Book(s)/Other Related –
Dr Who and the Bank Manager of Doom
Doctor Who Versus Big Bad Beetle Bugs
Beetlemania (Over-Excited Entomologists Editions)
Fluffs - Sylvester McCoy seemed to go cold turkey in this story.
"Ah, thank clergymen for smart god."
"Prey, be seated. Oh, wait, did I say 'prey'? I meant 'pray'. You know, religious incantation. I wasn’t saying you’re all food for a stronger predator at all. No way. Why would I want to say a thing like that? No, no, no. You’re not prey at all, especially not for any giant flesh-eating beetles. Not that denial is suspiciously specific in any way, shape or form - look, I’ll come in again..."
"Nothing would give us greater pleasure, but as you’re offering, I’ll have to put off nothing."
"Oh, Doctor, you have gone down hill. Whatever happened to the man who destroyed whole species for the greater good? He would never have let me got this far. But Time won’t have her champion for much longer. Oh this terrible waiting... Who would have thought a mere 80 minute television serial could have so much padding within it? Just get to the death scene already!"
Goofs -
What happens to all the beetles? Do they starve to death? Or do they start eating their own shit to make themselves clever enough to find a way out of that mess? Or does the new Doctor actually eat them all to sate his new ravenous hunger? Oh the bitter irony!
The Doctor’s post-regenerative eyesight - either that guy was totally smashed for the final scenes or he has a serious eye problem. It looked as if he was seeing the world from the bottom of a vodka bottle. People would lurch in and out of sight with an alarming randomness. No wonder he couldn’t pilot the TARDIS all those years - HE COULDN’T SEE THE DAMN BUTTONS! It’s a wonder the Doctor can even find the door...
Fashion Victims -
The Bank Manager’s ceremonial tinfoil helmet with coat-hangers sticking out of it at 90 degree angles and lime green PVC robe, and thoroughly deserves all the Doctor’s crap "it’s hard to break the habit, isn’t it?" jokes for three episodes.
Technobabble –
The Doctor explains he can regenerate decayed or diseased tissues by a triple helix DNA of self-replicating biogenic nano-molecules: "It’s a metamorphosis, like a butterfly... or Madonna."
Links and References -
Doctor: If I’ve got to go regenerate again, go through that miniature death one more time, I want it to be on my own terms!
Kate: What’s it like? Regenerating I mean?
Doctor: The first time I don’t remember, I was unconscious after a mass Cyberman roggering. The second time... I don’t want to talk about. Let’s just say the expression "scarecrow gangbang" was used and move on. The third time, I was unconscious after too much disco.
Kate: The fourth time?
Doctor: Atypical. There were some strange time and energy effects involved. Plus I’d just been shot through the hearts after an all-nighter of caffeine and kinder eggs.
Kate: But, you know, what does it feel like? Is it good or bad?
Doctor: Good... in the same way that having sex with household appliances very, very fast is a good feeling, until POW! Like being shoved through a window with a delicate part of your anatomy in the pop-up toaster. That’s what it was like the fifth time.
Kate: What about the sixth time?
Doctor: Unconscious. Mel, an exercise bike and a skull fracture.
Kate: How does it feel? Do you feel good because you realize you’re not going to die?
Doctor: No. You feel awful, because you KNOW you’re going to die. Again. In an excruciatingly embarrassing manner. With a bit of luck I won’t be awake for the next one either. I’ll just step onto a landmine or something and still retain SOME kind of dignity...
Untelevised Misadventures -
Kate bitches that the Doctor’s been in a right mood ever since he wiped out the Cybermen on Monday with trillions of civilian casualties – after all, that sort of genocide usually cheers him up.
Groovy DVD Extras -
A cut sequence from the final episode where the Doctor and Kate nearly get eaten by a beetle but only manage to escape by running up lots and lots of corridors. I myself cannot believe such a vital moment was removed from this incredibly intricate plot.
Dialogue Disasters -
Manager: I need your knowledge.
Doctor: I need it, too!
Manager: Oh, that’s what they ALWAYS say!
Doctor: And keep your eyes open.
Kate: For what?
Doctor: Well, anything interesting. And it always helps to keep your eyes open. You don’t bump into as many stalactites that way. Come on, my dear. Best foot forward.
(The Doctor trips and falls flat on his face.)
Doctor: Don’t. Say. A fucking. Word.
