering 29% royalty and the mugs being included in the buy-out rights, or else he might just walk away from the whole deal as by his accounts Big Finish already owed him 1492 pounds and 80 pence simply for agreeing to work for them.
Pye was shoved out of the offices and told in no uncertain terms if there is one thing worse than a stinky, loser hippie, than it is a complete sell out loser hippie like him.
"Hey, man, out west we’ve got an old saying: 'Don’t shit in your own jacuzzi', OK?" Pye sneered, sipping a green daiquiri, brushing down his Ted Lapidus shirt and before taking Nastassia Kinski, Billy Connelly and Pamela Stephenson to the nearest Italian restaurant and causing a nasty scene with the Maitre D'.
Neil Weedon Watkins-Pye Speaks!
"I hate you, Lords of Existence. I hate you because you’re NEGATIVE, HOSTILE and TOTALLY UNHELPFUL. I hope you die, okay? Listen, I don’t NEED training in how to write for Doctor Who. I’m not stupid you know. Why does everyone hate me? Do they think that because of my big success and all that money got on my Lentil Tour and developing a psychokinetic washing machine, that I’m totally out of touch with the real world? Well, I haven’t sold out, I still have something valid to say, I’m not some typical hyped-up media wanker leeching off the kids’ credibility!
My Big Finish storyline was beyond the brain and the totally blown mind, for those subscribers who brim with cosmic elfin awareness. It would totally blow the lid off the Breadhead Conspiracy, one of the heaviest trips you can imagine, linking life’s heaviest bummers – the alien astronauts (Attila the Hun, Henry VIII, Boadicea, Colonel Custer, Margaret Thatcher and ABBA) who came to Planet Earth ten thousand years ago to undermine the peaceful freaks and prehistoric animals who were all living in peace without any power hassles or pollution. Of course, the Breadheads have covered up the true history of Earth so they rule us with impunity – it’s like, too late! Oh, wowww!
I didn’t pay for any words or concepts lifted from Rob Shearman, because the whole concept of ‘copyright’ and ‘permissions’ is totally straight and breadheaded. By the way, my story "Elfin Digger Cutaway" is STRICTLY COPYRIGHTED © Neil, 1984 – so nobody fucking rip off anything, okay?
Hey, just look at the TARDIS, really study it carefully – if possible when you’re totally out of it. Suddenly, you can see the truth! The truth is the TARDIS! The TARDIS is the truth! Truth TARDIS, TARDIS truth... OH GOD, IT’S SO FUCKING BEAUTIFUL, MAN!!"
With less options than an Ipswich fish and chip shop, Russell turned to Eddie Hitler.
Edward Elizabeth Hitler had written a number of books on film, unfortunately no one could read his crude child like hieroglyphics on Emmerdale, QPR and the works of the Cohen Brothers, or his short story in Doctor Who – Short Trips: 'TARDIS Birds I Want To Do It With'. He had never written a Doctor Who audio drama before. Or any audio drama. Indeed, his first reaction to radio was to complain the tele part wasn’t working properly and kick it to pieces.
Hitler came up with a nifty four-part story entitled Waste of Life, and featured the TARDIS crew discovering a society based entirely on old episodes of Space: 1999, and featured a weird Cthulu-type tentacle monster eat people and sexually assault others.
Russell turned this down on the grounds they had used that plot in the six previous releases.
Hitler then suggested a new story entitled Atlanta, where the Eighth Doctor and his companions encountered a pitched battle between the rival armies of the Rollergirls and the Silverbacks, each seeking to gain control over the state of Georgia.
JHE turned this down as, not only had they used the plot in the six previous releases, it was a pretty pathetic idea to start with.
Desperately, Hitler logged onto OG and decided to tackle the old "wacky juxtaposition of alien monsters in suburban high street" story, but without any interesting alien monsters, just some wacky juxtaposition after he found out stories involving eleventh century monks owning phonograph, alien scientist spaceships being a Victorian’s cellar and Edwardian yachts racing through space had all been done before and much better than in Doctor Who.
Struggling to come up with a similar twist of fantasy and reality, Hitler spent six weeks getting completely pissed out of his skull on Victoria Bitter while watching the World Snooker Championships on TV at his Hammersmith bedsit he shares with Sir Richard Richard Esquire, the one human being possibly more pathetic than he is – an onlooker that remained rather skeptical over whether or not getting drunk and watching bar billiards counted as serious research for a Big Finish audio drama.
Finally, after consuming three gallons of old spice and a bottle of bleach, Hitler collapsed and suffered horrifyingly graphic hallucinations, one of which was an enormously fat astronaut holding two ice creams. He tried to communicate this vision by mime to his flatmate, but unfortunately Richard mistook the sight for a description of Pamela Anderson and so instead of ringing an ambulance for Hitler promptly locked himself in the bathroom for six weeks.
This disturbing image (the astronaut, not Richard Richard in the bathroom) was chosen to be the cover of Baker Street, so Hitler’s starting point to justify its use in the story. His idea was that suburbia is a hellish prison of torment, which was based on his life in Hammersmith for the past twenty five years.
JHE was, to put it likely, extremely pissed off to learn that Hitler had very vaguely outlined a story around the visual image of an astronaut selling ice cream in suburbia. True, Doctor Who often was just a means of stringing a plot out of bad LSD trips, but JHE didn’t want people to actually KNOW that!
Hitler later justified the crap script with "if you want discipline and self-restraint, go play with lego blocks you sad, pathetic wankers! Only fans will buy this shit anyway!"
(He’s right, you know.)
Ultimately, the main flaw in the story is it’s ending, which simply as Charley having sex so much the walls of reality come tumbling down – as the Doctor notes, this is rapidly replacing reversing the polarity of the neutron flow as the Who fan’s dues ex machina of choice.
The eighth Doctor is much more car-obsessed here than in recent releases, and Paul McGann delivers his petrol head material with obvious enjoyment.
India Fisher gets to shag Anneke Wills for some of the play and gives a cute, appealing performance. And though C’Rizz is paired off with Kim (Sara Carver) and left to argue what does and does not consist of "first base" for much of the play, Conrad Westmaas gives an enthusiastic performance of being sexed to the point of collapse.
Like The Crime of Fright-Night before it, Baker Street proved to be a completely unambitious tale totally ripped off other, much better stories, but done with such bollocks-in-the-fridge-door panache somehow makes it incredibly popular to respected reviewers and sheep-like fans.
Impressed not only by Baker Street’s success, but by Hitler’s can-do attitude and the fact he was not Nicholas Briggs, Russell decided to make him the offical script editor for the next few adventures of Paul McGann’s Doctor.
Although up against stiff competition, this has to have been the worst decision about Doctor Who that Gay Russell... or indeed ANYONE... has ever made.
Eddie Hitler Speaks!
"Doctor Who Audio Dramas by Big Finish? Sigh. Where do I even begin? How can I possibly describe in mere words the hatred I have for this atrocious production company? What could truly express the utter contempt I hold the never-ending franchise of elephant dung? The pile of monkey doo-doo I was forced to be a part of?
Working with the Doctor Who guys was, at best, a total fucking annoyance. They were talking constantly, all the time, non-stop! SHUT UP FOR TWO FUCKING SECONDS, PLEASE!! Still, I did manage to have sex seventeen times every hour with India Fisher, the voluptuous bit of tail that made the thing bearable – and isn’t Conrad Westmaas a bit of a poof? I’m not being homophobic, but a bloke who turns up for work – work which involves pretending to be a lizard – dressed as a pink bridesmaid’s dress clutching a bouquet is obviously still buttering his toast on three sides, if you get my drift.
Nicholas Briggs, however, was something else. He kept demanding that, as long as I wrote in a scene where the Doctor regenerates into Nicholas Briggs, he didn’t give a hoot about what else happened. He had no respect at all for the creative process, which is why I called him a wank biscuit and told him to get the fuck out of the way or I’d ram the editing equipment up his rectum. Bet he would have liked that, too, the little shitface. He actually asked me to put my name on his script, called "The Time Cabbages". Boy, let me tell you, what a piece of shit THAT was! 'Makes Season 23 look like friggin’ Shakespeare,' I told him, so I could enjoy seeing the flatulent git in such emotional agony.
I was so relieved when I found out he wasn’t in charge, just some nutter that was the only one who knew how to use the mixing desk and had ideas above his station..."
Season 32 Round-Up -
The fifth season of Paul McGann’s Doctor had true hurdles thrown at it. It wasn’t just the looming shadow of a clearly much more interesting, entertaining and above all visual series on the horizon, like the third and fourth seasons had suffered. By the time Terri’s Firmer was around, Paul McGann had been replaced not once, but twice! What’s more, the Temporal Difference of Opinion backstory, coupled passionately with McGann’s cameos in the new series proved without doubt that the Eighth Doctor was a dead man walking.
It would take something spectacular, something truly monumental to keep audiences interested in the clearly finite adventures of the Eighth Doctor, Charley "I was cool once" Pollard and Cecil "I was never cool" Rizz Esquire.
Tragically, Big Finish provided instead spectacularly, monumentally pointless stories, using submissions from the Divergent Universe/Double the Fist storyline that seemed, at the time, too rubbish to make.
After the dark, dangerous, evil peculiarity of Terri’s Firmer, with it’s at-times line-by-line plagiarism of the new series, all the stories had been up-beat, slightly wacky, un-involving, self-contained yawn fests linked by a steadfast refusal to join the new TV series.
Terri’s Firmer was the impressive opener, providing yet ANOTHER duel with a tyrannical maniac despot, the Last Ever Dear God Please Let Me Never Be Wrong About This The Idiot Must Never Return story for Kaiser "Ranty Goodness" Lavros, the prequel to the ongoing Dustbin Umpire series and finally revealed that the Eighth Doctor had the Olsen Twins as his companions – tragically, the handful of flashbacks show a much more interesting, enjoyable and above all jailbait relationship than the one he endures with Charley and C’Rizz.
Sail Away, with its strange Enya fetish, helped cement C’Rizz into the TARDIS crew, only three years after his first appearance, but this merely magnified the fact that Charley – once the entire purpose of the Big Finish audio line – was now as fascinating and engaging as Dennis Thatcher’s autobiography. With the novel twist of showing a titantic battle between natural order and human chaos with a nasty hair-pulling contest with Enya activating the full-tilt Maximum Evil Reset Button of Death, this audio barely justifies being released, let alone pointlessly spread over two discs.
Then, Other Lies, with its surprising, shocking and strangely satisfying sequences with C’Rizz being seduced by the Duke of Wellington; the Doctor being forced to wear a posing pouch and strut up and down in the freak show; and Charley and her sister having sexy pillow fights wearing only wet T-shirts. Nothing else of real consequence happens, which sums up this season rather well.
On to Clock Works, with its predictable satirical attack on consumerism and capitalism and forced conformity by lethal Clockwork Middle Management, with plenty of 1980s greed, paranoia, and hair styles, which makes it incredibly difficult to review as it simply blurs into memories of much better stories.
In Rubik’s Cube, a traditional blend of Cenobite torture, serial killer slasher horror, and the Eighth Doctor losing his memory with lots and lots and lots of running up and down corridors until four episodes are up and we can all go home and get wasted. Rubik’s Cube is aptly named since it is an irritating waste of time and yet... strangely alluring and addictive. Like meth amphetamines.
And to conclude the season of boring dead-end characters with absolutely no development from start to finish, we have another formulaic ‘TARDIS arrives in screwy world full of idiots and sweet FA happens for three and a half episodes’. Mind you, that describes most of Doctor Who now I come to think of it.
I myself am just glad this season had the common theme of the TARDIS crew dodging the draft against fighting Dustbins – imagine how shithouse these stories would have been without that? Oooh! Horrible!
However, looking back at it, McGann’s fifth season – and Baker Street in particular - was the last moment of tranquil normality before darkness engulfed the Earth for the final end of all things. Fighting and storms spilt the world asunder in the beginnings of Wolf-Time. BAD Wolf-Time!
No sooner had the next BF release ("Canberra", starring the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn) hit the shelves then the Great Serpent rose from the oceans and spewed its venomous fumes across all the land, killing every living thing on Earth.
The Dead Man’s Ship slipped its moorings and, with the evil god Loki at its helm, was carried by a huge wave right to Asgard shattering the Rainbow bridge that connects the home of the gods with Earth, leaving the gods trapped on the battlefield of Vilgrith against the wolfman Fenric, the Great Serpent and Loki plus their army of dead men.
Lord of the gods Odin hid behind the Great Ash Tree to ask the Well of Mimir for some way to save his sorry celestial arse, only to discover the Well has sent him into Coventry after Heimdal the Gatekeeper of the Rainbow Bridge had been using the well as a urinal for the past twenty aeons. Realizing how supremely screwed they are, Odin cried like a baby. Or Stan Laurel. Or Stan Laurel as a baby.
Finally, Heimdal spoiled for a rumble and played "Danny Boy" on the Gailler Horn as Fenric devoured his former pimp, Tyr; Thor smacked the Great Serpent up; before Loki sneaked up behind Heimdal himself and gave him the Wedgie of Ragnarok!
As the battlefield thundered with the sounds of death as the might armies died (often for the second time) Odin and his Warrior Wife Fricka enjoyed one last knee-trembler behind Valhalla and accidentally set off a conveniently-placed stack of M80s.
The whole universe burned, and as the flames began to subside leaving creation as nothing but chaos...
...AND NICHOLAS BRIGGS IN CHARGE OF BIG FINISH!!!
"Tom Baker Street" by Tom Baker and Mankind
*sax solo*
Stumbling your way
Down Tom Baker Street
Nostalgia in your head
Postmodernism on your feet
Well, another crazy day
You’ll drink the night away
And forget about jelly babies.
Cardiff’s weather
Makes you feel so cold
It’s got so many people
But it’s got no soul.
And it’s taken you so long
To find out you were wrong
About "Touchwood" being watchable.
We used to think
There’d be no new series
We used to say
There’d be no new series
But we’re crying
We’re lying now.
Another year and
We’ll get Eccleston.
Just one more year and
Then we’ll regenerate McGann.
But we’re lying
But we’re lying now!
*sax solo*
Way down the street
There’s a light in his place
McGann opens the door
He’s still got that face
And he asks where you have been
You tell him the spoilers you’ve seen
And you talk about Catherine Tate
He has got this dream about
Ditching his companions
He’s gonna get a new girl
For more than one night stands
And then there’s a chance in a million
Temporal Differences of Opinion
Will appear in SOME medium!
But you know Big Finish
Will always keep selling!
You know, it’ll never
Going to stop making
Missing adventures
For at least four Doctors or so...
The next two stories
Get rid of C’Rizz and Charley
The story after
Is really gnarly
New companion
Plus the Dustbins, yeah!
*sax solo*
*guitar solo*
*sax solo*
Showing posts with label Season 32. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Season 32. Show all posts
Friday, December 4, 2009
8th Doctor - Memory Lane (i)
Serial 9C – Baker Street
An Alternative Program Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Twenty-Ninth Entry in the EC Unauthorized Guide O' Demmed Colonials
"Motorcycle Saint Sebastian" lyrics by the Doug Anthony Allstars
D O C T O R W H O
Serial 9C – Baker Street -
Part One – Penny Lane
The TARDIS has arrived in a squalid Welsh bedsit where a backward thirty-year old called Tom Braudy is playing with Lego, while snooker is shown on the television and his care worker gets violently drunk and runs up a massive telephone bill ringing Taiwanese Clown Sex Lines.
Emerging from the TARDIS, the Doctor is already regretting the necessary sacrifices to avoid fighting in the Temporal Difference of Opinion, forced to hide in Cardiff of all places. What’s more, instead of verdant countryside and pleasantly daft racial stereotypes, they are immediately confronted by a mentally retarded bachelor and his clown-abusing social worker.
It’s enough to tempt C’Rizz to flee back inside the TARDIS. However, the Doctor loves the idea of watching snooker so much he immediately raids the fridge, slumps on the couch and puts his feet up on Tom. As Charley and C’Rizz watch on, the Time Lord makes himself at home and starts shouting abusive advice at the TV about "big" breaks and "bigger on the inside" breaks.
Charley nags the Doctor, suggesting they go outside and look for alien mischief and maybe have a curry and some sex, but the Doctor bitches that he is comfortable - and being dragged away from watching the snooker when you’re comfortable was the cause of at least fourteen major interplanetary wars.
"Course, the always SAY it’s down to politics or assassinations or economic expansion, but when all’s said and done and the shouting’s stopped, we know the truth! Isn’t that right, C’Rizz?"
It is at this point they realize C’Rizz left the flat fifteen minutes ago, overexcited at the prospect of a passing ice cream van.
C’Rizz, uncertain as how human manners deal with the buying and selling of frozen confectionery, charges the ice cream van, kung-fu kicks all the prospective customers unconscious, and then threatens to slash the seller’s throat if he doesn’t "get the fuck out of the van". Apparently this is stiffly formal and polite ice cream bartering by Eutermisan standards.
C’Rizz steals the ice cream van and drives off, laughing like a maniac as he scoffs all the Sky Ray Lollies and sticks all the trading cards on his jacket so he becomes a walking Season 6b story entitled "Dr Who and the Sky Ray Lollies Blow Up Centipedes on the Planet Zactus!"
C’Rizz then ram-raids a pet store, mistakenly believing it to be an illegal gambling den where snails are forced to wrestle in unnecessarily violent and bloody fights. When he learns his mistake, he gets upset and munches a Zoom with a dark expression.
Meanwhile, Charley looks out the window at the drizzling, dreary street of identical houses, dotted with twitching corpses of the customers C’Rizz accidentally reversed over.
The Doctor tells Charley to shut up and get used to it, as she is blocking his view of the snooker. Charley storms over to the kitchen, slips and falls out the window into the alleyway behind.
Charley is thoroughly disoriented to discover an identical flat beneath the other one, containing the same alcoholic social worker and the same backward thirty-year old playing with Lego. The snooker ends and is replaced by an episode of Space: 1999.
Whereupon the Doctor swears loudly, picks up the TV and hurls it out the window, flattening one of the few pedestrians to be spared by C’Rizz reenacting Grand Theft Auto 2.
The Doctor storms out of the flat and goes upstairs to get out on the roof, have a smoke and brood like all good telefantasy characters do. He is, however, shocked to discover the roof... is another flat identical to the one he left, even boasting the same moronic inhabitants. However, the TV is intact and showing the snooker, so the Doctor slumps on the couch and blanks out yet again.
Charley approaches the ice cream van where C’Rizz is idly spitting in all the ice cream vats. C’Rizz explains he has decided to start an army of reptilian ice cream vendors, and when Charley points out the evil aliens of Mars do it professionally, C’Rizz gets all depressed and quits the entire business.