Galen: [agonized] I have finally got all I ever wanted – inner peace! In one afternoon, you and your friends seem determined to ruin it at any cost! You assholes! You’re worse than Richard Dawkins!
Manager: You’re living on borrowed time.
Doctor: Borrowed time is better than no time at all.
Manager: Tell that to a librarian. MWAHAHAHA!
Kate: Surely we’re not going to leave the monks to be slaughtered?
Doctor: We can but try!
Galen: SHUT UP! My entire life has just gone to hell in a hand basket, all thanks to you! So – just – shut – up!
Kate: I sense hostility, Galen. Do you want to talk about it?
Doctor: Just what exactly are you playing at?
Manager: A game with high stakes, Doctor.
Doctor: And how high are they?
Manager: Higher than you can comprehend. And you’re not playing any more. You’ve won the booby prize!
Doctor: ...you actually think you’re being witty, don’t you?
New Doctor: Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, but the cow has failed in its first attempt at a moon landing! That’s one small step for a cow, one giant leap for the beef industry... MOO!
Dialogue Triumphs -
Doctor: You can’t win, Manager. If you strike me down, I shall become more eccentric than you could possibly imagine.
Kate: So who is this evil mastermind?
Doctor: Oh, he follows the same pattern. Genius with a deviant childhood, forced to eat liver, too much vitamin A, becomes ambitious, develops a taste for power. Before you know it they're trying to take over the universe and looking for someone to gloat at. Of course, sometimes they just become bank managers. And sometimes BOTH!
Manager: O creator of all, who made us flesh and blood and immortal interest rates in your credit rating, we give thanks for the annual chance you have given us to find the one true tax dodge, the path of extended overdrafts. As we eat our food to live another day, please don’t let a giant green alien bug tear us to pieces before the close of business, for that would be rather inconvenient not to mention messy.
Doctor: Changes come slowly in human beings. Imagine what it’s like to know you might wake up, suddenly, completely different; with a new face, with a new personality! Suddenly you like jazz instead of opera; suddenly you can’t stand pears when you used to love poires en douillon; suddenly you’re convinced you’re a penguin or you’re seeing gay porn that you never used to see...
Kate: It’s not my fault you’re going to regenerate! Don’t blame ME for your screwed-up alien biology...
Richard: Your usefulness remains the same, alive or dead. The amount of elixir will remain constant.
Kate: Elixir? What’s that got to with me?
Tim: Well, we’d like to tell you, but we are all sworn to secrecy.
Kate: You’re also not supposed to talk at all!
Time: What can we say? We pick and choose which vows we uphold.
(Paul picks up a chainsaw and switches it on.)
Paul: ‘Thy shall not kill’, for example. Never believed that.
Doctor: I see the faces of every death I’m responsible for every time I sleep. Every enemy, every friend I’ve lost, every innocent I’ve failed to save. So I stopped sleeping and started taking amphetamines instead! Lateral thinking or what? Sometimes I’m appalled by my own recklessness. And other times I just giggle at it.
Kate: So, do you have a partner or something?
Doctor: How can a member of one species really know how a member of another species mind works, or how they think or feel? You’ve no frame of reference: you can only make assumptions and have beliefs. And without a common frame of reference, those are most likely to be utterly wrong.
Kate: So you’re single.
Doctor: Yes.
Kate: You know, it’s probably more down to you being a secretive little asshole with a superiority complex than just being an alien.
Doctor: All the universe is a stage, Kate. Acting’s not enough for me. I like to direct. Or improvise with some spoons and a mime act! I’ve been the manipulator for too long, moving the pawns, the chess-master. I’ve spent so long formulating my own schemes that I’ve missed the fact that there are others better versed in the art of deception and deceit. I also forget to take out the bins on garbage day.
Kate: You are definitely one high-maintenance boyfriend, aren’t you?
Doctor: I started to tire of chess a while ago. These days, I seem to be playing hopscotch.
Manager: That was a stupid mistake.
Doctor: I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.
Manager: ...give me strength.
The Seventh Doctor’s parting words:
"Ah, lost sanity, I remember it well... Wait, my mind plays tricks! Thou art the final neural switches that will allow mind of mine to come home to roost! But wait, these will not be my thoughts, these are the thoughts of a simpleton, albeit a hideously overweight one. Oh vile vessel of future incarnations, take flight and do not leave me looking like the fat guy from Pie in the Sky!"
UnQuotable Quote -
New Doctor: Regeneration may LOOK all glowy, magical and cathartic, but believe you me - it stings like a bitch!
Viewer Quotes -
"Not bad, I suppose. A little overwrought, perhaps? But it’s a better exit than I ever had. A bang on the head, I ask you..."
- Colin Baker on the Seventh Doctor’s regeneration (2003)
"I can’t think of anything to say."
- Cameron J Mason (2010)
"Whoa. Death by Brain Bleach! Subverted HARD!"
– average TV Tropes response (2010)
"An infuriating combination of the spellbinding and the excruciating as Sylvester McCoy brings a sense of gravitas to the role which he never quite managed before, but only when he’s bound, gagged and locked in a padded cell away from the rest of the cast." - Jo Ford (2009)
"I can’t help but love this story. I think it’s awesome, even with its strange fetish for insect fecal consumption! Okay, the story is lame, but it showed the groundwork laid for a potential spin-off product of Bug Shit Energy Drinks. Stupid, but charming." - Sarah Palin (2010)
"The witless and childish Addiction shares its faults with the worst of 80s stories! The universe is inescapably savage, human beings at their worst, heavy-handed continuity references, annoying and unlikable companions, an emancipated Doctor, and the Bank Manager is a common creep... Where is the sublime maturity, damn you? WHERE? The Seventh Doctor should travel with Romana, not some schizophrenic, neurotic and often deranged trollop!"
- Thomas Cookson (2010)
"Sylvester McCoy gets hung out to dry! Lunatics have called it his best performance as the Doctor. Bollocks is it!" - Ken Campbell (2011)
"Very witty, old man. But I’ve seen the future, and you’re not it."
- Paul McGann on Richard Griffith’s Eighth Doctor(2010)
"You wouldn’t see Richard Griffiths always moaning to his current companion about how great Kate was and how much he misses her, or being really sneering and playing 'look at that freak' with the aliens, or using the TARDIS as his companions' personal taxi service whenever she wants to go pick a fight with her mum's ex-boyfriend. Oh, RTD, you bitchy, obnoxious spoilt childish control freak, you may have nothing whatsoever to do with this repellent excess, but I hate you anyway!"
- Thomas Cookson (later that week)
"I still can’t think of anything to say."
- Cameron J Mason (a few minutes later)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"DO YOU WANT TO SEE MY KNICKERS AGAIN, ESTER?!"
Sylvester McCoy Speaks!
"All my stories as the Doctor have such variety and interest and, thanks to the mysteries of television we can do thinks that are brilliant and wonderful and when it finally comes on television it’s some completely random bollocks about me fighting a man made out of liquorice allsorts or getting drunk with King Arthur who turns out to be the Brigadier! What the hell happened there? Still, four years as the Doctor was just about right. My one regret is that I never got to go back in time and prove that Richard III was a really nice man – but, flipping it round, at least I didn’t have to be in that Nev Fountain story like poor young Peter Davison. Narrow escape there! Hah, no, I’m not ashamed to be part of Doctor Who. Unlike SOME people, eh, Rich?"
Richard Griffiths Speaks!
"Oh, go away you Scottish troglodyte."
Julia Sawalha Speaks!
"There is a theory in drama that all you need is one REALLY good bit and people will remember that, forget the crap bits and go away raving about it. Actually that is not really a theory, I just made it up. However it IS true. Just like green alien slime from the Earth's core, this story grows on you. But fortunately doesn’t turn you into a hideous slavering monster. Quite a common complaint, that."
Trivia -
An abandoned special effect would have the Doctor’s famous question mark umbrella become an exclamation mark umbrella whenever it sensed danger but this idea was abandoned for fear it would make the audience think the Doctor’s umbrella was becoming sexually aroused in such life-or-death situations.
Rumors & Facts -
Addiction’s place in history is assured on three counts – it ends the Seventh Doctor’s era, concludes the Cartmel Master Plan and finally answers the question of whether your bank manager is pure evil from beyond the dawn of time who must be destroyed at any cost.
By mid-1990, Sylvester McCoy was strongly reconsidering his career choice – since he was now working as the main character in a TV series that the BBC refused to broadcast and, indeed, were only making as part of an incredibly intricate tax dodge. He was similarly underwhelmed at the huge fan demand that he return to the role specifically so he could be killed off in the first scene of a story and regenerate into "the cool guy from Granada’s Sherlock Holmes".