They decide to head back to the Doctor, but all the houses the look identical. After a convenient amount of padding involving them checking lots of identical flats, they encounter a flat with more than two people in it – unfortunately, the third person is not the Doctor but Nasty Linda, who looks like a failed Eastenders character.
Nasty Linda pulls out a gun-shaped prop and threatens to blow both their heads off. Charley screams and runs out of the flat, closes the door and barricades it, trapping C’Rizz with a psychopath. Whether this is sheer absentmindedness or some cunning vengeance we may never know.
Nasty Linda orders C’Rizz at gunpoint to eat some biscuits. When he refuses, she fires the gun. She misses C’Rizz entirely, but the Eutermisan wets himself and faints dead away.
Charley runs up to the roof and finds another flat. In this particular flat, the Doctor is rolling a huge joint on a Blue Oyster Cult album, and watching an episode of Blake’s 7.
Charley desperately insists that fighting the combined armies of every Dustbin faction in existence must be better than living in this demented Escher landscape of drunken Welsh imbeciles!
The Doctor thinks Charley is getting WAY too worried and tells her to mellow out and enjoy a spliff.
However, all this turns out to be a hallucination the Doctor is having AFTER he smoked said spliff. Dazed, he heads downstairs and passes a vengeful ice cream salesman hauling a police box down the stairs. Waving a greeting to him, the Doctor heads into the flat and is shocked to find the TARDIS has been stolen!
Using his super Time Lord intelligence, the Doctor comes to an incredible conclusion!
The TARDIS has been stolen by the ice-cream man!
Part Two – Baker Street
Trying drunkenly to find a toilet, the Doctor stumbles out into the street and meets Charley. They are both at such a loose end they go to Louigi’s Fish Finger Emporium where there is also snooker coverage.
Despite the fact the story has explained most of the plot already, the Doctor and Charley can only wonder – who are the strange people in the flats? Why have they been cloned six thousand times? Why is there nothing but snooker? And does goat’s milk taste better than raw sewage?
C’Rizz wakes up to find he has been tied to a crucifix hanging from the ceiling and Nasty Linda is lying on a couch. She explains she’s not REALLY called Nasty Linda, but is in fact Kim Krotonska, an Australian backpacker.
She is convinced that they have somehow arrived in the middle of a Cardiff soap opera called "Baker Street", which unfortunately is the least imaginative soap opera ever! It only has two incredibly dull and pathetic characters who watch snooker all day while getting drunk.
Kim muses that since the whole of Cardiff City has been filled with clones locked in a strange twilight version of hell, where every house is identical and time folds around itself, the soap opera must be incredibly popular and justifies a 24/7 live broadcast and, in order to keep up with demand.
Glad that clumsy exposition is out of the way, C’Rizz bursts free of his bonds, does a summersault, lands on his feet after a devastating series of roundhouse kicks to Kim’s head, he steals a gun and shoots her through the head, before back-flipping out the kitchen window.
Tragically, that turned out to be an ice-cream fueled hallucination and C’Rizz is still nailed to the ceiling.
After a brutal fight over the last remaining fish finger, Charley sulks and heads to the other side of the diner, where she is mildly surprised to find her niece Polly Wright and her latest boy toy, Ben Jackson, a Ready, Willing and Able seaman.
Charley is so used to bumping into her niece in strange dream like realms she doesn’t even question this and idly asks if she can crash at their place in return for some Tantric Sex lessons. They accept and Charley flips the Doctor the bird as they leave.
At a loss of what to do, the lonely Time Lord shrugs, changes the channel on the TV and watches an episode of Hazel and goes cross-eyed trying to understand the rhyming Cockney slang.
Bored to tears, C’Rizz starts to sing out of tune every single poem he has ever written. After the 227th stanza of "Felicity Is Electricity In My Genital Region", Kim starts screaming and banging her head against the floor and then jumps out of the third-story window.
C’Rizz sighs and realizes he can hear sounds from the apartment above – the sound of Charley, Polly and Ben having an incredibly kinky threesome. C’Rizz just sighs and turns on his iPod incredibly loud, and soon Moby’s "Lift Me Up!" is blaring out loudly.
The music totally ruins the mood and the indignant Charley storms downstairs to complain, wearing only some whipped cream. At first, she doesn’t recognize C’Rizz, but then she suddenly projectile vomits up at him with such force he is wrenched free of the crucifix and falls to the ground.
As Charley looms over C’Rizz, he is gripped with terror.
"That wasn’t morning sickness again, was it?!" he exclaims.
Charley thinks for a moment, then puts it down to the incredibly out of date fish fingers she has been eating, plus the fact she’s become bulimic in her spare time.
The Doctor, gripped with a sudden desire to play a saxophone, runs out into the street, and notices Kim lying sprawled in the street. Idly, he asks her if she has any brass wind instruments about her person, but to no avail.
The Doctor notes that the only way Kim could have survived the fall from the window was if the gravitational constant of the universe changed... or if they were not actually in Cardiff on Earth.
The Time Lord smacks his forehead – the TARDIS navigation computer has cocked up again. Instead of Cardiff on Earth, it’s Cardiff on another planet entirely. "It’s not the first time it’s happened," he admits grimly. "I remember that time I set the coordinates for Paris and ended up at Paris in Texas rather than Paris in France."
This means that Charley and C’Rizz owe him an apology for their bitching in the previous episode, so the Doctor immediately heads up to the apartment, following Charley’s vomit stains.
The Doctor bursts in and explains that they are actually in some incredibly demented idea of suburban Hell, like in that episode of Angel, with the prisoner not even aware he is a prisoner. Obviously Tom Braudy has been imprisoned in this twilight realm – he doubts Kim is the prisoner since Australian backpackers turn up EVERYWHERE and, frankly, if there wasn’t one present here, he’d start to panic.
Charley muses that the prison seems pretty pathetic. Where are the horrors of the shower room? The angry cell mates? The humiliating wardens? All this place does is bore people into a happy stupor – it might be more human locking people up in tiny cells, but it’s not half as sadistic or amusing.
C’Rizz notes that it is clearly effecting all of them... unless maybe all the drugs they keep smoking are distorting their perceptions. Are Ben and Polly really in the flat above? Or is it some strange kinky fantasy on Charley’s part.
The Doctor grimaces at the thought and declares everything about this incident morally wrong, though admits he’s intrigued about the incest threesome, it’s probably not a good idea to let on about this.
The trio immediately plan to leave in the TARDIS before realizing even if they knew which flat it was in, the time machine was nicked by an ice cream man in the previous cliffhanger.
Everyone smacks C’Rizz over the head, as it was his fault for alerting the guard to their presence by trying to steal his ice cream van and use it to trash up the city.
The Doctor’s plan to draw the ice-cream van back is for them to stand in the street and shout "Cor, I’d like an ice cream right about now, funk soul brother!" a lot.
Kim finds this incredibly humiliating and pops into the nearest flat to take out her frustration by repeatedly shooting the drunken carer as he sits naked on the couch eating dorritoes.
C’Rizz announces suddenly he can hear the sound of distant drums, and the block of flats explodes since the Doctor accidentally left the gas on in one apartment.
The singed, soot-stained figures watch the burning ruins.
"Whoops," the Doctor muses.
Part Three – Streets of London
The Doctor clears his throat and, for want of something to do, checks if everyone else is all right. Bored with the outcome, he tells the others about the time he and Led Zeppelin invaded Phobos.
Tom staggers from the rubble demanding to know what the hell happened, and the Doctor suggests that maybe this is divine retribution for going around, leaving crisp packets everywhere.
This shuts up Tom and so the quartet stand around, waiting for the arrival of the ice-cream van.
Finally, C’Rizz gets bored and propositions Kim, suggesting they make the "Oroog With Three Backs" in one of the less demolished flats. It seems at first that Kim is really up for the idea, but she just wants to humiliate C’Rizz by telling him to head for the nearest cupboard, take off his clothes, put a paper bag on his head, and await further instructions.
C’Rizz runs off as the others shake their head and mutter "Tosser!".
Struggling to pass the time, Charley demands to know if there is a room aboard the TARDIS full of arm chairs, the Doctor debates the wikipedia definition of hyperspace, and Tom notices that a big black hairy thing with huge fangs is lurking in the rubble.
At that moment, the ice cream van arrives, and Tom immediately jumps aboard and tells the driver, Lest, to step on it. The van hurtles away, leaving the others at the mercy of this story’s token monster as the Doctor shakes his fist and swears furiously.
The monster looms closer and there is a predictable chase scene as the Doctor and Charley attempt to find sanctuary with Ben and Polly, in the hope that if the prison realm reacts to Charley’s memories and reshape itself, thus getting rid of their pursuer.
Finally, they find Ben and Polly at the Fish Finger Emporium, discussing the news on the TV about Adam Rickitt being arrested for shoplifting a New Zealand corner shop, which the Doctor thinks is odd as Rickitt is hardly newsworthy at the best of times.
Charley flashes the waiter and gets them all a round of free drinks and the Doctor awkwardly asks how Ben and Polly are since they parted company at Gatwick Airport, and the two humans swore that if they ever saw him again they’d break his fingers.
Just then, Lest the ice cream man pops inside for some lunch, so the Doctor cracks him over the head with a framed menu and steals the ice cream van, conveniently abandoning Charley in the process.
Kim meanwhile has been hiding from the monster in the only shelter available – inside the linen cupboard where C’Rizz was waiting for her and him to get squelchy. She quickly explains that simply staring at each other for a few seconds counts as sex for human beings, freeing them from "the tyranny of genital superiority".
C’Rizz has spent enough time with Charley to know Kim is talking bullshit, but pretends to fall for it since he doesn’t want to look like an even BIGGER tool than he already is.
"Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from
here!" Kim laughs and, as C’Rizz puts his pants back on, she deliberately steps on his hand.
Just for the hell of it.
At that moment, the ice cream van motors by and the duo narrowly avoid being run over by the Doctor as he screams, "I am NOT the Doctor! I am become... MOTORCYCLE SAINT SEBASTIAN! Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-ba-da-da!!"
C’Rizz and Kim manage to scramble aboard the ice cream van as it hurtles down the street at a hundred and forty-four miles an hour. Then, just like in Back to the Future, the van punches a burning hole in reality and leaves only scorched tire-tracks to mark it’s passing.
And C’Rizz and Kim, who are left sprawled on the road.
The ice cream van bursts into a studio set where the TARDIS and several Star Begotten props have been kept, but the Doctor is caught up in the excitement and tries to get the van to do a wheelie. All the time he screams, "Live to ride, ride to live – HEY!!"
The Doctor jumps from the van and surrenders to the rhythm of the hard rock music in the background, as the inexplicably-present C’Rizz and Kim provide backup singers and groovy dances.
"Lit like a live fuse, never settled!
Come on, child, press the pedal to the metal!
I gotta one way ticket, no turning back.
Live to ride, ride to live, hey!"
As the Doctor begins the next verse, he’s unaware that he’s being watched Lest and his superior, Argot. It seems that the prison has finally acclimatized to the Doctor super Time Lord powers, and created his perfect fantasy – to be a leather-clad rapscallion singing about driving really fast without due care and attention. Forever.
Unaware of his horrific predicament, the Doctor burst into song!
"No one leaves - they just move on!
Never forfeit your dignity!
Diesel heart? Pure air in your lungs!
Live to ride, ride to live - HEY!"
Part Four – Santa Monica Boulevard
Back at the Fish Finger Emporium, Ben and Polly finally collapse from exhaustion as Charley easily shags them into submission with another massive orgy, also including all the shop staff and a few customers and a bloke who just stopped by for directions.
Kim and C’Rizz stumble inside and realize the fish and chip shop now resembles an Ormellian Brothel, and the reality of the suburban prison is struggling to focus its attention on Charley. But no matter how many people it creates to sleep with her, she’s STILL horny.
"It’s what makes her so damn endearing," C’Rizz admits, before folding his arms and challenging Kim to explain how the orgy before them meets up with her descriptions of "non-tactile intercourse"?
As Charley wishes to do it in the jungles of India, or on the Great Wall of China, or rolling down the pyramids in Egypt. She’s so excited she simply can’t keep her hands to herself and C’Rizz and Kim are dragged into the next round of hardcore guilt-free sex inferno!
Elsewhere, the Doctor continues his rock song...
"Engine's blown! The gasket's shot,
Mercy, mercy, to a grinding halt!
Stench of petrol? Brand new martyrs!
Live to ride, ride to live – HEY!"
Back in the brothel, the exhausted and terrified C’Rizz and Kim weakly crawl for the exit, only for Charley to effortlessly drag them behind the counter for more naughty fun.
Meanwhile, the Doctor bursts into song once again...
"Broken down! Ditch water brown!
Pure radiance in another dead city!
I heard a voice alluring and cool say,
'Live to ride, ride to live - HEY!'"
Suddenly, the sound and music cut out, leaving the Doctor lip-synching to absolute silence, on his own, in the dark. Rather pathetic, all told, when you think about it.
At then, Argot and Lest arrive, waving their tentacles and screaming shrilly with their top three mouths.
Argot and Lest explain in a very contrived info dump that the aliens on this planet managed to extend their life spans, conquer disease and death, but this caused a huge population explosion until the planet started to fall apart from the sheer mass of all the aliens.
Finally, they discovered a mysterious magical device called the MacGuffin, which allowed them to place each individual in their own private reality cell, allowing them to exist forever in their own dreams and fantasies forever and ever.
When Tom Braudy, an astronaut shot through a wormhole and left in a living ship full of strange alien beings, struggling to get home, arrived on the planet, a cell immediately formed around him. When Kim turned out, she was chucked into the cell as well.
But the cell cannot cope with the strain of holding the Doctor, Tom, Kim, C’Rizz AND Charley – especially as it is taking more and more energy to shape itself around Charley’s varied and intense desires. Now, it cannot provide the endless orgies AND the rock music video for the Doctor, and soon all the other cells on the planet will shut down as Charley takes more and more energy.
Already the walls are starting to wobble and bend as the processors are unable to sate Charley’s karma-sutra-rewriting demands!
As the Ormellian Brothel starts to melt, C’Rizz and Kim finally scramble for rescue and Polly berates Charley for letting her libido destroy virtual reality – AGAIN!
Charley shrugs and offers to try and screw her and Ben in the real world next time, before her used sex slaves melt out of existence, leaving her, C’Rizz and Kim standing stark naked in a soiled holodeck.
The Doctor arrives with Tom Braudy on a leash and tells off Charley for letting her sex drive bring yet ANOTHER civilization to the brink of collapse! This makes it the eleventh planet they’ve been banned from because of her since they left the Divergent Universe!
Using a copy of "Tender is the Night" by F Scott Fitzgerald, the Doctor beats Argot unconscious and bundles the still half-dressed Charley and C’Rizz into the TARDIS, telling them that they’re lucky the aliens are so clueless they haven’t called the Galactic Police.
As the TARDIS dematerializes, the entire unnamed alien planet is scorched lifeless in the crossfire of a Dustbin war fleet and a battalion of Phaidon Warpsmiths and the Moaning Host.
"Phew, that was close!" say the TARDIS crew in unison, and all mime wiping their foreheads in relief. God, it’s camp.
C’Rizz points out that the Temporal Difference of Opinion is getting more hardcore in times past, present and future.
"We’ll be all right," says Charley as she idly hoses herself down. "We can just put a few hundred light years between us and them and we’ll be laughing. I mean, the battle zone is only a quarter of the universe. Maybe even less!"
"It’s only a few hours until it’s a eighth of the universe," the Doctor grumbles. "And a few months before now, it was a fifth. And tomorrow after yesterday it was..."
"We get the point," grumbles C’Rizz as he takes a turn with the hose.
"You’ll get it through your shoulder blades if there’s any justice," the Doctor grumbles. "It won’t be long before the whole of creation is caught between two battle fleets, millions of ships, fighting in the heart of mythology itself. We’re taking George Lucas on napalm here, people! But I know where we can hide until it’s all over!"
"Don’t spoil the atmosphere," Charley grunts.
"Cardiff?" asks C’Rizz, bored.
"Better EVEN than that!" the Doctor grins, setting coordinates. "I first got the idea after I was beaten up in an alleyway and then fell down a drain into a brutal psychedelic underworld. Outside time and space, the void between dimensions, out-sitting eternity itself!"
"So... THAT’S where we’re going?" asks Charley, confused.
"What? Get real, Charley! No, we’re going to--"
Due to an editing flaw, the theme tune crashes in at this point, leaving us on tenterhooks until the next story... only a mere fourteen months later. Dunno about you but I’M excited!
An Alternative Program Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Twenty-Ninth Entry in the EC Unauthorized Guide O' Demmed Colonials
"Motorcycle Saint Sebastian" lyrics by the Doug Anthony Allstars
D O C T O R W H O
Serial 9C – Baker Street -
Part One – Penny Lane
The TARDIS has arrived in a squalid Welsh bedsit where a backward thirty-year old called Tom Braudy is playing with Lego, while snooker is shown on the television and his care worker gets violently drunk and runs up a massive telephone bill ringing Taiwanese Clown Sex Lines.
Emerging from the TARDIS, the Doctor is already regretting the necessary sacrifices to avoid fighting in the Temporal Difference of Opinion, forced to hide in Cardiff of all places. What’s more, instead of verdant countryside and pleasantly daft racial stereotypes, they are immediately confronted by a mentally retarded bachelor and his clown-abusing social worker.
It’s enough to tempt C’Rizz to flee back inside the TARDIS. However, the Doctor loves the idea of watching snooker so much he immediately raids the fridge, slumps on the couch and puts his feet up on Tom. As Charley and C’Rizz watch on, the Time Lord makes himself at home and starts shouting abusive advice at the TV about "big" breaks and "bigger on the inside" breaks.
Charley nags the Doctor, suggesting they go outside and look for alien mischief and maybe have a curry and some sex, but the Doctor bitches that he is comfortable - and being dragged away from watching the snooker when you’re comfortable was the cause of at least fourteen major interplanetary wars.
"Course, the always SAY it’s down to politics or assassinations or economic expansion, but when all’s said and done and the shouting’s stopped, we know the truth! Isn’t that right, C’Rizz?"
It is at this point they realize C’Rizz left the flat fifteen minutes ago, overexcited at the prospect of a passing ice cream van.
C’Rizz, uncertain as how human manners deal with the buying and selling of frozen confectionery, charges the ice cream van, kung-fu kicks all the prospective customers unconscious, and then threatens to slash the seller’s throat if he doesn’t "get the fuck out of the van". Apparently this is stiffly formal and polite ice cream bartering by Eutermisan standards.
C’Rizz steals the ice cream van and drives off, laughing like a maniac as he scoffs all the Sky Ray Lollies and sticks all the trading cards on his jacket so he becomes a walking Season 6b story entitled "Dr Who and the Sky Ray Lollies Blow Up Centipedes on the Planet Zactus!"
C’Rizz then ram-raids a pet store, mistakenly believing it to be an illegal gambling den where snails are forced to wrestle in unnecessarily violent and bloody fights. When he learns his mistake, he gets upset and munches a Zoom with a dark expression.
Meanwhile, Charley looks out the window at the drizzling, dreary street of identical houses, dotted with twitching corpses of the customers C’Rizz accidentally reversed over.
The Doctor tells Charley to shut up and get used to it, as she is blocking his view of the snooker. Charley storms over to the kitchen, slips and falls out the window into the alleyway behind.
Charley is thoroughly disoriented to discover an identical flat beneath the other one, containing the same alcoholic social worker and the same backward thirty-year old playing with Lego. The snooker ends and is replaced by an episode of Space: 1999.
Whereupon the Doctor swears loudly, picks up the TV and hurls it out the window, flattening one of the few pedestrians to be spared by C’Rizz reenacting Grand Theft Auto 2.
The Doctor storms out of the flat and goes upstairs to get out on the roof, have a smoke and brood like all good telefantasy characters do. He is, however, shocked to discover the roof... is another flat identical to the one he left, even boasting the same moronic inhabitants. However, the TV is intact and showing the snooker, so the Doctor slumps on the couch and blanks out yet again.
Charley approaches the ice cream van where C’Rizz is idly spitting in all the ice cream vats. C’Rizz explains he has decided to start an army of reptilian ice cream vendors, and when Charley points out the evil aliens of Mars do it professionally, C’Rizz gets all depressed and quits the entire business.
They decide to head back to the Doctor, but all the houses the look identical. After a convenient amount of padding involving them checking lots of identical flats, they encounter a flat with more than two people in it – unfortunately, the third person is not the Doctor but Nasty Linda, who looks like a failed Eastenders character.
Nasty Linda pulls out a gun-shaped prop and threatens to blow both their heads off. Charley screams and runs out of the flat, closes the door and barricades it, trapping C’Rizz with a psychopath. Whether this is sheer absentmindedness or some cunning vengeance we may never know.
Nasty Linda orders C’Rizz at gunpoint to eat some biscuits. When he refuses, she fires the gun. She misses C’Rizz entirely, but the Eutermisan wets himself and faints dead away.
Charley runs up to the roof and finds another flat. In this particular flat, the Doctor is rolling a huge joint on a Blue Oyster Cult album, and watching an episode of Blake’s 7.
Charley desperately insists that fighting the combined armies of every Dustbin faction in existence must be better than living in this demented Escher landscape of drunken Welsh imbeciles!
The Doctor thinks Charley is getting WAY too worried and tells her to mellow out and enjoy a spliff.
However, all this turns out to be a hallucination the Doctor is having AFTER he smoked said spliff. Dazed, he heads downstairs and passes a vengeful ice cream salesman hauling a police box down the stairs. Waving a greeting to him, the Doctor heads into the flat and is shocked to find the TARDIS has been stolen!
Using his super Time Lord intelligence, the Doctor comes to an incredible conclusion!
The TARDIS has been stolen by the ice-cream man!
Part Two – Baker Street
Trying drunkenly to find a toilet, the Doctor stumbles out into the street and meets Charley. They are both at such a loose end they go to Louigi’s Fish Finger Emporium where there is also snooker coverage.
Despite the fact the story has explained most of the plot already, the Doctor and Charley can only wonder – who are the strange people in the flats? Why have they been cloned six thousand times? Why is there nothing but snooker? And does goat’s milk taste better than raw sewage?
C’Rizz wakes up to find he has been tied to a crucifix hanging from the ceiling and Nasty Linda is lying on a couch. She explains she’s not REALLY called Nasty Linda, but is in fact Kim Krotonska, an Australian backpacker.
She is convinced that they have somehow arrived in the middle of a Cardiff soap opera called "Baker Street", which unfortunately is the least imaginative soap opera ever! It only has two incredibly dull and pathetic characters who watch snooker all day while getting drunk.
Kim muses that since the whole of Cardiff City has been filled with clones locked in a strange twilight version of hell, where every house is identical and time folds around itself, the soap opera must be incredibly popular and justifies a 24/7 live broadcast and, in order to keep up with demand.
Glad that clumsy exposition is out of the way, C’Rizz bursts free of his bonds, does a summersault, lands on his feet after a devastating series of roundhouse kicks to Kim’s head, he steals a gun and shoots her through the head, before back-flipping out the kitchen window.
Tragically, that turned out to be an ice-cream fueled hallucination and C’Rizz is still nailed to the ceiling.
After a brutal fight over the last remaining fish finger, Charley sulks and heads to the other side of the diner, where she is mildly surprised to find her niece Polly Wright and her latest boy toy, Ben Jackson, a Ready, Willing and Able seaman.
Charley is so used to bumping into her niece in strange dream like realms she doesn’t even question this and idly asks if she can crash at their place in return for some Tantric Sex lessons. They accept and Charley flips the Doctor the bird as they leave.
At a loss of what to do, the lonely Time Lord shrugs, changes the channel on the TV and watches an episode of Hazel and goes cross-eyed trying to understand the rhyming Cockney slang.
Bored to tears, C’Rizz starts to sing out of tune every single poem he has ever written. After the 227th stanza of "Felicity Is Electricity In My Genital Region", Kim starts screaming and banging her head against the floor and then jumps out of the third-story window.
C’Rizz sighs and realizes he can hear sounds from the apartment above – the sound of Charley, Polly and Ben having an incredibly kinky threesome. C’Rizz just sighs and turns on his iPod incredibly loud, and soon Moby’s "Lift Me Up!" is blaring out loudly.
The music totally ruins the mood and the indignant Charley storms downstairs to complain, wearing only some whipped cream. At first, she doesn’t recognize C’Rizz, but then she suddenly projectile vomits up at him with such force he is wrenched free of the crucifix and falls to the ground.
As Charley looms over C’Rizz, he is gripped with terror.
"That wasn’t morning sickness again, was it?!" he exclaims.
Charley thinks for a moment, then puts it down to the incredibly out of date fish fingers she has been eating, plus the fact she’s become bulimic in her spare time.
The Doctor, gripped with a sudden desire to play a saxophone, runs out into the street, and notices Kim lying sprawled in the street. Idly, he asks her if she has any brass wind instruments about her person, but to no avail.
The Doctor notes that the only way Kim could have survived the fall from the window was if the gravitational constant of the universe changed... or if they were not actually in Cardiff on Earth.
The Time Lord smacks his forehead – the TARDIS navigation computer has cocked up again. Instead of Cardiff on Earth, it’s Cardiff on another planet entirely. "It’s not the first time it’s happened," he admits grimly. "I remember that time I set the coordinates for Paris and ended up at Paris in Texas rather than Paris in France."
This means that Charley and C’Rizz owe him an apology for their bitching in the previous episode, so the Doctor immediately heads up to the apartment, following Charley’s vomit stains.
The Doctor bursts in and explains that they are actually in some incredibly demented idea of suburban Hell, like in that episode of Angel, with the prisoner not even aware he is a prisoner. Obviously Tom Braudy has been imprisoned in this twilight realm – he doubts Kim is the prisoner since Australian backpackers turn up EVERYWHERE and, frankly, if there wasn’t one present here, he’d start to panic.
Charley muses that the prison seems pretty pathetic. Where are the horrors of the shower room? The angry cell mates? The humiliating wardens? All this place does is bore people into a happy stupor – it might be more human locking people up in tiny cells, but it’s not half as sadistic or amusing.
C’Rizz notes that it is clearly effecting all of them... unless maybe all the drugs they keep smoking are distorting their perceptions. Are Ben and Polly really in the flat above? Or is it some strange kinky fantasy on Charley’s part.
The Doctor grimaces at the thought and declares everything about this incident morally wrong, though admits he’s intrigued about the incest threesome, it’s probably not a good idea to let on about this.
The trio immediately plan to leave in the TARDIS before realizing even if they knew which flat it was in, the time machine was nicked by an ice cream man in the previous cliffhanger.
Everyone smacks C’Rizz over the head, as it was his fault for alerting the guard to their presence by trying to steal his ice cream van and use it to trash up the city.
The Doctor’s plan to draw the ice-cream van back is for them to stand in the street and shout "Cor, I’d like an ice cream right about now, funk soul brother!" a lot.
Kim finds this incredibly humiliating and pops into the nearest flat to take out her frustration by repeatedly shooting the drunken carer as he sits naked on the couch eating dorritoes.
C’Rizz announces suddenly he can hear the sound of distant drums, and the block of flats explodes since the Doctor accidentally left the gas on in one apartment.
The singed, soot-stained figures watch the burning ruins.
"Whoops," the Doctor muses.
Part Three – Streets of London
The Doctor clears his throat and, for want of something to do, checks if everyone else is all right. Bored with the outcome, he tells the others about the time he and Led Zeppelin invaded Phobos.
Tom staggers from the rubble demanding to know what the hell happened, and the Doctor suggests that maybe this is divine retribution for going around, leaving crisp packets everywhere.
This shuts up Tom and so the quartet stand around, waiting for the arrival of the ice-cream van.
Finally, C’Rizz gets bored and propositions Kim, suggesting they make the "Oroog With Three Backs" in one of the less demolished flats. It seems at first that Kim is really up for the idea, but she just wants to humiliate C’Rizz by telling him to head for the nearest cupboard, take off his clothes, put a paper bag on his head, and await further instructions.
C’Rizz runs off as the others shake their head and mutter "Tosser!".
Struggling to pass the time, Charley demands to know if there is a room aboard the TARDIS full of arm chairs, the Doctor debates the wikipedia definition of hyperspace, and Tom notices that a big black hairy thing with huge fangs is lurking in the rubble.
At that moment, the ice cream van arrives, and Tom immediately jumps aboard and tells the driver, Lest, to step on it. The van hurtles away, leaving the others at the mercy of this story’s token monster as the Doctor shakes his fist and swears furiously.
The monster looms closer and there is a predictable chase scene as the Doctor and Charley attempt to find sanctuary with Ben and Polly, in the hope that if the prison realm reacts to Charley’s memories and reshape itself, thus getting rid of their pursuer.
Finally, they find Ben and Polly at the Fish Finger Emporium, discussing the news on the TV about Adam Rickitt being arrested for shoplifting a New Zealand corner shop, which the Doctor thinks is odd as Rickitt is hardly newsworthy at the best of times.
Charley flashes the waiter and gets them all a round of free drinks and the Doctor awkwardly asks how Ben and Polly are since they parted company at Gatwick Airport, and the two humans swore that if they ever saw him again they’d break his fingers.
Just then, Lest the ice cream man pops inside for some lunch, so the Doctor cracks him over the head with a framed menu and steals the ice cream van, conveniently abandoning Charley in the process.
Kim meanwhile has been hiding from the monster in the only shelter available – inside the linen cupboard where C’Rizz was waiting for her and him to get squelchy. She quickly explains that simply staring at each other for a few seconds counts as sex for human beings, freeing them from "the tyranny of genital superiority".
C’Rizz has spent enough time with Charley to know Kim is talking bullshit, but pretends to fall for it since he doesn’t want to look like an even BIGGER tool than he already is.
"Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from
here!" Kim laughs and, as C’Rizz puts his pants back on, she deliberately steps on his hand.
Just for the hell of it.
At that moment, the ice cream van motors by and the duo narrowly avoid being run over by the Doctor as he screams, "I am NOT the Doctor! I am become... MOTORCYCLE SAINT SEBASTIAN! Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-ba-da-da!!"
C’Rizz and Kim manage to scramble aboard the ice cream van as it hurtles down the street at a hundred and forty-four miles an hour. Then, just like in Back to the Future, the van punches a burning hole in reality and leaves only scorched tire-tracks to mark it’s passing.
And C’Rizz and Kim, who are left sprawled on the road.
The ice cream van bursts into a studio set where the TARDIS and several Star Begotten props have been kept, but the Doctor is caught up in the excitement and tries to get the van to do a wheelie. All the time he screams, "Live to ride, ride to live – HEY!!"
The Doctor jumps from the van and surrenders to the rhythm of the hard rock music in the background, as the inexplicably-present C’Rizz and Kim provide backup singers and groovy dances.
"Lit like a live fuse, never settled!
Come on, child, press the pedal to the metal!
I gotta one way ticket, no turning back.
Live to ride, ride to live, hey!"
As the Doctor begins the next verse, he’s unaware that he’s being watched Lest and his superior, Argot. It seems that the prison has finally acclimatized to the Doctor super Time Lord powers, and created his perfect fantasy – to be a leather-clad rapscallion singing about driving really fast without due care and attention. Forever.
Unaware of his horrific predicament, the Doctor burst into song!
"No one leaves - they just move on!
Never forfeit your dignity!
Diesel heart? Pure air in your lungs!
Live to ride, ride to live - HEY!"
Part Four – Santa Monica Boulevard
Back at the Fish Finger Emporium, Ben and Polly finally collapse from exhaustion as Charley easily shags them into submission with another massive orgy, also including all the shop staff and a few customers and a bloke who just stopped by for directions.
Kim and C’Rizz stumble inside and realize the fish and chip shop now resembles an Ormellian Brothel, and the reality of the suburban prison is struggling to focus its attention on Charley. But no matter how many people it creates to sleep with her, she’s STILL horny.
"It’s what makes her so damn endearing," C’Rizz admits, before folding his arms and challenging Kim to explain how the orgy before them meets up with her descriptions of "non-tactile intercourse"?
As Charley wishes to do it in the jungles of India, or on the Great Wall of China, or rolling down the pyramids in Egypt. She’s so excited she simply can’t keep her hands to herself and C’Rizz and Kim are dragged into the next round of hardcore guilt-free sex inferno!
Elsewhere, the Doctor continues his rock song...
"Engine's blown! The gasket's shot,
Mercy, mercy, to a grinding halt!
Stench of petrol? Brand new martyrs!
Live to ride, ride to live – HEY!"
Back in the brothel, the exhausted and terrified C’Rizz and Kim weakly crawl for the exit, only for Charley to effortlessly drag them behind the counter for more naughty fun.
Meanwhile, the Doctor bursts into song once again...
"Broken down! Ditch water brown!
Pure radiance in another dead city!
I heard a voice alluring and cool say,
'Live to ride, ride to live - HEY!'"
Suddenly, the sound and music cut out, leaving the Doctor lip-synching to absolute silence, on his own, in the dark. Rather pathetic, all told, when you think about it.
At then, Argot and Lest arrive, waving their tentacles and screaming shrilly with their top three mouths.
Argot and Lest explain in a very contrived info dump that the aliens on this planet managed to extend their life spans, conquer disease and death, but this caused a huge population explosion until the planet started to fall apart from the sheer mass of all the aliens.
Finally, they discovered a mysterious magical device called the MacGuffin, which allowed them to place each individual in their own private reality cell, allowing them to exist forever in their own dreams and fantasies forever and ever.
When Tom Braudy, an astronaut shot through a wormhole and left in a living ship full of strange alien beings, struggling to get home, arrived on the planet, a cell immediately formed around him. When Kim turned out, she was chucked into the cell as well.
But the cell cannot cope with the strain of holding the Doctor, Tom, Kim, C’Rizz AND Charley – especially as it is taking more and more energy to shape itself around Charley’s varied and intense desires. Now, it cannot provide the endless orgies AND the rock music video for the Doctor, and soon all the other cells on the planet will shut down as Charley takes more and more energy.
Already the walls are starting to wobble and bend as the processors are unable to sate Charley’s karma-sutra-rewriting demands!
As the Ormellian Brothel starts to melt, C’Rizz and Kim finally scramble for rescue and Polly berates Charley for letting her libido destroy virtual reality – AGAIN!
Charley shrugs and offers to try and screw her and Ben in the real world next time, before her used sex slaves melt out of existence, leaving her, C’Rizz and Kim standing stark naked in a soiled holodeck.
The Doctor arrives with Tom Braudy on a leash and tells off Charley for letting her sex drive bring yet ANOTHER civilization to the brink of collapse! This makes it the eleventh planet they’ve been banned from because of her since they left the Divergent Universe!
Using a copy of "Tender is the Night" by F Scott Fitzgerald, the Doctor beats Argot unconscious and bundles the still half-dressed Charley and C’Rizz into the TARDIS, telling them that they’re lucky the aliens are so clueless they haven’t called the Galactic Police.
As the TARDIS dematerializes, the entire unnamed alien planet is scorched lifeless in the crossfire of a Dustbin war fleet and a battalion of Phaidon Warpsmiths and the Moaning Host.
"Phew, that was close!" say the TARDIS crew in unison, and all mime wiping their foreheads in relief. God, it’s camp.
C’Rizz points out that the Temporal Difference of Opinion is getting more hardcore in times past, present and future.
"We’ll be all right," says Charley as she idly hoses herself down. "We can just put a few hundred light years between us and them and we’ll be laughing. I mean, the battle zone is only a quarter of the universe. Maybe even less!"
"It’s only a few hours until it’s a eighth of the universe," the Doctor grumbles. "And a few months before now, it was a fifth. And tomorrow after yesterday it was..."
"We get the point," grumbles C’Rizz as he takes a turn with the hose.
"You’ll get it through your shoulder blades if there’s any justice," the Doctor grumbles. "It won’t be long before the whole of creation is caught between two battle fleets, millions of ships, fighting in the heart of mythology itself. We’re taking George Lucas on napalm here, people! But I know where we can hide until it’s all over!"
"Don’t spoil the atmosphere," Charley grunts.
"Cardiff?" asks C’Rizz, bored.
"Better EVEN than that!" the Doctor grins, setting coordinates. "I first got the idea after I was beaten up in an alleyway and then fell down a drain into a brutal psychedelic underworld. Outside time and space, the void between dimensions, out-sitting eternity itself!"
"So... THAT’S where we’re going?" asks Charley, confused.
"What? Get real, Charley! No, we’re going to--"
Due to an editing flaw, the theme tune crashes in at this point, leaving us on tenterhooks until the next story... only a mere fourteen months later. Dunno about you but I’M excited!
8th Doctor - Something Inside (ii)
Book(s)/Other Related -
Dunno, Can’t Remember
Doctor Who: Something Inside
Touch Wood: Something Outside
Spot the Loony – the game show with Spike Milligan and David Tennant
Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed cracked in the head for most of this story.
"We are beyond all held now."
"'All held'. Do you mean 'help'?"
"Aw, hell!"
"So now we’re beyond aw hell now?!"
"Shut up, C’Rizz!"
Goofs – C’Rizz and Charley have started holding hands. You don’t think... no, that’s just sick. Let us think of something else.