McCoy’s decision to quit was yet another horrible burden placed upon Producer John Satan-Turner, since he was just about to sneak out the back door and catch a one-way plane to Singapore finally freeing himself of this unending torment when McCoy spotted him. It was quite clear that not only were they have to go through the pointless rigmarole of recording Season 27, they also had to culminate everything in a massive climax to regenerate the Seventh Doctor!
Luckily, careful fund management and the fact they hadn’t bothered to waste any cash on sets, costumes or special effects since no one would be watching meant that 20% of the season’s budget was just lying there, waiting to be used on this season finale... or, more practically, be used on McCoy’s farewell party and make it five times as rowdy, drunken, and likely to attract police attention than Tom Baker’s farewell bash which had been dubbed "inciting a riot on an international scale contravening numerous anti-terrorism laws."
Initially, the final story of the season was going to be The Bellhop Inheritance written by Andrew Kearley. A long time fan with neither writing experience or social life, Kearley was chosen mainly because he utterly HATED the Sylvester McCoy era and Andrew Cartmel’s attempts to turn the Doctor into a quasi-mystical heartless arch-manipulating super hero right out of Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN (albeit not a bright blue nudist). Whatever his numerous faults, Kearley could be guaranteed to write the script absolutely free as long as he got to "restore the Doctor to his true, heroic and Jon Pertweesque self" and destroy any remaining sense of mystery in the show.
This epic story restored the Doctor’s impulsive idealism via cunningly being a word-for-word plagiarism of Planet of the Spy-Spoofs, The Invasion of Tim, and Death Comes to Tom. This would reveal that at the exact same moment Andrew Cartmel began script-editing the TV series, the Doctor would be possessed by the Satanic Powers of the mysterious Bellhop who ruled Ancient Gallifrey with Rassilon and Omigod. In desperation the Doctor uses his good pal Sean Connery to drain out his True SelfTM as a completely separate and independent individual...
...who immediately beat the Seventh Doctor to death, smashing his skull in with a twelve-pound lump hammer and causing him to regenerate into the Eighth Doctor who acted, looked and thought as if 1973 had yet to actually occur.
Alas, Kearley proved unable to pen the story as he began to foam at the mouth, demanding that "the Pertwee era is the only constant" resurrecting old hat and retreading old ground like the Bastard, UNIT, the Great Narrator, and the companion being a 1960s dolly bird with the IQ of a duvet cover. Kearley was finally hauled out of the production office by men in white coats. His screams of "FOOLS! Breadth and depth are POINTLESS! Doctor Who must be narrow and shallow for the TV screen! MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS!" were eventually muffled by chloroform.
With that plan stuffed, another fan fic writer with a pathological disgust for the Seventh Doctor was chosen – this time it was some hack by the name of Misha Lauenstein. Lauenstein’s suggestion for the season finale was Best Enema and was basically ripping off a rather mediocre Lost in Space episode.
In this story, the Bastard returned and very stupidly “flush” all of the evil out of the Seventh Doctor into a homicidal, mass-murdering, clown-molesting clone of Sylvester McCoy who immediately tried to assassinate President Flavia at the Gallifreyan Book Depository, before kidnapping geriatrics from retirement homes and making them his sex slaves. Meanwhile, the Bastard and the Seventh Doctor would roshambo each other until they fell over Niagra Falls and regenerated into Robin Hood and a random female prostitute respectively. After an awkward morning after at the VD clinic, the two enemies went their separate ways and experimented with cross-dressing.
Seemingly out of options, it was decided to rely on Return of the Animus Adversary And Its Time Weapon On A Race To the Court of Intrigue For A Viking Encounter – an epic five-episode story that combined the talents of Ben (Rememberin’ to Take Out The Dustbins) Aaaaronovitch, Big (The Chess of Fenric) Ian, along with Donald (The Piss Takers) Cotton, Jon (The Mascara) Lucaratti and Bill (The Weird Planet) Sutton in one gigantic complex across all of time and space.
The story concerned the Doctor and Ace discovering a salmonella outbreak in contemporary London is actually down to aliens. This proves rather boring, so the dimension-transcending duos catch a lift on a giant spaceship heading for the warzone between Dekk and Hendra IV where some other aliens are arguing, whereupon the Wine Peddler, some Slurpies and a radioactive toilet roll combine in an alliance destroy all of time and space before Ace accidentally explodes her stockpile of Nitro-9, killing absolutely everybody and causing the Doctor to regenerate into his next incarnation.