Fashion Victims -
C’Rizz in a ginger wig, multicolored stripy jumper and denim overalls. Charley wears a white wedding dress, a black neck collar and leather jacket with the words DEATH BY ORGASM spelt out in studs on the back.
...And this is supposed to convince the Cenobites that they are SANE?!?
Technobabble - The Doctor reverses the polarity of the neutron flow.
In these post-RTD days, that’s worth a street party in itself.
Links and References -
The Doctor thinks of happier days when he encountered Mickey Mouse, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy and Dracula in the lower orders of Hell where they repeatedly sang "Happy Birthday" at him until the Dustbins arrive and blew everyone up. (Serial R, "The Chaste")
Untelevised Misadventures -
Charley mentions she invented the term "stevedore" and nearly broke her last lover’s back during a French kiss.
Groovy DVD Extras -
A kind of Hangman game but instead of a stick man being hanged, there is a stick C’Rizz looking worried as a stick Pinhead makes him bend over, then picks up a baseball bat and applies some Vaseline.
Dialogue Disasters –
Doctor: How can you find out if I’m not lying.
Pinhead: There’s one way of finding out – on a purely subconscious level, of course – but it will involve whips and chains.
Doctor: It’s always whips and chains with you Cenobites. You got a fetish or something?
Charley: I wouldn’t try and read my mind right now if I were you. It’s likely to be a bit of a mess. An incredibly kinky, seductive and above all XXX-rated mess but a mess nonetheless. Ooh, that rhymes! Cool!
Pinhead: You are useless to me. You were never amnesiac.
Doctor: Huh? Who are you? I don’t remember where I am!
Butterball: Damn it, he’s good.
Doctor: Well, I don’t FEEL telepathic. I’m sure I’d notice if I was. And I can’t tell what you’re thinking. Beyond the obvious of course.
Charley: Spoilsport! Fine, I’ll put my clothes BACK on, then!
Doctor: I never said I wanted that!
Charley mocks Butterball’s erectile dysfunction –
"Come, then, if you think you’re hard enough."
Doctor: I may not know who I am, but I don’t give second chances.
Charley: I’ll give you a lapdance.
Doctor: Hmm. OK. I don’t give THIRD chances. I’m that sort of a man. DAMN IT, I JUST LOVE BEING MERCIFUL!
Dialogue Triumphs -
Doctor: Why not just kill me and get it over with?
Pinhead: We have eternity to know your flesh.
Doctor: Bollocks! You’ve only got another two eps and you know it!
Charley: So what did you think of "The Credo of the Moron"?
Doctor: Not one of my best audio plays, Charley.
C’Rizz: You hate me but you need me. That can be an ugly combination.
Charley: Not as ugly as you, lizard boy.
C’Rizz: Doctor, what about Charley?
Doctor: Who are you? Who is Charley? Why can’t I remember?
C’Rizz: Maybe it’s down to you continually biffing yourself in the face with a frying pan?!
UnQuotable Quote -
Dreamer: Keep still, my dear.
Viewer Quotes -
"I really like how Charley and C’Rizz are developing as characters. Trouble is, those characters seem to be Chucky and Tiffany the incredibly homicidal psychotic serial killing children’s toys. Still... a mouth’s a mouth." – Nigel Verkoff (2006)
"The Doctor’s a Liverpool supporter? Tosser! I quit!"
– Chris Eccleston (2005)
"Butterball was kinda like Lytton. He was my favorite character in Doctor Who. The rest can suck my balls." – Eric Saward (1992)
"Once again Conrad Westmaas steals the show. Why does he want it in the first place though? Did he think it was a copy of Bare Parts?"
– Amanda Freeman (2008)
"Rubik’s Cube thoroughly entertained me. But then I am a thoroughly sick son of a bitch who is easily pleased. A lot of this is down to what the regulars go though in this story – particularly the Doctor and C’Rizz who get tortured with rusty metal implements and laser-sighted dildos. That kind of thing really appeals to me."
– an irritating shit of a fan who talks loudly at conventions and thinks he’s even remotely funny (attributed)
"India Fisher loves ME best. She signed the cover of my copy of the play in red, and put three x's on it. Our love is beyond human comprehension." – Cameron Mason, www.istalkcharley.com.au (2007)
"She's just stringing you along, bitch," – Nigel Verkoff (2007 – again)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"There might be an evil worm living inside my head. Then again, there might not. Then again, there might be. Only one way to find out. Pass me the ice pick and close your eyes, pretty boy..."
Paul McGann Speaks!
"The Temporal Difference of Opinion’s really hitting my Doctor hard. There’s a more cantankerous, almost paranoid side coming out and I enjoyed that because both I AND Doctor Who know about the monster hiding in the stationary cupboard, with its dark fur and googly eyes and horns and teeth... IT’S GOING TO KILL US ALL TONIGHT! TONIGHT!"
India Fisher Speaks!
"Sorry, can’t talk, I’m off to play an incredibly kinky and oversexed prison guard in the shittiest ever version of Blake’s 7, where terrorists use exploding frying pans and Avon’s played by an Isaac Haynes wannabe, and Bruce Willis' Armageddon is the set text we’re working from rather than 'The Way Back'."
Conrad Westmaas Speaks!
"Yeah, I gotta go to. I’m playing India’s spiked leather codpiece in the fight scenes. Sigh. It’s a living."
Trivia -
That version of Blake’s 7 they mentioned redefined the word "crap". Sadly, I have to admit I needed to check the definition of the word "crap" in the first place.
Rumors & Facts -
What is happening to Big Finish lately? A couple of years ago they never seemed to put a foot wrong. Actually, they put so many feet wrong that if they were accused of drink driving they’d have been locked up for thirteen consecutive life sentences, but the mob is a fickle thing. As are the cops with the breathalizers, so be warned.
Nevertheless, the fen of fandom were rarely disappointed until 2003, coincidentally the year that Zig-Zag-Gay-Ass was created and RTD announced that the real show was coming back, so no one had to piss about with stopgaps like audios anymore. Since then, the range has managed the impressive feat of treading water in a downward spiral of increasing lacklustreness, and, frankly not worth the time or the cash.
Worst of all was the Eighth Doctor range – once the bravest and most innovative forms of possible Doctor, it is now almost forgotten now that Paul McGann has gone from the Current Doctor to the One Before The One Before The Current Doctor Who Was Brilliant In Casanova.
If only there was some kind of pattern.
Trevor Baxendale, OBE, MBE, BSC, first handed in a version of this script in 2002, fully expecting that no one had done an "Eighth Doctor Versus Hellraiser" story before. Tragically the script was used as kitty litter and the story remained in genesis until 2005 when it was re-submitted and then rejected immediately as it did not feature enough fanwanky foreshadowing to the current Ninth Doctor’s TV series.
Two weeks later, the re-submitted "The Cenobites" was rejected again as featuring far too much fanwanky foreshadowing to the Ninth Doctor, as the Tenth was being cast and Eccleston was 'SO yesterday!' as Gay Russell would say, quite a lot, often when no one was present and thus unaware that this was a symptom of his complete nervous breakdown that left him in charge of Cosgrove Hall’s "Unique Head And Shoulder Doctor Who Animation Department" which went bankrupt three hours later.
However, let us open a black hole in real space and rewind the continuum slightly, to when Russell was still in charge of Big Finish if we can avoid the inevitable Temporal Orbit.
Now totally out of new material, Big Finish was once again being forced to produce scripts they’d maybe accepted and then used in paper plane competitions for their own amusement. Thus, after the soul-crushing despair of Steve Lyon’s Clock Work, it was decided that "Doctor Who Sits Inside Your Head Among the Dead And Mocks You As You’re Sleeping Dear Sweet Jesus They’re Coming Through The Walls Oh God Protect Us Please!" would have to be the next excursion for the Eighth Doctor, Charley Pollard and Cecil Rizz Esquire to suffer.
Baxendale relished the chance to write for Paul McGann’s uniquely Liverpudlian incarnation since Baxendale was uniquely Liverpudlian himself, and thought nothing of the inherent paradox in this sentence. The script originally was an extreme survival reality game show hosted by the Kro’ka in The Double The Fist Universe Story Arc, but only for about three minutes before Baxendale rubbished the arc like every other sane member of the human race. Another abandoned plot thread has the Pinhead character unmasked at the end of episode three to reveal he was really Eric Sykes all the time – hence Pinhead calling himself Eric at various points in the story as heavy-handed exposition.
Production on DWSIYHATDAMYAYSDSJTCTTWOGPUP was slightly hampered as, after re-submitting the same storyline three times an hour for five years, Baxendale found the plot incredibly predictable – especially since it was stolen wholesale from a less-than-memorable episode of Garth Marenghi’s DarkPlace hospital drama.
"Anyone can write a story that surprises the audience," Baxendale said over three pipes of opium, "but to write a story that surprises the AUTHOR, well, that takes imagination. And genius. And blind luck. And more opium. Suki, more lavender oil in my triceps."
Thus, in order to make sure that he had NO idea what was going to happen next, Baxendale logged onto SimplyScripts.Com and downloaded a heap of sci fi horror film early drafts, and cut and pasted randomly from them into the script for DWSIYHATDAMYAYSDSJTCTTWOGPUP, in particular Cube, Scanners, Aliens, Friday 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream If You Know What You Did Last Friday Thirteenth, every film done by Lucio Fulchi and, for an extra twist, Hating Alison Ashley.
Curiously, this created the most predictable plot line used by Big Finish so far. In fact, wander into the local pub and – give or take some giant maggots – the average punter will know the plot off by heart, from the amnesiac Doctor to the cop-out ending where our heroes bravely run for their miserable lives.
"Yeah, well, Doctor Who’s STARDIS arrives in this base that’s under siege by this monster, right? And all the wankers in the base are trying to get out before it turns them into potato salad (the stuff in tins, not the firm, tasty, delicatessen variety). Doctor Who gets locked up and loses his memory while his bird and some losers run up and down lots of corridors telling us the monster’s chasing us cause the show is show cheap it can’t get a monster outfit. Part of the charm of that pathetic, childish crap. Billie Piper’s well fit, in’t she?"
Tragically, timing meant the sequence where C’Rizz puts on a hockey mask and chases Chatterbeast while the Doctor puts on a floppy hat, a stripy jumper and an Edward Scissorhands prop was cut from the final product. Ironically, this makes the plot make a lot more sense.
Another unintentional script tidy was carried out when Baxendale, for a laugh, shuffled every scene in the episode to a completely random place and this amazingly made the narrative more linear.
Meanwhile, Steve Foxx, once again sidelined since his much hated character had been brutally killed off years earlier in a divergent universe, once again got his own back on the production team.
After providing in the inappropriate cello horror music for Clock Work and the ridiculous Waltzing Matilda to The Unsettling, he used an incredibly cheap and nasty 1990s techno brass beat which was as appropriate to this demonic slasher flick as a the Stripper Song at an Amish birthday party. When the cheesy jazz pub turn prodding away the same few notes on the cheap and nasty 1980s Casio keyboard was found, he was hung, drawn and quartered and fed to the hellbeast next door to the studios Big Finish were recording in at the time.
Critically, Rubik’s Cube didn’t do too badly, since after Baxendale’s truly awful New Adventure audio The Dark Llama, expectations about his next audio were so low they were in fact drilling a hole to the inner core of the Earth, deep in the mantle well below the crust.
"Time War Trouble" by Shampoo and Conditioner
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Ever since Fargo
Got turned to rubble! Yeah, yeah!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Dustbins versus Time Lords
Gonna burst the Time Bubble!
We could be on the front line
Fighting for the cause
With the N-Forms and the Bowships
And all the in-laws!
We tried to dodge the draft
With a new identity
Get an office job
Claim to be a loony!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Higher beings brickin’ it
It sure ain’t subtle! Yeah, yeah!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Acardia has fallen
Romana’s getting stubble!
We didn’t want to fight
In the last apocalypse
Even though the Nestles say it’s a
"Piece of piss!"
The Animus is just some dust
Eternals running for the hills
Dustbins’ getting religion and
It’s giving us the... chills!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
We’ll be right behind the sofa
In a Type 40 shuttle! Yeah, yeah!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
It’s a battle in the vortex
Quick march on the double!
The Time Lords are after us
And they’re as mad as hell
The Doctor’s super confident
But you never can tell!
We’re hiding out in Cardiff
Coz there’s nowhere else to go!
Though how it fits with RTD
Only God will know!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Creation is at stake
Got time for a cuddle? Yeah Yeah!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
To Gallifrey confusion
And continuity befuddle!
Dunno, Can’t Remember
Doctor Who: Something Inside
Touch Wood: Something Outside
Spot the Loony – the game show with Spike Milligan and David Tennant
Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed cracked in the head for most of this story.
"We are beyond all held now."
"'All held'. Do you mean 'help'?"
"Aw, hell!"
"So now we’re beyond aw hell now?!"
"Shut up, C’Rizz!"
Goofs – C’Rizz and Charley have started holding hands. You don’t think... no, that’s just sick. Let us think of something else.
Fashion Victims -
C’Rizz in a ginger wig, multicolored stripy jumper and denim overalls. Charley wears a white wedding dress, a black neck collar and leather jacket with the words DEATH BY ORGASM spelt out in studs on the back.
...And this is supposed to convince the Cenobites that they are SANE?!?
Technobabble - The Doctor reverses the polarity of the neutron flow.
In these post-RTD days, that’s worth a street party in itself.
Links and References -
The Doctor thinks of happier days when he encountered Mickey Mouse, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy and Dracula in the lower orders of Hell where they repeatedly sang "Happy Birthday" at him until the Dustbins arrive and blew everyone up. (Serial R, "The Chaste")
Untelevised Misadventures -
Charley mentions she invented the term "stevedore" and nearly broke her last lover’s back during a French kiss.
Groovy DVD Extras -
A kind of Hangman game but instead of a stick man being hanged, there is a stick C’Rizz looking worried as a stick Pinhead makes him bend over, then picks up a baseball bat and applies some Vaseline.
Dialogue Disasters –
Doctor: How can you find out if I’m not lying.
Pinhead: There’s one way of finding out – on a purely subconscious level, of course – but it will involve whips and chains.
Doctor: It’s always whips and chains with you Cenobites. You got a fetish or something?
Charley: I wouldn’t try and read my mind right now if I were you. It’s likely to be a bit of a mess. An incredibly kinky, seductive and above all XXX-rated mess but a mess nonetheless. Ooh, that rhymes! Cool!
Pinhead: You are useless to me. You were never amnesiac.
Doctor: Huh? Who are you? I don’t remember where I am!
Butterball: Damn it, he’s good.
Doctor: Well, I don’t FEEL telepathic. I’m sure I’d notice if I was. And I can’t tell what you’re thinking. Beyond the obvious of course.
Charley: Spoilsport! Fine, I’ll put my clothes BACK on, then!
Doctor: I never said I wanted that!
Charley mocks Butterball’s erectile dysfunction –
"Come, then, if you think you’re hard enough."
Doctor: I may not know who I am, but I don’t give second chances.
Charley: I’ll give you a lapdance.
Doctor: Hmm. OK. I don’t give THIRD chances. I’m that sort of a man. DAMN IT, I JUST LOVE BEING MERCIFUL!
Dialogue Triumphs -
Doctor: Why not just kill me and get it over with?
Pinhead: We have eternity to know your flesh.
Doctor: Bollocks! You’ve only got another two eps and you know it!
Charley: So what did you think of "The Credo of the Moron"?
Doctor: Not one of my best audio plays, Charley.
C’Rizz: You hate me but you need me. That can be an ugly combination.
Charley: Not as ugly as you, lizard boy.
C’Rizz: Doctor, what about Charley?
Doctor: Who are you? Who is Charley? Why can’t I remember?
C’Rizz: Maybe it’s down to you continually biffing yourself in the face with a frying pan?!
UnQuotable Quote -
Dreamer: Keep still, my dear.
Viewer Quotes -
"I really like how Charley and C’Rizz are developing as characters. Trouble is, those characters seem to be Chucky and Tiffany the incredibly homicidal psychotic serial killing children’s toys. Still... a mouth’s a mouth." – Nigel Verkoff (2006)
"The Doctor’s a Liverpool supporter? Tosser! I quit!"
– Chris Eccleston (2005)
"Butterball was kinda like Lytton. He was my favorite character in Doctor Who. The rest can suck my balls." – Eric Saward (1992)
"Once again Conrad Westmaas steals the show. Why does he want it in the first place though? Did he think it was a copy of Bare Parts?"
– Amanda Freeman (2008)
"Rubik’s Cube thoroughly entertained me. But then I am a thoroughly sick son of a bitch who is easily pleased. A lot of this is down to what the regulars go though in this story – particularly the Doctor and C’Rizz who get tortured with rusty metal implements and laser-sighted dildos. That kind of thing really appeals to me."
– an irritating shit of a fan who talks loudly at conventions and thinks he’s even remotely funny (attributed)
"India Fisher loves ME best. She signed the cover of my copy of the play in red, and put three x's on it. Our love is beyond human comprehension." – Cameron Mason, www.istalkcharley.com.au (2007)
"She's just stringing you along, bitch," – Nigel Verkoff (2007 – again)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"There might be an evil worm living inside my head. Then again, there might not. Then again, there might be. Only one way to find out. Pass me the ice pick and close your eyes, pretty boy..."
Paul McGann Speaks!
"The Temporal Difference of Opinion’s really hitting my Doctor hard. There’s a more cantankerous, almost paranoid side coming out and I enjoyed that because both I AND Doctor Who know about the monster hiding in the stationary cupboard, with its dark fur and googly eyes and horns and teeth... IT’S GOING TO KILL US ALL TONIGHT! TONIGHT!"
India Fisher Speaks!
"Sorry, can’t talk, I’m off to play an incredibly kinky and oversexed prison guard in the shittiest ever version of Blake’s 7, where terrorists use exploding frying pans and Avon’s played by an Isaac Haynes wannabe, and Bruce Willis' Armageddon is the set text we’re working from rather than 'The Way Back'."
Conrad Westmaas Speaks!
"Yeah, I gotta go to. I’m playing India’s spiked leather codpiece in the fight scenes. Sigh. It’s a living."
Trivia -
That version of Blake’s 7 they mentioned redefined the word "crap". Sadly, I have to admit I needed to check the definition of the word "crap" in the first place.
Rumors & Facts -
What is happening to Big Finish lately? A couple of years ago they never seemed to put a foot wrong. Actually, they put so many feet wrong that if they were accused of drink driving they’d have been locked up for thirteen consecutive life sentences, but the mob is a fickle thing. As are the cops with the breathalizers, so be warned.
Nevertheless, the fen of fandom were rarely disappointed until 2003, coincidentally the year that Zig-Zag-Gay-Ass was created and RTD announced that the real show was coming back, so no one had to piss about with stopgaps like audios anymore. Since then, the range has managed the impressive feat of treading water in a downward spiral of increasing lacklustreness, and, frankly not worth the time or the cash.
Worst of all was the Eighth Doctor range – once the bravest and most innovative forms of possible Doctor, it is now almost forgotten now that Paul McGann has gone from the Current Doctor to the One Before The One Before The Current Doctor Who Was Brilliant In Casanova.
If only there was some kind of pattern.
Trevor Baxendale, OBE, MBE, BSC, first handed in a version of this script in 2002, fully expecting that no one had done an "Eighth Doctor Versus Hellraiser" story before. Tragically the script was used as kitty litter and the story remained in genesis until 2005 when it was re-submitted and then rejected immediately as it did not feature enough fanwanky foreshadowing to the current Ninth Doctor’s TV series.
Two weeks later, the re-submitted "The Cenobites" was rejected again as featuring far too much fanwanky foreshadowing to the Ninth Doctor, as the Tenth was being cast and Eccleston was 'SO yesterday!' as Gay Russell would say, quite a lot, often when no one was present and thus unaware that this was a symptom of his complete nervous breakdown that left him in charge of Cosgrove Hall’s "Unique Head And Shoulder Doctor Who Animation Department" which went bankrupt three hours later.
However, let us open a black hole in real space and rewind the continuum slightly, to when Russell was still in charge of Big Finish if we can avoid the inevitable Temporal Orbit.
Now totally out of new material, Big Finish was once again being forced to produce scripts they’d maybe accepted and then used in paper plane competitions for their own amusement. Thus, after the soul-crushing despair of Steve Lyon’s Clock Work, it was decided that "Doctor Who Sits Inside Your Head Among the Dead And Mocks You As You’re Sleeping Dear Sweet Jesus They’re Coming Through The Walls Oh God Protect Us Please!" would have to be the next excursion for the Eighth Doctor, Charley Pollard and Cecil Rizz Esquire to suffer.
Baxendale relished the chance to write for Paul McGann’s uniquely Liverpudlian incarnation since Baxendale was uniquely Liverpudlian himself, and thought nothing of the inherent paradox in this sentence. The script originally was an extreme survival reality game show hosted by the Kro’ka in The Double The Fist Universe Story Arc, but only for about three minutes before Baxendale rubbished the arc like every other sane member of the human race. Another abandoned plot thread has the Pinhead character unmasked at the end of episode three to reveal he was really Eric Sykes all the time – hence Pinhead calling himself Eric at various points in the story as heavy-handed exposition.
Production on DWSIYHATDAMYAYSDSJTCTTWOGPUP was slightly hampered as, after re-submitting the same storyline three times an hour for five years, Baxendale found the plot incredibly predictable – especially since it was stolen wholesale from a less-than-memorable episode of Garth Marenghi’s DarkPlace hospital drama.
"Anyone can write a story that surprises the audience," Baxendale said over three pipes of opium, "but to write a story that surprises the AUTHOR, well, that takes imagination. And genius. And blind luck. And more opium. Suki, more lavender oil in my triceps."
Thus, in order to make sure that he had NO idea what was going to happen next, Baxendale logged onto SimplyScripts.Com and downloaded a heap of sci fi horror film early drafts, and cut and pasted randomly from them into the script for DWSIYHATDAMYAYSDSJTCTTWOGPUP, in particular Cube, Scanners, Aliens, Friday 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream If You Know What You Did Last Friday Thirteenth, every film done by Lucio Fulchi and, for an extra twist, Hating Alison Ashley.
Curiously, this created the most predictable plot line used by Big Finish so far. In fact, wander into the local pub and – give or take some giant maggots – the average punter will know the plot off by heart, from the amnesiac Doctor to the cop-out ending where our heroes bravely run for their miserable lives.
"Yeah, well, Doctor Who’s STARDIS arrives in this base that’s under siege by this monster, right? And all the wankers in the base are trying to get out before it turns them into potato salad (the stuff in tins, not the firm, tasty, delicatessen variety). Doctor Who gets locked up and loses his memory while his bird and some losers run up and down lots of corridors telling us the monster’s chasing us cause the show is show cheap it can’t get a monster outfit. Part of the charm of that pathetic, childish crap. Billie Piper’s well fit, in’t she?"
Tragically, timing meant the sequence where C’Rizz puts on a hockey mask and chases Chatterbeast while the Doctor puts on a floppy hat, a stripy jumper and an Edward Scissorhands prop was cut from the final product. Ironically, this makes the plot make a lot more sense.
Another unintentional script tidy was carried out when Baxendale, for a laugh, shuffled every scene in the episode to a completely random place and this amazingly made the narrative more linear.
Meanwhile, Steve Foxx, once again sidelined since his much hated character had been brutally killed off years earlier in a divergent universe, once again got his own back on the production team.
After providing in the inappropriate cello horror music for Clock Work and the ridiculous Waltzing Matilda to The Unsettling, he used an incredibly cheap and nasty 1990s techno brass beat which was as appropriate to this demonic slasher flick as a the Stripper Song at an Amish birthday party. When the cheesy jazz pub turn prodding away the same few notes on the cheap and nasty 1980s Casio keyboard was found, he was hung, drawn and quartered and fed to the hellbeast next door to the studios Big Finish were recording in at the time.
Critically, Rubik’s Cube didn’t do too badly, since after Baxendale’s truly awful New Adventure audio The Dark Llama, expectations about his next audio were so low they were in fact drilling a hole to the inner core of the Earth, deep in the mantle well below the crust.
"Time War Trouble" by Shampoo and Conditioner
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Ever since Fargo
Got turned to rubble! Yeah, yeah!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Dustbins versus Time Lords
Gonna burst the Time Bubble!
We could be on the front line
Fighting for the cause
With the N-Forms and the Bowships
And all the in-laws!
We tried to dodge the draft
With a new identity
Get an office job
Claim to be a loony!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Higher beings brickin’ it
It sure ain’t subtle! Yeah, yeah!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Acardia has fallen
Romana’s getting stubble!
We didn’t want to fight
In the last apocalypse
Even though the Nestles say it’s a
"Piece of piss!"
The Animus is just some dust
Eternals running for the hills
Dustbins’ getting religion and
It’s giving us the... chills!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
We’ll be right behind the sofa
In a Type 40 shuttle! Yeah, yeah!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
It’s a battle in the vortex
Quick march on the double!
The Time Lords are after us
And they’re as mad as hell
The Doctor’s super confident
But you never can tell!
We’re hiding out in Cardiff
Coz there’s nowhere else to go!
Though how it fits with RTD
Only God will know!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
Creation is at stake
Got time for a cuddle? Yeah Yeah!
Belgium,
There’s Time War Trouble!
To Gallifrey confusion
And continuity befuddle!
8th Doctor - Something Inside (i)
Serial 9B – Rubik's Cube
An Alternative Program Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Twenty-Eighth Entry in the EC Unauthorized Guide O' Takin Over The Asylum
D O C T O R W H O
Serial 9B – Rubik's Cube -
Part One – Dunno Can’t Remember
The Temporal Difference of Opinion between the Time Lords of Gallifrey and the Mighty Dustbin Umpire rages across all the known universes. Bowships attack the Deathsmiths of Goth, Black Hole Carriers clash with Death Stars and N-Forms fight to the death against a spatio-temporal shake’n’vac.
As the time lines of lesser races and planet shift and higher species are devastated, Doctor Who is trying to get locked up in a Gallifreyan lunatic asylum in a desperate attempt to dodge the draft.
The Doctor claims he has total amnesia. His (for want of a better term) companions agree this is likely. The Doctor’s post regenerative amnesia has always been more intense than other Time Lords – indeed, his latest transformation left him with no idea who he was, and he soon lost it again in a booby trap from the Bastard, again in a devilish attack by Lavros, then having his mind sucked out by Agrajag, then the Sunnydale Brain Sucker-Outer, the devastating legacy of Retroactive Continuity, the emotional turmoil of the afterlife, and now hitting himself in the face repeatedly with a frying pan seems to be the last straw. The Doctor adds there was also that time he accidentally nuked Gallifrey and was left wandering amnesiac for one hundred years.
"How do you remember that?!" C'Rizz demands.
"I don't!" shouts the Doctor, thinking quickly.
The Time Lords ultimately decide that the Doctor IS amnesiac and so sends the TARDIS hurtling towards the Rubik’s Cube, a Lemarchand Box the size of the planet Jupiter. It is staffed by Cenobites, a bunch of extra dimensional punk rocker S&M demons who are dedicated to giving Time Lords the ultimate experience in either pleasure or pain. The Doctor isn’t a hundred per cent certain which is right, but is confident he’s got a 50/50 chance of Nirvana.
A booming voice is heard, "WARNING. YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER RUBIK’S CUBE - ALL FORMS OF ARE PROHIBITED. DO NOT ATTEMPT KARIOKE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. KARIOKE MACHINES WILL BE FORCIBLY REMOVED. (GENITAL PIERCINGS ARE COMPULSORY). CAUTION. YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS. YOU HAVE NO POWERS. YOU HAVE NO DEFENCE. YOU ARE NOW INSIDE THE RUBIK’S CUBE. HAVE A NICE DAY."
The TARDIS lands in the foyer of the Rubik’s Cube next to a pot plant, a few comfy chairs and a table of old Woman’s Weeklys. The Doctor, still trying to act amnesiac, pretends to be surprised that this is not the Festival of Ghana but a reception area with no water cooler.
Charley and C’Rizz are immediately struck by the cold metallic structure, the lack of light, windows or deodorant. There is the stench of human sweat, human fear and very cold coffee. The Doctor picks up a copy of Cosmopoliton when a small goblin jumps onto the coffee table and vomits all over the magazines and then explodes.
The Doctor suspects this is some wacky Cenobite initiation ceremony, and is confident that they will be honoured guests, treated as kings with every sordid whim fulfilled utterly no matter how baser the instinct beneath it.
C’Rizz confides to Charley he isn’t sure if the Doctor is truly amnesic, but the Time Lord is clearly utterly insane enough to warrant a spell in this Gallifreyan mental institution.
In the distance, a toilet is flushed. Charley and C’Rizz decide it might be safer to take a suicide charge against the Dustbin Emperor flagship than hang around a beige waiting room. The Doctor laughs in their faces, accusing them of shitting their pants in fear because of a few scary noises.
"And an evil little goblin with an exploding head," C’Rizz reminds us.
"Oh yeah, that too. Sorry, forgot."
The Doctor goes over to the charity box and starts to steal the cash contained therein while the others decide to ditch him.
In a painfully embarrassing moment of stupidity, Charley and C’Rizz get lost in the waiting room and assume the TARDIS has disappeared when it is simply on the other side of the room. Charley and C’Rizz also think the Doctor has vanished and they run out of the waiting room, screaming hysterically.
The Doctor watches them go, muttering something like "gaywads" under his breath as he empties loose change into his pockets.
However, a hooded black shape holding a hook steps from behind the TARDIS and calmly approaches the Doctor as he hums old Zombie songs to himself and flips through a copy of Rolling Stone...
Meanwhile, Charley and C’Rizz run off down the corridor, wailing and moaning with less rational thought than a script writing session for Touchwood. OOOH YEAH! SMACKDOWN! SMACK FUCKING DOWN!
The sound of a pencil falling to the floor stretches their sanity to breaking point as two pierced, demonic figures step out of the kitchen area. This is Butterball, an immense fat demon munching donuts, and Dreamer, a bald white-skinned leather clad woman.
Dreamer’s presence immediately cause Charley and C’Rizz to slobber with lust and immediately agree to her orders to become her bitch.
These Cenobites have used their sinister psychic powers... and very mundane powers of hearing and eyesight... to locate the time traveling sluts, and suspect they might know how to set up their broadband internet connection.
Butterball is furious to discover that the goblin formally known as "Pistonpants" has exploded before he can chip into the sweepstake on the outcome of the Temporal Difference of Opinion. Butterball continues to bitch as they head down the long, dark corridors and muses that, if he were a particularly cynical and paranoid Cenobite, he’d suspect the staff of Rubik’s Cube were being hunted down by an unknown force, one by one and it is too late for any of them to survive.
"Oh, shut yer cakehole," Dreamer snaps, slashing open Butterball’s guts and nearly drowning C’Rizz in the yellow, bloody fat that gushes out with insane high-pitched laughter.
As Charley quietly vomits in the corner, Dreamer admits she is unable to fathom why two hominid pleasure seekers like them would be dumb enough to come to the Rubik’s Cube of Unending Torment?
The time travelers explain that they were just escorting a loony Time Lord called the Doctor who has a complicated repetitive amnesiac disorder. Butterball checks the duty roster and realizes he won the sweepstake of "How Doctor Who Escapes Time Conscription". He is so delighted his pancreas drops out.
Dreamer calls Charley and C'Rizz craven and pathetic liars and Cenobite wannabes that couldn’t be Goth enough to get into a Marilyn Manson cover of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love".
However, this does not have a soul destroying effect on either 1930s rent girl or pan-universal Eutermisan, neither of whom know anything about Marilyn Mason, Soft Cell or even what a cover is. Dreamer sighs and stubs out a cigarette on her own forehead, confusing the duo even more than they were before.
C'Rizz is also confused about why a bunch of S&M bondage freaks would piss about with definitions of pleasure and plain as justification instead of getting out the laser-sighted triple-barreled dildo probes no questions asked?
Butterball finds the conversation getting rather nauseating which prompts Charley to start it all over again, this time using the phrases "full bathtub" "4000 watts of direct current" and "conductive testicle handcuffs" and this causes Butterball to unzip his head to vomit.
Just when things couldn’t get any more surreal, a cloaked figure with a silver hook and a carnival Scream II ghost mask appears, and the Cenobites gather their flesh and entrails and run like fuck.
Even Charley and C'Rizz can tell than when Cenobites are scared shitless of something, it’s not good, and they too flee for the upper landing as fast as they can as the cloaked figure moves through the darkness towards them.
At this point, however, I feel duty bound to mention the incidental music, which is a cheerful 1980s polka on a Yamaha Organ. This has the curious effect of canceling out any real tension in this story. Or indeed interest in this story.
Dreamer explains that the mysterious psycho killer is clearly a being of immense power if it can kill Cenobites, who butcher and maim each other the same way other species breathe oxygen. The chances of ANY of them surviving an encounter with the killer is ludicrously low.
They reach the next level and close the door behind them... only for it to be opened immediately! The Cenobites have forgotten that the doors in Rubik’s Cube are swing doors that open both ways!
Screaming hysterically, C’Rizz hides behind Charley, hoping her luscious blonde hair, over-developed breasts and milk-white honey tasting skin will make her a viable target.
"Plus you’re fat enough to totally conceal me," C’Rizz sniggers.
Annoyed, Charley picks him up and hurls him bodily at the serial killer...
Part Two – Dunno Can’t Remember
Luckily, the serial killer seems disgusted at C’Rizz presence and throws him down the stairs, rubbing his hands obsessively and then running off for a watch.
Charley tells the Cenobites they must assume C’Rizz is dead... because even if they’re wrong, they DO need cheering up.
C’Rizz wakes up at the bottom of the stairwell with a blinding light being shone into his eyes by a newcomer with an even more hideous face than the Eutermisan.
This is Chatter Beast, who has found the Doctor already and drags the Eutermisan by his tongue through the corridors to the Palace of A Thousand Sucking Chest Wounds.
Inside the Palace of A Thousand Sucking Chest Wounds, the Doctor has been stripped naked and crucified by a strange looking person in a leather cape and lots of nails sticking out of his head. This is the Lead Cenobite, AKA The Angel of Suffering, AKA The Dark Prince of Pain, AKA That Bloke With All The Nails In His Head from Hellraizer, AKA Uncle Fester’s Goth Phase, AKA The Prick of Hell...
The Doctor gets bored and decides to call him "Pinhead" for a rather obvious reason, and complains that he hasn’t got ANY pleasure so far – not even the kinky, naughty variety.
Pinhead has begun this torture for various reasons, but the one that will get put in all the reference guides like this one is simply to test whether or not the Doctor is faking his amnesia. The Doctor insists he can’t remember if he’s faking or not, and although he could be lying there’s no reason for him to do so or is there?
Pinhead goes crosseyed trying to work this out, shrugs, and rams a hot poker through the Doctor’s ribcage in annoyance.
Angrily, Pinhead points out that for a total amnesiac with a complete blank for a mind, the Doctor knows his name, where he is, how he got there, and the fact the first episode was Gilligan’s Island filmed on 23 November 1963 and was so awful that watching it killed CS Lewis stone dead.
"There is something of a contradiction here," Pinhead points out, before bitching that he stupidly signed up a contract at the Gallifrey Home for the Mentally Bewildered and Terminally Incontinent when he could be out there, killing Dustbins and wiping out time streams. He could have been someone! DAMN IT! He could have been a Cenobite!
"You ARE a Cenobite," the Doctor complains, frowning.
"Oh yeah. Slipped my mind for a bit. Sorry."
Pinhead then has Chatter Beast drag in C’Rizz who the Doctor claims never to have met before ever in his entire life and he doesn’t care if C’Rizz lives or dies in fact kill him, kill him now, please, god, I beg you, please kill the bastard!!
Pinhead grumbles that maybe he should have gone for hypnosis or some other shit like that. There’s no way of telling if the Doctor is bluffing or not – the amnesiac Doctor wouldn’t care if he killed C’Rizz and the non-amnesiac Doctor would be over the moon.
Brooding on this problem, Pinhead conjures up numerous chains with barbed hooks that dig into C’Rizz exoskeleton and pulls in different directions. Maybe delight at this torture might trick the Doctor into revealing his true colours.
The Doctor insists he cannot remember anything, but would like some popcorn for when C’Rizz is ripped violently in half.
Unfortunately, C’Rizz starts making weird faces and screams orgasmically, "Oh yeah! YEAH, BABY! OH, JOHNNY CARSON! JOHNNY CARSON! JOHNNY CARSON! SPANK ME, SATAN MY BITCH, SPANK MEEEEEEEEEEE!"
This puts off everyone.
Elsewhere, Charley, Dreamer and Butterball stop for a ciggie break on the stairs and explain that the Cenobites are amoral demonic killing machines summoned forth to explore all human experience, especially those involving metal penetration of sensitive flesh.
Their missions including eavesdropping on the enemy, reconnaissance, teleport incursions, and even stripping off enemy flesh and dangling it in a pit of horny speelsnapes, each one given the AIDS virus.