The fact that this story had been written, let alone considered for production, shows what depths of depression and despair the Doctor Who production team had fallen into over the last year.
Luckily... VERY luckily... hell, borderline-miraculously... there was one other script around, Addiction by Robert Mukherjee. Mukherjee first pitched the idea of a religious order dependant on insect fecal matter in 1989, but the story idea required much work to shape it to the required format and also decide which sort of bug crap would be the most thematically appropriate.
Used to the freedom of theatre and uncertain what one of these new-fangled "script editors" was, Mukherjee took some time to mould his ideas and approaches in accordance with a producer’s overview and the specific needs of a slot in a season. Alas, by the time he’d finished it, Doctor Who had been taken off the air. D’oh!
Mukherjee was pretty pissed off about this, having spent ages re-treading the narrative ground of Doctor Who rather than using the formulaic essence to come up with a story best described as "Bertie Basset Takes Shit From No-One only more blue-coloured". Mukherjee had spent ages coming up with the ultimate nemesis for the Seventh Doctor, a sinister human being who was highly manipulative, ahead of the game, with an insight into events and a love for cocktails, a mastermind character best described as "the Bastard only if he was bank manager played by Bob Monkhouse".
There were some strong feelings that maybe everyone was being overly harsh on Return of the Animus Adversary And Its Time Weapon On A Race To the Court of Intrigue For A Viking Encounter, and maybe they should consider working with what they had.
Cartmel remained confident over Addiction; he had always been keen on avoiding stories where the Doctor and companion arbitrarily arrived on different planets and strange beings running up and down lots of corridors – so one can only wonder what the hell he was thinking commissioning a story based SOLELY on that premise. Apparently, as long as there was a "dramatic core" involved, he could break his own rules as much as he liked.
Out of Addiction’s drunken collage of chase sequences, battles of wits and a sneaking suspicion that all energy drinks come from the asses of invertebrates, something approaching a proper plot appeared. Alas, Mukherjee ultimately went entirely overboard with originality and overturned the entire format of the show by killing off the Seventh Doctor and replacing him with the Richard Griffiths incarnation. Since this was precisely what the production team wanted, they weren’t fussed – though they were slightly annoyed that some hack writer was telling THEM who to cast as the Eighth Doctor.
"Richard Griffiths has those eyes!" Mukherjee would tell anyone who would listen. "Eyes that see more than what they’re looking at! I KNOW WHEREOF I SPEAK!"
The production team were apparently so taken by Mukherjee’s deranged enthusiasm they immediately decided to make the Griffiths the Eighth Doctor in lieu of the other more-qualified candidates like David Troughton, Edward Peel-Smith, Robert Hardy or Danny la Rue. Well, there might have been another story behind their decision, but I can’t be arsed to research it and, hell, Mukherjee sounds convincing to me.
Some people complain the Griffiths Doctor is lightweight compared to McCoy, but you can’t ALWAYS be a planet destroying sad sack can you? Sometimes you have to take pleasure in the little things like food, shoes and having it off with some fit blonde behind the catering van during filming. I know I do.
Addiction would prove to be, by far the darkest story of Season 27. OK, it was a downright parody of everything Doctor Who stood for and based entirely on the premise that Bob Monkhouse cracking one liners as very unconvincing animatronic beetles chase people up and down corridors, but it was VERY POORLY-LIT. Hence, while it may not have been incredibly disturbing and outlandish, it WAS dark.
This three-part story was not only the final story for Sylvester McCoy, but also for JST and Andrew Cartmel – intending to either get work on BBC2 that would actually get broadcast, like adaptations of Derek Tanguye’s sexual memoirs, or else die in a suicide pact. JST’s final decision as producer was to tell Richard Griffiths, an actor he had first considered for the role as the Doctor almost a decade earlier, to stop blocking the goddamned doorway already and allow people to get through.
JST made a touching farewell speech when the final scene was recorded: "In the words of the Doctor, this is the end, the contract has not been renewed. My record-breaking involvement with Doctor Who is at an end after ten long years... NOW LEAVE ME ALONE, YOU UNGRATEFUL ANORAK-CLAD WANKER SON OF BITCHES’ BITCHES’ BASTARD!"