After the previous Temporal Difference of Opinion, with the Haldoran Evolution Jugglers and the Eternal Bores, the Time Lords placed the Cenobites in a puzzle box the size of a planet and then off loaded the more loopy of Time Lords there for rehabilitation and occasionally lethal auto-erotic asphyxiation.
The Rubik’s Cube is now ruled by Eric, AKA Pinhead, AKA Lead Cenobite, AKA The Angel of Suffering, AKA The Dark Prince of Pain... and he’s hiding on the top floor out of reach of the mysterious psycho killer that’s running around gutting Cenobites like fish fingers. Now Butterball and Dreamer are all that’s left, which is pretty lucky as the budget could never cope for more.
Now they have been left trapped with a serial killer, in the ultimate base under siege plotline and no one is going to get out of here alive unless they are a series regular. Or Angelique the Loser Loner Loony, the hithertoo unmentioned Swamp Witch who lives in the stationary cupboard, claiming to be the most powerful Cenobite ever.
The interrogation of the Doctor is still going nowhere, and not even some cunning Cracker-style quick questions can work since the Doctor has the cunning plan of replying to every single thing said to him with "Don’t remember".
Pinhead wonders if maybe the serial killer has left a hole in the Doctor’s mind... or maybe just a hole in the back of the Doctor’s head. Neither, in fact. Since the Doctor has no hope, no rights and no chance of escape, Pinhead gets out a black and decker drill and starts to ventilate the Doctor’s skull...
Part Three – Dunno Can’t Remember
The Doctor desperately suggests that he and Pinhead can talk about this reasonably, have a cup of tea, settle down in Cardiff and be happy to each other. In fact, why aren’t they friends? The Doctor offers to change, cut his leather, wear leather and be "dead Northern" from now on, if it makes Pinhead happy.
Disturbed the Ka Faraq Gatri is chatting him up, Pinhead shudders in horror and throws the drill over his shoulder, beheading Chatter Beast in a display of postmodern animalism.
On the bright side, Pinhead now firmly believes the Doctor is truly mentally disturbed.
Meanwhile, fleeing another glimpse of the serial killer, Charley and the Cebonites hide with Angelique, who promptly kicks them out. Charley, seeing Angelique has taken the form of Anne Robinson, is more than happy to take her chances with the slasher outside.
Angelique explains she read Charley’s mind and now feels incredibly turned on and requires about thirty-four cold showers before she will be able to speak properly – and she has already seen the minds of the Doctor and C’Rizz, so this is some seriously twisted shit.
Butterball gets bored and wanders off, idly wondering if any plot will unfold before the end of the episode. He decides to remove the skin of Pistonpants and use it in a strange game of Sadism Cricket.
The Doctor suggests they remove his brain from his skull and place it in a blender, then changes his mind on the ground that similar attempts have had brain damage as a not uncommon side effect. The Doctor hurriedly changes the topic and starts humming Pink Floyd’s "One Of These Days" to himself.
Chatter Beast realizes he can torment C’Rizz to a far higher degree WITHOUT using chains and hooks and whips, and gets rather depressed as he really enjoys those parts of his work. Nevertheless, he decides to remove C’Rizz throat with a buzz saw when Pinhead notices the Doctor crushing up Pinhead’s supply of codeine and snorting it while laughing like a madman. Pinhead is put out to say the least – having all that metal in your skull can give you quite a headache.
However, the Doctor is now so full of painkillers that the Cenobites cannot cause him either pain or pleasure or any screwy definition in between. Laughing diabolically, the Doctor picks up a handy cricket bat and beats the nihilistic shit out of Pinhead and Chatter Beast, sending nasal cartilage across the torture chamber. The Doctor then reverses the polarity of the neutron flow and the Cenobites start screaming.
Cheerfully, the Doctor and C’Rizz head off to the TARDIS, where the Eutermisan accuses the Time Lord of getting him beaten up to convince the Cenobites he was genuinely amnesiac. The Doctor insists that he genuinely can’t remember his companion, but this means he has to act all surprised and amazed as C’Rizz explains that the blue box is their home and they travel through time and space in it.
When C’Rizz notes the Doctor still seemed to recognize the police box, he gets kicked in the head repeatedly. "Are you suffering from blood loss yet?" the Doctor demands to know, kicking C’Rizz in the gut.
They leave the reception area for a very good reason lost in the narrative ether and stumble conveniently across Charley seconds later. Charlie finds all sorts of holes and discontinuities in the Doctor’s account of events, causing him to panic and claim there’s a serial killer right behind them and they run up and down corridors.
Meanwhile, Butterball is furious with himself for the way he’s behaved – mainly because he had two fresh victims to flay alive and feed to maggots and what did he do? Make insults about Soft Cell! On top of that they’re trapped like Macra in a sushi restaurant and they are all going to die and maybe, he suspects, it won’t give them any vicarious thrills whatsoever!
Dreamer kicks him in the groin and removes his spinal column with the sharp end of a school compass.
The serial killer attacks the Doctor, who pulls out a set of nunchukas and a brutal kung fu Jackie Chan style fight begins, with all sorts of convenient blunt objects being used as deadly weapons. At numerous points C’Rizz is used by both sides to create complete carnage.
All underscored by that Belgian electropop jazz in a scene which really doesn’t work on audio.
The Doctor flings the serial killer down the stairwell, then clutches his head and claims he’s got even MORE amnesia than before!
Angelique emerges from the shadows and ominously chuckles, explaining she has read all their minds and knows their dirty little secrets. She knows exactly where Charley got that yeast infection, if the Doctor is really faking amnesia, and just what C’Rizz intends to do with Felicity Kendall...
"In that case..." says C’Rizz reasonably, before he, Charley and the Doctor rip Angelique’s head off and hurl her body down the stairwell, laughing while they do so.
"That was close, wasn’t?" the Doctor chuckles happily.
Part Four – Dunno Can’t Remember
Butterball and Dreamer head up the stairs looking for pretty much anything to torture, main, dissect and shag. Butterball is curious about the fact the only patient that ever turned up at the Rubik’s Cube was the Doctor and soon after a psychotic serial killer started killing everyone. In fact, the serial killer started BEFORE the Doctor arrived? What if the Doctor didn’t arrive at all, but was there all the time?
Convinced by his own argument, he swears to kill the Doctor, then trips over Angelique’s corpse and falls down the stairs.
Meanwhile, Pinhead and Chatter Beast run down the stairs believing that the sonic screwdriver is some lethally addictive sex toy. Chatter Beast threatens to use it on Charley, and is put off when she is totally up for the idea.
Pinhead, frustrated, headbutts Chatter Beast and kills him horribly.
The Doctor muses that Pinhead could be the serial killer himself. Of course, the Doctor himself could be the serial killer. Or Charley. Or C’Rizz. Or a very angry midget. But out of all the options, Pinhead would probably be the most likely target.
After a few attempts of going "eenie meenie minie moe" to work out who is the psycho killer, Pinhead gets bored and starts to summon up chains and hooks when suddenly they wrap around the nails in his head and pulls him apart in every direction.
Bits of him fly off and strike Butterball, knocking him back down the stairs for a second time.
The hooded, ghost-masked serial killer jumps out of the shadows and does an impressive juggling display of sharp blades.
To everyone’s surprise, it turns out Dreamer was the serial killer.
The Doctor, Charley and C’Rizz look on for a few minutes, get bored and wander off, discussing the 2005 European Cup Final when Liverpool was 3-0 down at half-time against AC Milan, then scored three times in the second half and went on to win the match in extra time.
They head into the TARDIS, closing the door to the stairwell and locking it after them, sealing the serial killer and Butterball trapped in the heart of the Rubik’s Cube forever. Unless, you know, someone lets them out or they break down the door or try and get through the ventilation ducts or some crap like that.
After putting a 'CLOSED FOR THE TEMPORAL DIFFERENCE OF OPINION' sign on the front door, the Doctor whistles a Puccini aria backwards in triple time and he and the others leave, realizing they have only one place left to hide from Time Lord conscription...
...Cardiff!
An Alternative Program Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Twenty-Eighth Entry in the EC Unauthorized Guide O' Takin Over The Asylum
D O C T O R W H O
Serial 9B – Rubik's Cube -
Part One – Dunno Can’t Remember
The Temporal Difference of Opinion between the Time Lords of Gallifrey and the Mighty Dustbin Umpire rages across all the known universes. Bowships attack the Deathsmiths of Goth, Black Hole Carriers clash with Death Stars and N-Forms fight to the death against a spatio-temporal shake’n’vac.
As the time lines of lesser races and planet shift and higher species are devastated, Doctor Who is trying to get locked up in a Gallifreyan lunatic asylum in a desperate attempt to dodge the draft.
The Doctor claims he has total amnesia. His (for want of a better term) companions agree this is likely. The Doctor’s post regenerative amnesia has always been more intense than other Time Lords – indeed, his latest transformation left him with no idea who he was, and he soon lost it again in a booby trap from the Bastard, again in a devilish attack by Lavros, then having his mind sucked out by Agrajag, then the Sunnydale Brain Sucker-Outer, the devastating legacy of Retroactive Continuity, the emotional turmoil of the afterlife, and now hitting himself in the face repeatedly with a frying pan seems to be the last straw. The Doctor adds there was also that time he accidentally nuked Gallifrey and was left wandering amnesiac for one hundred years.
"How do you remember that?!" C'Rizz demands.
"I don't!" shouts the Doctor, thinking quickly.
The Time Lords ultimately decide that the Doctor IS amnesiac and so sends the TARDIS hurtling towards the Rubik’s Cube, a Lemarchand Box the size of the planet Jupiter. It is staffed by Cenobites, a bunch of extra dimensional punk rocker S&M demons who are dedicated to giving Time Lords the ultimate experience in either pleasure or pain. The Doctor isn’t a hundred per cent certain which is right, but is confident he’s got a 50/50 chance of Nirvana.
A booming voice is heard, "WARNING. YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER RUBIK’S CUBE - ALL FORMS OF ARE PROHIBITED. DO NOT ATTEMPT KARIOKE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. KARIOKE MACHINES WILL BE FORCIBLY REMOVED. (GENITAL PIERCINGS ARE COMPULSORY). CAUTION. YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS. YOU HAVE NO POWERS. YOU HAVE NO DEFENCE. YOU ARE NOW INSIDE THE RUBIK’S CUBE. HAVE A NICE DAY."
The TARDIS lands in the foyer of the Rubik’s Cube next to a pot plant, a few comfy chairs and a table of old Woman’s Weeklys. The Doctor, still trying to act amnesiac, pretends to be surprised that this is not the Festival of Ghana but a reception area with no water cooler.
Charley and C’Rizz are immediately struck by the cold metallic structure, the lack of light, windows or deodorant. There is the stench of human sweat, human fear and very cold coffee. The Doctor picks up a copy of Cosmopoliton when a small goblin jumps onto the coffee table and vomits all over the magazines and then explodes.
The Doctor suspects this is some wacky Cenobite initiation ceremony, and is confident that they will be honoured guests, treated as kings with every sordid whim fulfilled utterly no matter how baser the instinct beneath it.
C’Rizz confides to Charley he isn’t sure if the Doctor is truly amnesic, but the Time Lord is clearly utterly insane enough to warrant a spell in this Gallifreyan mental institution.
In the distance, a toilet is flushed. Charley and C’Rizz decide it might be safer to take a suicide charge against the Dustbin Emperor flagship than hang around a beige waiting room. The Doctor laughs in their faces, accusing them of shitting their pants in fear because of a few scary noises.
"And an evil little goblin with an exploding head," C’Rizz reminds us.
"Oh yeah, that too. Sorry, forgot."
The Doctor goes over to the charity box and starts to steal the cash contained therein while the others decide to ditch him.
In a painfully embarrassing moment of stupidity, Charley and C’Rizz get lost in the waiting room and assume the TARDIS has disappeared when it is simply on the other side of the room. Charley and C’Rizz also think the Doctor has vanished and they run out of the waiting room, screaming hysterically.
The Doctor watches them go, muttering something like "gaywads" under his breath as he empties loose change into his pockets.
However, a hooded black shape holding a hook steps from behind the TARDIS and calmly approaches the Doctor as he hums old Zombie songs to himself and flips through a copy of Rolling Stone...
Meanwhile, Charley and C’Rizz run off down the corridor, wailing and moaning with less rational thought than a script writing session for Touchwood. OOOH YEAH! SMACKDOWN! SMACK FUCKING DOWN!
The sound of a pencil falling to the floor stretches their sanity to breaking point as two pierced, demonic figures step out of the kitchen area. This is Butterball, an immense fat demon munching donuts, and Dreamer, a bald white-skinned leather clad woman.
Dreamer’s presence immediately cause Charley and C’Rizz to slobber with lust and immediately agree to her orders to become her bitch.
These Cenobites have used their sinister psychic powers... and very mundane powers of hearing and eyesight... to locate the time traveling sluts, and suspect they might know how to set up their broadband internet connection.
Butterball is furious to discover that the goblin formally known as "Pistonpants" has exploded before he can chip into the sweepstake on the outcome of the Temporal Difference of Opinion. Butterball continues to bitch as they head down the long, dark corridors and muses that, if he were a particularly cynical and paranoid Cenobite, he’d suspect the staff of Rubik’s Cube were being hunted down by an unknown force, one by one and it is too late for any of them to survive.
"Oh, shut yer cakehole," Dreamer snaps, slashing open Butterball’s guts and nearly drowning C’Rizz in the yellow, bloody fat that gushes out with insane high-pitched laughter.
As Charley quietly vomits in the corner, Dreamer admits she is unable to fathom why two hominid pleasure seekers like them would be dumb enough to come to the Rubik’s Cube of Unending Torment?
The time travelers explain that they were just escorting a loony Time Lord called the Doctor who has a complicated repetitive amnesiac disorder. Butterball checks the duty roster and realizes he won the sweepstake of "How Doctor Who Escapes Time Conscription". He is so delighted his pancreas drops out.
Dreamer calls Charley and C'Rizz craven and pathetic liars and Cenobite wannabes that couldn’t be Goth enough to get into a Marilyn Manson cover of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love".
However, this does not have a soul destroying effect on either 1930s rent girl or pan-universal Eutermisan, neither of whom know anything about Marilyn Mason, Soft Cell or even what a cover is. Dreamer sighs and stubs out a cigarette on her own forehead, confusing the duo even more than they were before.
C'Rizz is also confused about why a bunch of S&M bondage freaks would piss about with definitions of pleasure and plain as justification instead of getting out the laser-sighted triple-barreled dildo probes no questions asked?
Butterball finds the conversation getting rather nauseating which prompts Charley to start it all over again, this time using the phrases "full bathtub" "4000 watts of direct current" and "conductive testicle handcuffs" and this causes Butterball to unzip his head to vomit.
Just when things couldn’t get any more surreal, a cloaked figure with a silver hook and a carnival Scream II ghost mask appears, and the Cenobites gather their flesh and entrails and run like fuck.
Even Charley and C'Rizz can tell than when Cenobites are scared shitless of something, it’s not good, and they too flee for the upper landing as fast as they can as the cloaked figure moves through the darkness towards them.
At this point, however, I feel duty bound to mention the incidental music, which is a cheerful 1980s polka on a Yamaha Organ. This has the curious effect of canceling out any real tension in this story. Or indeed interest in this story.
Dreamer explains that the mysterious psycho killer is clearly a being of immense power if it can kill Cenobites, who butcher and maim each other the same way other species breathe oxygen. The chances of ANY of them surviving an encounter with the killer is ludicrously low.
They reach the next level and close the door behind them... only for it to be opened immediately! The Cenobites have forgotten that the doors in Rubik’s Cube are swing doors that open both ways!
Screaming hysterically, C’Rizz hides behind Charley, hoping her luscious blonde hair, over-developed breasts and milk-white honey tasting skin will make her a viable target.
"Plus you’re fat enough to totally conceal me," C’Rizz sniggers.
Annoyed, Charley picks him up and hurls him bodily at the serial killer...
Part Two – Dunno Can’t Remember
Luckily, the serial killer seems disgusted at C’Rizz presence and throws him down the stairs, rubbing his hands obsessively and then running off for a watch.
Charley tells the Cenobites they must assume C’Rizz is dead... because even if they’re wrong, they DO need cheering up.
C’Rizz wakes up at the bottom of the stairwell with a blinding light being shone into his eyes by a newcomer with an even more hideous face than the Eutermisan.
This is Chatter Beast, who has found the Doctor already and drags the Eutermisan by his tongue through the corridors to the Palace of A Thousand Sucking Chest Wounds.
Inside the Palace of A Thousand Sucking Chest Wounds, the Doctor has been stripped naked and crucified by a strange looking person in a leather cape and lots of nails sticking out of his head. This is the Lead Cenobite, AKA The Angel of Suffering, AKA The Dark Prince of Pain, AKA That Bloke With All The Nails In His Head from Hellraizer, AKA Uncle Fester’s Goth Phase, AKA The Prick of Hell...
The Doctor gets bored and decides to call him "Pinhead" for a rather obvious reason, and complains that he hasn’t got ANY pleasure so far – not even the kinky, naughty variety.
Pinhead has begun this torture for various reasons, but the one that will get put in all the reference guides like this one is simply to test whether or not the Doctor is faking his amnesia. The Doctor insists he can’t remember if he’s faking or not, and although he could be lying there’s no reason for him to do so or is there?
Pinhead goes crosseyed trying to work this out, shrugs, and rams a hot poker through the Doctor’s ribcage in annoyance.
Angrily, Pinhead points out that for a total amnesiac with a complete blank for a mind, the Doctor knows his name, where he is, how he got there, and the fact the first episode was Gilligan’s Island filmed on 23 November 1963 and was so awful that watching it killed CS Lewis stone dead.
"There is something of a contradiction here," Pinhead points out, before bitching that he stupidly signed up a contract at the Gallifrey Home for the Mentally Bewildered and Terminally Incontinent when he could be out there, killing Dustbins and wiping out time streams. He could have been someone! DAMN IT! He could have been a Cenobite!
"You ARE a Cenobite," the Doctor complains, frowning.
"Oh yeah. Slipped my mind for a bit. Sorry."
Pinhead then has Chatter Beast drag in C’Rizz who the Doctor claims never to have met before ever in his entire life and he doesn’t care if C’Rizz lives or dies in fact kill him, kill him now, please, god, I beg you, please kill the bastard!!
Pinhead grumbles that maybe he should have gone for hypnosis or some other shit like that. There’s no way of telling if the Doctor is bluffing or not – the amnesiac Doctor wouldn’t care if he killed C’Rizz and the non-amnesiac Doctor would be over the moon.
Brooding on this problem, Pinhead conjures up numerous chains with barbed hooks that dig into C’Rizz exoskeleton and pulls in different directions. Maybe delight at this torture might trick the Doctor into revealing his true colours.
The Doctor insists he cannot remember anything, but would like some popcorn for when C’Rizz is ripped violently in half.
Unfortunately, C’Rizz starts making weird faces and screams orgasmically, "Oh yeah! YEAH, BABY! OH, JOHNNY CARSON! JOHNNY CARSON! JOHNNY CARSON! SPANK ME, SATAN MY BITCH, SPANK MEEEEEEEEEEE!"
This puts off everyone.
Elsewhere, Charley, Dreamer and Butterball stop for a ciggie break on the stairs and explain that the Cenobites are amoral demonic killing machines summoned forth to explore all human experience, especially those involving metal penetration of sensitive flesh.
Their missions including eavesdropping on the enemy, reconnaissance, teleport incursions, and even stripping off enemy flesh and dangling it in a pit of horny speelsnapes, each one given the AIDS virus.
After the previous Temporal Difference of Opinion, with the Haldoran Evolution Jugglers and the Eternal Bores, the Time Lords placed the Cenobites in a puzzle box the size of a planet and then off loaded the more loopy of Time Lords there for rehabilitation and occasionally lethal auto-erotic asphyxiation.
The Rubik’s Cube is now ruled by Eric, AKA Pinhead, AKA Lead Cenobite, AKA The Angel of Suffering, AKA The Dark Prince of Pain... and he’s hiding on the top floor out of reach of the mysterious psycho killer that’s running around gutting Cenobites like fish fingers. Now Butterball and Dreamer are all that’s left, which is pretty lucky as the budget could never cope for more.
Now they have been left trapped with a serial killer, in the ultimate base under siege plotline and no one is going to get out of here alive unless they are a series regular. Or Angelique the Loser Loner Loony, the hithertoo unmentioned Swamp Witch who lives in the stationary cupboard, claiming to be the most powerful Cenobite ever.
The interrogation of the Doctor is still going nowhere, and not even some cunning Cracker-style quick questions can work since the Doctor has the cunning plan of replying to every single thing said to him with "Don’t remember".
Pinhead wonders if maybe the serial killer has left a hole in the Doctor’s mind... or maybe just a hole in the back of the Doctor’s head. Neither, in fact. Since the Doctor has no hope, no rights and no chance of escape, Pinhead gets out a black and decker drill and starts to ventilate the Doctor’s skull...
Part Three – Dunno Can’t Remember
The Doctor desperately suggests that he and Pinhead can talk about this reasonably, have a cup of tea, settle down in Cardiff and be happy to each other. In fact, why aren’t they friends? The Doctor offers to change, cut his leather, wear leather and be "dead Northern" from now on, if it makes Pinhead happy.
Disturbed the Ka Faraq Gatri is chatting him up, Pinhead shudders in horror and throws the drill over his shoulder, beheading Chatter Beast in a display of postmodern animalism.
On the bright side, Pinhead now firmly believes the Doctor is truly mentally disturbed.
Meanwhile, fleeing another glimpse of the serial killer, Charley and the Cebonites hide with Angelique, who promptly kicks them out. Charley, seeing Angelique has taken the form of Anne Robinson, is more than happy to take her chances with the slasher outside.
Angelique explains she read Charley’s mind and now feels incredibly turned on and requires about thirty-four cold showers before she will be able to speak properly – and she has already seen the minds of the Doctor and C’Rizz, so this is some seriously twisted shit.
Butterball gets bored and wanders off, idly wondering if any plot will unfold before the end of the episode. He decides to remove the skin of Pistonpants and use it in a strange game of Sadism Cricket.
The Doctor suggests they remove his brain from his skull and place it in a blender, then changes his mind on the ground that similar attempts have had brain damage as a not uncommon side effect. The Doctor hurriedly changes the topic and starts humming Pink Floyd’s "One Of These Days" to himself.
Chatter Beast realizes he can torment C’Rizz to a far higher degree WITHOUT using chains and hooks and whips, and gets rather depressed as he really enjoys those parts of his work. Nevertheless, he decides to remove C’Rizz throat with a buzz saw when Pinhead notices the Doctor crushing up Pinhead’s supply of codeine and snorting it while laughing like a madman. Pinhead is put out to say the least – having all that metal in your skull can give you quite a headache.
However, the Doctor is now so full of painkillers that the Cenobites cannot cause him either pain or pleasure or any screwy definition in between. Laughing diabolically, the Doctor picks up a handy cricket bat and beats the nihilistic shit out of Pinhead and Chatter Beast, sending nasal cartilage across the torture chamber. The Doctor then reverses the polarity of the neutron flow and the Cenobites start screaming.
Cheerfully, the Doctor and C’Rizz head off to the TARDIS, where the Eutermisan accuses the Time Lord of getting him beaten up to convince the Cenobites he was genuinely amnesiac. The Doctor insists that he genuinely can’t remember his companion, but this means he has to act all surprised and amazed as C’Rizz explains that the blue box is their home and they travel through time and space in it.
When C’Rizz notes the Doctor still seemed to recognize the police box, he gets kicked in the head repeatedly. "Are you suffering from blood loss yet?" the Doctor demands to know, kicking C’Rizz in the gut.
They leave the reception area for a very good reason lost in the narrative ether and stumble conveniently across Charley seconds later. Charlie finds all sorts of holes and discontinuities in the Doctor’s account of events, causing him to panic and claim there’s a serial killer right behind them and they run up and down corridors.
Meanwhile, Butterball is furious with himself for the way he’s behaved – mainly because he had two fresh victims to flay alive and feed to maggots and what did he do? Make insults about Soft Cell! On top of that they’re trapped like Macra in a sushi restaurant and they are all going to die and maybe, he suspects, it won’t give them any vicarious thrills whatsoever!
Dreamer kicks him in the groin and removes his spinal column with the sharp end of a school compass.
The serial killer attacks the Doctor, who pulls out a set of nunchukas and a brutal kung fu Jackie Chan style fight begins, with all sorts of convenient blunt objects being used as deadly weapons. At numerous points C’Rizz is used by both sides to create complete carnage.
All underscored by that Belgian electropop jazz in a scene which really doesn’t work on audio.
The Doctor flings the serial killer down the stairwell, then clutches his head and claims he’s got even MORE amnesia than before!
Angelique emerges from the shadows and ominously chuckles, explaining she has read all their minds and knows their dirty little secrets. She knows exactly where Charley got that yeast infection, if the Doctor is really faking amnesia, and just what C’Rizz intends to do with Felicity Kendall...
"In that case..." says C’Rizz reasonably, before he, Charley and the Doctor rip Angelique’s head off and hurl her body down the stairwell, laughing while they do so.
"That was close, wasn’t?" the Doctor chuckles happily.
Part Four – Dunno Can’t Remember
Butterball and Dreamer head up the stairs looking for pretty much anything to torture, main, dissect and shag. Butterball is curious about the fact the only patient that ever turned up at the Rubik’s Cube was the Doctor and soon after a psychotic serial killer started killing everyone. In fact, the serial killer started BEFORE the Doctor arrived? What if the Doctor didn’t arrive at all, but was there all the time?
Convinced by his own argument, he swears to kill the Doctor, then trips over Angelique’s corpse and falls down the stairs.
Meanwhile, Pinhead and Chatter Beast run down the stairs believing that the sonic screwdriver is some lethally addictive sex toy. Chatter Beast threatens to use it on Charley, and is put off when she is totally up for the idea.
Pinhead, frustrated, headbutts Chatter Beast and kills him horribly.
The Doctor muses that Pinhead could be the serial killer himself. Of course, the Doctor himself could be the serial killer. Or Charley. Or C’Rizz. Or a very angry midget. But out of all the options, Pinhead would probably be the most likely target.
After a few attempts of going "eenie meenie minie moe" to work out who is the psycho killer, Pinhead gets bored and starts to summon up chains and hooks when suddenly they wrap around the nails in his head and pulls him apart in every direction.
Bits of him fly off and strike Butterball, knocking him back down the stairs for a second time.
The hooded, ghost-masked serial killer jumps out of the shadows and does an impressive juggling display of sharp blades.
To everyone’s surprise, it turns out Dreamer was the serial killer.
The Doctor, Charley and C’Rizz look on for a few minutes, get bored and wander off, discussing the 2005 European Cup Final when Liverpool was 3-0 down at half-time against AC Milan, then scored three times in the second half and went on to win the match in extra time.
They head into the TARDIS, closing the door to the stairwell and locking it after them, sealing the serial killer and Butterball trapped in the heart of the Rubik’s Cube forever. Unless, you know, someone lets them out or they break down the door or try and get through the ventilation ducts or some crap like that.
After putting a 'CLOSED FOR THE TEMPORAL DIFFERENCE OF OPINION' sign on the front door, the Doctor whistles a Puccini aria backwards in triple time and he and the others leave, realizing they have only one place left to hide from Time Lord conscription...
...Cardiff!
8th Doctor - Time Works (ii)
Book(s)/Other Related -
Doctor Who Works Clocks
Dilbert Who: The Clockwork Business Development Manager
Charley Pollard's Dock Work: How to Live on Thirty Altarian Dollars A Shag
Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed to be on overtime for most of this story.
Goofs –
How fucking hard can it be to say the words “Tick Tock” in order?! Yet, somehow, not a single Clockwork Man can manage it, the useless, time-wasting piss heads! No, I am NOT envious of their lifestyle!
Fashion Victims – Charley’s ‘Heaven This Way’ lace panties.
Technobabble –
The Clockwork Men rely on ‘tickytockytickytockboom!’ energy.
Links and References -
The Doctor hasn’t been this bored since "The Spam Musuem" (Serial Q).
Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor and Krestorian know each other through their mutual friend Acting Lieutenant Horatio Hornblower, who Krestorian reluctantly imprisoned in a mainland Spanish fort in 1795, “The Duchess and the Devil.”
In one particularly nasty post-regenerative hangover, the Doctor joined Hornblower on the Hotspur as a mid-shapman calling himself Lieutenant George W Bush.
Groovy DVD Extras -
Introduction and narration by Ricky Gervais.
Dialogue Disasters –
Kestorian: You want to know about the Clockwork Men? We work in their shadow, every tick and tock of our lives. We hear them in the workings of the Great Clock. We work hard, turn our hands – but we all wind down in time, and that is when they come for us: when our time is up and, more specifically, when they atomize us in a violent drunken rage...
Doctor: Sorry to interrupt your long speeches, Kestorian, but you DO know this is part four of a four episode story?
Kestorian: Then I fear that our work has been nothing. We will suffer the fate of the Old World. Out time will be over. The seconds are counting down to a fateful future that has already happened, UNLESS we can beat the clock...
Doctor: Christ, he goes on a bit, doesn’t he?
Vannet: The Great Clock cannot be turned back. It measures our progress towards completion.
Revnon: It measures our progress towards lunchtime. I’m famished.
Vannet: Shut up, asshole, I’m trying to be mythic here!
Head Honcho: AS HEAD HONCHO, MY FUNCTION HAVE BEEN MANY, DEPENDENT UPON THE NEEDS OF THE TIME. THE FIRST AGE WAS THE AGE OF INNOVATION, BUT THAT IT LONG OVER. THE AGE OF THE ARCHITECT TOO HAS PASSED. NOW I JUST DO SUDOKU AND WATCH GILMORE GIRLS ON YOUTUBE.
Vannet: This is my punishment, for daring to turn anti clockwise!
Doctor: You mustn’t fear change, Vannet. Sometimes the only way to make something right is to tear it down first. That’s what I tell the insurance company, but the bastards never believe me.
Zanith: I know what the workers say of me, but I’m not addicted to hardcore pornography. It just takes the edge off. I can quit whenever I want to. I just don’t want to, that’s all. Besides, idle hands and all that!
Dialogue Triumphs -
Charley, on her desired, full-time occupation:
"Finding trouble and then shagging it."
Doctor: Even the best parties become humdrum once you’ve gatecrashed as many of them as I have – but outside those doors now, there could be anything, literally anything at all. Doesn’t that excite you?
Charley: Hell yes! Pass the whipped cream!
Doctor: Woo-hoo! DAMN IT, I JUST LOVE WHIPPED CREAM ORGIES!
A chilling introduction to the main villain of this story -
"I AM THEIR GUIDE. THEIR BOSS. THEIR TOP MAN. THEIR MANAGING DIRECTOR. THEIR SUPREME COMMANDER. THEIR GRAND EMPEROR. THEIR GODHEAD. THEIR SUPERIOR MADE FLESH. THEIR HEAD HONCHO. BUT, LIKE I SAID, I DON’T LIKE TO GO ON ABOUT IT."
Revnon: The Clockwork Men
Keep us turning clockwise
And without them, we
Would be tempted to leave
Our hands
Idle
And my girlfriend and I have
No time for those who
Would turn
Our hand back.
Doctor: What crap. That’s not worth thinking, let alone putting on a blog, you sad pastule!
Revnon: Get your own blog then, Doctor.
Doctor: I will, I will! I’ll call it “The Not Half As Excremental Offal As Revnon Writes Blog”!
Revnon: You wound me, man, you really do.
Doctor: AND you don’t a girlfriend, you liar!
Charley: You know what I think? I don’t think the TARDIS is faulty at all. Or, if it is, that suits him quite well.
Doctor: I keep telling you, security cameras being installed in all the bedrooms is a total coincidence!
Kestorian: You wanna piece of me, bitch? You ain’t got the cogs!
Clockwork Man: I’ll settle for yours!
Doctor: Once upon a time, in a land not too dissimilar to ours, I knew a man once who became obsessed with predicting the future and planning for every variable... until he realised that he was losing the one thing that was most precious to him: he only wanted to be more human.
Vannet: Who was that?
Doctor: I dunno, he was a real geek and not really that memorable.
UnQuotable Quote -
Zanith: I have no purpose. Rather like this script.
Viewer Quotes -
"Thank God it wasn’t a sequel to the Colditz story. That would have been... actually, it can’t have been worse than that story. It would have been brilliant. David Tennant versus Tracey Childs, I'd pay to hear that. Certainly more than I’d pay for this crap."
– Jared Hansen (2007)
"Wow. Forty five bucks for a biting satire about the working man’s struggle for a couple of days off a week. I really loved the subversive bit where that Union rep in the cloth cap stood up and shouted, ‘Awwight lads, evweboddy aht!’ The idea of Unions and strikes actually having RELEVANCE in this country is science fiction in itself. What do I do for a living? None of your business and now I’m off to Centrelink to collect my dole. Go away." – Mark Latham (2006)
"You know, there are three types of Doctor Who stories. Historicals, outer space stories, and Sideways In Time And Space stories. It’s telling that there are very, very few of the last category and they are all crap. All of them. Every last one. Argue with me on this and I WILL kill you. I’m not joking, I’m prepared to go to jail over this, with your blood on my hands." – Dallas Jones (2004)
"'Bullshit' is the first word that springs to mind when I think about this one. You could just say that this is a standard something-weird-going-on-with-time plot hybridized with a revolution plot, much like The Spam Museum was back in 1965, but if you did you'd be vastly underselling the beauty there is in that story." – Martin Sheen (2008)
"An essential slice of Doctor Who that should not be overlooked! If you overlooked it, you might think it was actually worth watching! Rubbish! Only one show is worth watching, and that is Blake’s 7! EVERYTHING ELSE IS SUB-STANDARD DETRITUS! ONLY MY OPINIONS ARE VALID! NO ONE ELSE'S! YOU WILL BELIEVE ME AND OBEY! OBEY! OBEY! OBEY YOUR GOD, YOU SCUM! OBEY! O-BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYY MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
– The introduction to John Meer’s "A History And Critical Analysis of Blake’s 7: The 1978-1981 British Television Space Adventure" (2000)
"I love Ronald Pickup! He fricken rocks! He’s the best Aslan there is – I totally boycotted the movie version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe because he wasn’t in it... at, least, I assumed he wasn’t. Anyway, it’s brilliant that he’s finally done a Doctor Who! In fact, now he’s done it, I’m going to throw away every other part of my collection... What do you mean he was in a Hartnell story? I just torched all my copies of the missing episodes!"
– Andrew Beeblebrox (2005)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"The people at my office have been replaced with clockwork androids. It’s so the originals can be disposed of without offending the unions. Damn them. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock..."
Paul McGann Speaks!
"I can’t think of anything I don’t like about Clock Works. Maybe because I can’t remember a single thing about it. Which Doctor was it again? Me? No, really?"
India Fisher Speaks!
"For all the frozen time stuff, we decided to do it ‘bullet-time’ Matrix scenes, so we all turned up in leather coats and sunglasses, mainly so Paul and I could throw people off tall buildings and see if they bounced like Keanu Reeves. They never did, but we didn’t much like any of them. In fact, one of them WAS Keanu Reeves, now I think about it, but his career’s gone downhill since Bill and Ted, and well, we wouldn’t be part of Doctor Who if we let the fucker get away with THAT movie, would we?"
Conrad Westmaas Speaks!
"There’s a fairy tale feel to this one, with the tea room and the photocopiers and Ronald Pickup and Tracy Childs. Actually, come to think about it, it’s not really fairy tale stuff at all. It’s just crappy office soap-u-mentaries. "
Trivia -
Despite all of Big Finish’s hopes, the Eleventh Doctor was not cast from a main character Clock Work, so the flukes with Coleslaw Cutaway and The Reservation of the Scourge were just flukes. HAH! Told ya!
Rumors & Facts -
Steve Lyon’s Clock Works is tremendously creative, as long as you are incredibly easy to impress.
Steve Lyons had written three and a half Doctor Who audios for Big Finish and not one of them started out as an idea remotely original, despite what Lyons himself automatically assumed. His first two ideas, which he was certain no one in the entire world would have done before, were was "Doctor Who goes to a science fiction convention" and "Doctor Who gets locked up for a crime he didn't commit", which later hit the shelves as The Fans of Vulcan and Coleslaw Cutaway respectively.
Five years later, he came up with this story, simply entitled "Doctor Who in An Exciting Adventure In Middle Management and or IT". It was rejected as the stories involving the TARDIS crew doing just that stretched all the way back to 1964's William Hartnell story The Lab Techs.
This time, Lyons was mildly prepared for the rejection, have got a word-for-word identical reaction when he suggested the idea to Steven Cole's BBC novels. On that occasion it was dropped for being identical to Mike Collier’s The Longest Wait, where the Eighth Doctor and Sam discover Microsoft runs on time travelling oak trees. When Lyons suggested his other two ideas, he got the same response: the plots were too similar to Dreamstone Mooning by Paul Leonard and I C U by Kate Orman. Finally, Lyon began to suspect that Steve Cole was deliberately engineering this to happen.
He had reason to think that, since his original idea TimWorm: Office Politics had been ditched by Peter Darril Evans for already being far too similar to Paul Carnall’s 1990's TimWorm: St Paul Letters To The Corinthians II. Back then, Lyons had been working in the admin section of a well-known high street bank and was so bored he came up with an idea of a science fiction series with a shape-changing time traveler whose vehicle was shaped like a police box. Upon discovering someone had beaten him to it, he’d been submitting stories ever since.
Indeed, Andrew Cartmel has been known to blame the original series' cancellation on Steve Lyon. And Saddam Hussain. And the floating of the American dollar. And the mining of uranium. Plus sunspot activity. Not to mention the wandering Jew. Actually, I think Cartmel may not be the most reliable of witnesses. Let us move on.
With only weeks until RTD's The Michaelmas Evasion, Lyons was taken aback when his latest suggestion caused the Big Finish production team to break down in unison into horrendous sobbing.
All he said was "How about some clockwork robots?"
As anyone who wasn’t Steve Lyon had noted by now, clockwork robots are old hat. Not only did everyone see them adequate explored in Steven Moffat's The Nun In The Liftshaft (or "How I Learned How To Stop Worrying About Clockwork Robots And Fuck Mdme Du Pompadour"), but the Ninth Doctor’s premier novel was The Clockwork Robots. And what about the Tellos Novella The Clockwork Robots? In fact, there are so many stories with Clockwork robots in them a given Doctor will have encountered them three times more than the bloody Dustbins! Hell, even the Cybermen went though that clockwork phase in the mid 1970s to go with the flared trousers and the acid trip wallpaper...
Anyway, Lyons protested firmly that Big Finish hadn’t heard him out. His story would use Clockwork Men in a totally new and original way: they would be the servants of an all powerful computer controlling the lives of a small enclave of humans, with the enslaved population eventually revolting and gaining their freedom thanks to help from the Doctor and his motley companions.
At this point everyone started screaming mindlessly and smashing their heads against the tables again and again.
Lyons was confused – was his "Doctor Who Teams Up With The Rebels And Overthrows An Evil Authoritarian Regime" just too radical and inventive for a conservative organization like Big Finish?
He then offered "Doctor Who Discovers Aliens Invade Earth By Interfering With History" at which point Gay Russell grabbed Lyons and threw him down the stairs.
Unfortunately, it was at this point Russell realized he was entirely on his own – he had specifically subdivided Big Finish into the Benny Summerfield Adventures; Dustbin Umpire; Cybermen; I, Lavros; Doctor Who Unsoiled; The Tomorrow Persons; Companion Cutaways; Judge Dredd... all in an attempt to hold back Nick Briggs. But Briggs had foreseen this and allowed it to divide Big Finish’s forces.
Now, nothing was able to stop him seizing control of Big Finish!
In one last stroke of tactical genius, Gay Russell actually gave Briggs full editorial control and thus made Lyons and his story Briggs’ problem! After producing, recording and releasing this story, Briggs was found trying to suffocate himself to death with a pickled onion sandwich while Lyons outlined a spin off series to Doctor Who about a rogue group of over-sexed xeno-tech hunters lead by an omnisexual ex-companion, "The Porlock Foundation" starring Matthew Waterhouse as Supreme Commander Adric.
Gay Russell regained control of Big Finish, had Lyons and Briggs sealed in concrete and dumped in the North Sea, before commissioning a new series of BBC7 audio dramas for the eighth Doctor.
But this proved only to be a stop gap, as Briggs was now well-used to being sealed in concrete and dumped in the North Sea. His return would be swift and terrible and nothing would be the same again.
Not even the theme tune, which this week was:
"Eutermisan Head" by Cecil Rizz the Third and the Zodan Five
The coffee is flat
We’re always worked out
Don’t have a getaway car
So we didn’t get very far
We’re as stupid as hell
And these elevators
Moving so fast
Like a beaver
So close to the bone
I don’t feel too well
And if you choose
To take today off
I will flay you
Like a shark
And I’ll cut out
Your heart
I’ll set fire to my farts
To inflame you...
Sleeping alone
No pleasure
The Eutermisan head
It spins and spins
Possessed by dark gods
Don’t remember if
I shagged her last week
It was a long time ago
And if you choose
To take today off
I will flay you
Like a shark
And I’ll cut out
Your heart
I’ll set fire to my farts
To inflame you...
TART!!!
(Yes, Charley, you!)
And if you choose
To take today off
I will flay you
Like a shark
And I’ll cut out
Your heart
I’ll set fire to my farts
To inflame you...
TART!!!
Doctor Who Works Clocks
Dilbert Who: The Clockwork Business Development Manager
Charley Pollard's Dock Work: How to Live on Thirty Altarian Dollars A Shag
Fluffs – Paul McGann seemed to be on overtime for most of this story.
Goofs –
How fucking hard can it be to say the words “Tick Tock” in order?! Yet, somehow, not a single Clockwork Man can manage it, the useless, time-wasting piss heads! No, I am NOT envious of their lifestyle!
Fashion Victims – Charley’s ‘Heaven This Way’ lace panties.
Technobabble –
The Clockwork Men rely on ‘tickytockytickytockboom!’ energy.
Links and References -
The Doctor hasn’t been this bored since "The Spam Musuem" (Serial Q).
Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor and Krestorian know each other through their mutual friend Acting Lieutenant Horatio Hornblower, who Krestorian reluctantly imprisoned in a mainland Spanish fort in 1795, “The Duchess and the Devil.”
In one particularly nasty post-regenerative hangover, the Doctor joined Hornblower on the Hotspur as a mid-shapman calling himself Lieutenant George W Bush.
Groovy DVD Extras -
Introduction and narration by Ricky Gervais.
Dialogue Disasters –
Kestorian: You want to know about the Clockwork Men? We work in their shadow, every tick and tock of our lives. We hear them in the workings of the Great Clock. We work hard, turn our hands – but we all wind down in time, and that is when they come for us: when our time is up and, more specifically, when they atomize us in a violent drunken rage...
Doctor: Sorry to interrupt your long speeches, Kestorian, but you DO know this is part four of a four episode story?
Kestorian: Then I fear that our work has been nothing. We will suffer the fate of the Old World. Out time will be over. The seconds are counting down to a fateful future that has already happened, UNLESS we can beat the clock...
Doctor: Christ, he goes on a bit, doesn’t he?
Vannet: The Great Clock cannot be turned back. It measures our progress towards completion.
Revnon: It measures our progress towards lunchtime. I’m famished.
Vannet: Shut up, asshole, I’m trying to be mythic here!
Head Honcho: AS HEAD HONCHO, MY FUNCTION HAVE BEEN MANY, DEPENDENT UPON THE NEEDS OF THE TIME. THE FIRST AGE WAS THE AGE OF INNOVATION, BUT THAT IT LONG OVER. THE AGE OF THE ARCHITECT TOO HAS PASSED. NOW I JUST DO SUDOKU AND WATCH GILMORE GIRLS ON YOUTUBE.
Vannet: This is my punishment, for daring to turn anti clockwise!
Doctor: You mustn’t fear change, Vannet. Sometimes the only way to make something right is to tear it down first. That’s what I tell the insurance company, but the bastards never believe me.
Zanith: I know what the workers say of me, but I’m not addicted to hardcore pornography. It just takes the edge off. I can quit whenever I want to. I just don’t want to, that’s all. Besides, idle hands and all that!
Dialogue Triumphs -
Charley, on her desired, full-time occupation:
"Finding trouble and then shagging it."
Doctor: Even the best parties become humdrum once you’ve gatecrashed as many of them as I have – but outside those doors now, there could be anything, literally anything at all. Doesn’t that excite you?
Charley: Hell yes! Pass the whipped cream!
Doctor: Woo-hoo! DAMN IT, I JUST LOVE WHIPPED CREAM ORGIES!
A chilling introduction to the main villain of this story -
"I AM THEIR GUIDE. THEIR BOSS. THEIR TOP MAN. THEIR MANAGING DIRECTOR. THEIR SUPREME COMMANDER. THEIR GRAND EMPEROR. THEIR GODHEAD. THEIR SUPERIOR MADE FLESH. THEIR HEAD HONCHO. BUT, LIKE I SAID, I DON’T LIKE TO GO ON ABOUT IT."
Revnon: The Clockwork Men
Keep us turning clockwise
And without them, we
Would be tempted to leave
Our hands
Idle
And my girlfriend and I have
No time for those who
Would turn
Our hand back.
Doctor: What crap. That’s not worth thinking, let alone putting on a blog, you sad pastule!
Revnon: Get your own blog then, Doctor.
Doctor: I will, I will! I’ll call it “The Not Half As Excremental Offal As Revnon Writes Blog”!
Revnon: You wound me, man, you really do.
Doctor: AND you don’t a girlfriend, you liar!
Charley: You know what I think? I don’t think the TARDIS is faulty at all. Or, if it is, that suits him quite well.
Doctor: I keep telling you, security cameras being installed in all the bedrooms is a total coincidence!
Kestorian: You wanna piece of me, bitch? You ain’t got the cogs!
Clockwork Man: I’ll settle for yours!
Doctor: Once upon a time, in a land not too dissimilar to ours, I knew a man once who became obsessed with predicting the future and planning for every variable... until he realised that he was losing the one thing that was most precious to him: he only wanted to be more human.
Vannet: Who was that?
Doctor: I dunno, he was a real geek and not really that memorable.
UnQuotable Quote -
Zanith: I have no purpose. Rather like this script.
Viewer Quotes -
"Thank God it wasn’t a sequel to the Colditz story. That would have been... actually, it can’t have been worse than that story. It would have been brilliant. David Tennant versus Tracey Childs, I'd pay to hear that. Certainly more than I’d pay for this crap."
– Jared Hansen (2007)
"Wow. Forty five bucks for a biting satire about the working man’s struggle for a couple of days off a week. I really loved the subversive bit where that Union rep in the cloth cap stood up and shouted, ‘Awwight lads, evweboddy aht!’ The idea of Unions and strikes actually having RELEVANCE in this country is science fiction in itself. What do I do for a living? None of your business and now I’m off to Centrelink to collect my dole. Go away." – Mark Latham (2006)
"You know, there are three types of Doctor Who stories. Historicals, outer space stories, and Sideways In Time And Space stories. It’s telling that there are very, very few of the last category and they are all crap. All of them. Every last one. Argue with me on this and I WILL kill you. I’m not joking, I’m prepared to go to jail over this, with your blood on my hands." – Dallas Jones (2004)
"'Bullshit' is the first word that springs to mind when I think about this one. You could just say that this is a standard something-weird-going-on-with-time plot hybridized with a revolution plot, much like The Spam Museum was back in 1965, but if you did you'd be vastly underselling the beauty there is in that story." – Martin Sheen (2008)
"An essential slice of Doctor Who that should not be overlooked! If you overlooked it, you might think it was actually worth watching! Rubbish! Only one show is worth watching, and that is Blake’s 7! EVERYTHING ELSE IS SUB-STANDARD DETRITUS! ONLY MY OPINIONS ARE VALID! NO ONE ELSE'S! YOU WILL BELIEVE ME AND OBEY! OBEY! OBEY! OBEY YOUR GOD, YOU SCUM! OBEY! O-BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYY MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
– The introduction to John Meer’s "A History And Critical Analysis of Blake’s 7: The 1978-1981 British Television Space Adventure" (2000)
"I love Ronald Pickup! He fricken rocks! He’s the best Aslan there is – I totally boycotted the movie version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe because he wasn’t in it... at, least, I assumed he wasn’t. Anyway, it’s brilliant that he’s finally done a Doctor Who! In fact, now he’s done it, I’m going to throw away every other part of my collection... What do you mean he was in a Hartnell story? I just torched all my copies of the missing episodes!"
– Andrew Beeblebrox (2005)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"The people at my office have been replaced with clockwork androids. It’s so the originals can be disposed of without offending the unions. Damn them. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock..."
Paul McGann Speaks!
"I can’t think of anything I don’t like about Clock Works. Maybe because I can’t remember a single thing about it. Which Doctor was it again? Me? No, really?"
India Fisher Speaks!
"For all the frozen time stuff, we decided to do it ‘bullet-time’ Matrix scenes, so we all turned up in leather coats and sunglasses, mainly so Paul and I could throw people off tall buildings and see if they bounced like Keanu Reeves. They never did, but we didn’t much like any of them. In fact, one of them WAS Keanu Reeves, now I think about it, but his career’s gone downhill since Bill and Ted, and well, we wouldn’t be part of Doctor Who if we let the fucker get away with THAT movie, would we?"
Conrad Westmaas Speaks!
"There’s a fairy tale feel to this one, with the tea room and the photocopiers and Ronald Pickup and Tracy Childs. Actually, come to think about it, it’s not really fairy tale stuff at all. It’s just crappy office soap-u-mentaries. "
Trivia -
Despite all of Big Finish’s hopes, the Eleventh Doctor was not cast from a main character Clock Work, so the flukes with Coleslaw Cutaway and The Reservation of the Scourge were just flukes. HAH! Told ya!
Rumors & Facts -
Steve Lyon’s Clock Works is tremendously creative, as long as you are incredibly easy to impress.
Steve Lyons had written three and a half Doctor Who audios for Big Finish and not one of them started out as an idea remotely original, despite what Lyons himself automatically assumed. His first two ideas, which he was certain no one in the entire world would have done before, were was "Doctor Who goes to a science fiction convention" and "Doctor Who gets locked up for a crime he didn't commit", which later hit the shelves as The Fans of Vulcan and Coleslaw Cutaway respectively.
Five years later, he came up with this story, simply entitled "Doctor Who in An Exciting Adventure In Middle Management and or IT". It was rejected as the stories involving the TARDIS crew doing just that stretched all the way back to 1964's William Hartnell story The Lab Techs.
This time, Lyons was mildly prepared for the rejection, have got a word-for-word identical reaction when he suggested the idea to Steven Cole's BBC novels. On that occasion it was dropped for being identical to Mike Collier’s The Longest Wait, where the Eighth Doctor and Sam discover Microsoft runs on time travelling oak trees. When Lyons suggested his other two ideas, he got the same response: the plots were too similar to Dreamstone Mooning by Paul Leonard and I C U by Kate Orman. Finally, Lyon began to suspect that Steve Cole was deliberately engineering this to happen.
He had reason to think that, since his original idea TimWorm: Office Politics had been ditched by Peter Darril Evans for already being far too similar to Paul Carnall’s 1990's TimWorm: St Paul Letters To The Corinthians II. Back then, Lyons had been working in the admin section of a well-known high street bank and was so bored he came up with an idea of a science fiction series with a shape-changing time traveler whose vehicle was shaped like a police box. Upon discovering someone had beaten him to it, he’d been submitting stories ever since.
Indeed, Andrew Cartmel has been known to blame the original series' cancellation on Steve Lyon. And Saddam Hussain. And the floating of the American dollar. And the mining of uranium. Plus sunspot activity. Not to mention the wandering Jew. Actually, I think Cartmel may not be the most reliable of witnesses. Let us move on.
With only weeks until RTD's The Michaelmas Evasion, Lyons was taken aback when his latest suggestion caused the Big Finish production team to break down in unison into horrendous sobbing.
All he said was "How about some clockwork robots?"
As anyone who wasn’t Steve Lyon had noted by now, clockwork robots are old hat. Not only did everyone see them adequate explored in Steven Moffat's The Nun In The Liftshaft (or "How I Learned How To Stop Worrying About Clockwork Robots And Fuck Mdme Du Pompadour"), but the Ninth Doctor’s premier novel was The Clockwork Robots. And what about the Tellos Novella The Clockwork Robots? In fact, there are so many stories with Clockwork robots in them a given Doctor will have encountered them three times more than the bloody Dustbins! Hell, even the Cybermen went though that clockwork phase in the mid 1970s to go with the flared trousers and the acid trip wallpaper...
Anyway, Lyons protested firmly that Big Finish hadn’t heard him out. His story would use Clockwork Men in a totally new and original way: they would be the servants of an all powerful computer controlling the lives of a small enclave of humans, with the enslaved population eventually revolting and gaining their freedom thanks to help from the Doctor and his motley companions.
At this point everyone started screaming mindlessly and smashing their heads against the tables again and again.
Lyons was confused – was his "Doctor Who Teams Up With The Rebels And Overthrows An Evil Authoritarian Regime" just too radical and inventive for a conservative organization like Big Finish?
He then offered "Doctor Who Discovers Aliens Invade Earth By Interfering With History" at which point Gay Russell grabbed Lyons and threw him down the stairs.
Unfortunately, it was at this point Russell realized he was entirely on his own – he had specifically subdivided Big Finish into the Benny Summerfield Adventures; Dustbin Umpire; Cybermen; I, Lavros; Doctor Who Unsoiled; The Tomorrow Persons; Companion Cutaways; Judge Dredd... all in an attempt to hold back Nick Briggs. But Briggs had foreseen this and allowed it to divide Big Finish’s forces.
Now, nothing was able to stop him seizing control of Big Finish!
In one last stroke of tactical genius, Gay Russell actually gave Briggs full editorial control and thus made Lyons and his story Briggs’ problem! After producing, recording and releasing this story, Briggs was found trying to suffocate himself to death with a pickled onion sandwich while Lyons outlined a spin off series to Doctor Who about a rogue group of over-sexed xeno-tech hunters lead by an omnisexual ex-companion, "The Porlock Foundation" starring Matthew Waterhouse as Supreme Commander Adric.
Gay Russell regained control of Big Finish, had Lyons and Briggs sealed in concrete and dumped in the North Sea, before commissioning a new series of BBC7 audio dramas for the eighth Doctor.
But this proved only to be a stop gap, as Briggs was now well-used to being sealed in concrete and dumped in the North Sea. His return would be swift and terrible and nothing would be the same again.
Not even the theme tune, which this week was:
"Eutermisan Head" by Cecil Rizz the Third and the Zodan Five
The coffee is flat
We’re always worked out
Don’t have a getaway car
So we didn’t get very far
We’re as stupid as hell
And these elevators
Moving so fast
Like a beaver
So close to the bone
I don’t feel too well
And if you choose
To take today off
I will flay you
Like a shark
And I’ll cut out
Your heart
I’ll set fire to my farts
To inflame you...
Sleeping alone
No pleasure
The Eutermisan head
It spins and spins
Possessed by dark gods
Don’t remember if
I shagged her last week
It was a long time ago
And if you choose
To take today off
I will flay you
Like a shark
And I’ll cut out
Your heart
I’ll set fire to my farts
To inflame you...
TART!!!
(Yes, Charley, you!)
And if you choose
To take today off
I will flay you
Like a shark
And I’ll cut out
Your heart
I’ll set fire to my farts
To inflame you...
TART!!!
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