Season 27 Wrap-Up -
When the BBC took Doctor Who off the air but continued making it, no one sane thought that the ratings share would improve. But then, when was anyone sane working at the BBC? The fact that the show was now giving out a steady performance of 0 viewers rather than see-sawing in popularity made many dub Season 27 "a significant year of rip-roaring success" – but, unfortunately, it had still somehow faded in the public’s affection since they hadn’t seen it for two years.
By December 3, 1990, production manager Ian Fraser was made Doctor Who’s tenth and final producer by virtue of everyone else having buggered off ages ago. Fraser was confident that, as the head of a "newly-repopularised" series, the only way could be up and was certain that he would achieve global fame, stardom, and anorexia nervosa!
Fraser felt little need to modify JST’s repertory team of designers, directors and other personnel – mainly because they’d all left as well and he was the only one in the studio. Meanwhile, press statements from the BBC were increasingly vague; not only were they unwilling to comment on what was happening to Doctor Who, they weren’t prepared to admit that Doctor Who had ever existed. Why, the argument went, should they put any more effort into in-house production when
a) many of the BBC’s most successful shows were now made independently?
b) no one was willing to make the fucking show anyway?
Ultimately, it would be over twenty years before the recordings of Live Aid, Thin Ice, Sale of the Century and Addiction were released to the public. Dedicated followers were grateful that, having survived Survival, the Seventh Doctor finally had a farewell story! Hang out a bunting! Declare a holiday! Build a dome! Or not.
No longer does some inconclusive guff about cheetahs end the original classic series, but now viewers have scenes that define Doctor Who in the public eye – well, apart from Dustbins and Cybermen at war, evil moving statues, and David Tennant sleeping with 80% of the audience. Apart from that, ask anyone and they’ll tell you about aliens at Stonehenge, cat burgler assistants, and... no, wait, still talking about RTD. I give up.
Even fans forget about these stories, which started off the show’s fourth decade with shite Monty Python gags, Ice Cream Vendors, an evil bank manager and a sci-fi free thriller of drug smuggling and armed sieges so unrealistic they made Edge of Darkness look like The Bill. Frankly, I’m glad no one saw these till now and if I could, I’d make sure no one ever did! TRENCHCOAT IS CANON, FUCK IT!
Finally, since 1988, script editor Andrew Cartmel had been rewriting what was left of the mythos of Doctor Who to make it appeal to people like Alan Moore, Stephen Baxter and Noel Edmonds. Writers from Mark Plate to Big Ian to Ben Aaaaronovitch found themselves inducted into a strange Masonic-style order known as the Cartmel Masterplan, which would change Doctor Who forever.
After three years of basically being given a pile of Sandman comics with orders to "rip this shit off", Cartmel realized that Season 27 would be his last and all of his Masterplan merely amounted to a few weird mutterings about the Seventh Doctor being Cthulu Jones, had murdered his prior incarnation with a lethal electric joy-buzzer, and that Time Lords never had sex because some old woman put them off the idea of biological reproduction forever (apparently based on a painful childhood memory of Cartmel’s, and designed to make Who fans feel a bit better that they can never get laid).
Thus, the final scene of the story would have a final glimpse of the Seventh Doctor and his dealing with the Gods of the Time Lords, a scene that revealed entirely what the Cartmel Masterplan REALLY was a career plan to get headhunted as script editor for Casualty. Everything else was just poppycock to keep everyone else baffled!
Excerpt from "Doctor Who And The Addictive Asteroid" Episode 3:
(Setting: The Doctor wakes up lying under a tree in verdant countryside beside a lake. Birds flutter in the trees and rabbits hop through the bushes. He looks around, startled.)
Doctor: What do I look like? Have I been dead long?
(An attractive young Goth chick with unnaturally pale skin in black top, jeans and silver ankh chain is leaning against a tree.)
Death: It’s about time, wily raven. I’ve waited long enough!
Doctor: Death? I’m dead? After 964 years in the business? How undignified! I’ll never hear the end of it! Funny, dying didn’t hurt as much as last time. I must be getting good at it...
Death: You might be dead now, but Number Eight has taken your place. The Doctor’s not done suffering yet...
Doctor: Goodness, what do you Eternals think I’ve been doing down there? Watching Emmerdale Farm? I’ve suffered enough!
Death: Oh, you haven’t seen half of it. They’ve got big plans for your new manifestation.
Doctor: How big, Grim Reaperess?
Death: They’ll write tragedies on what happens. You, however, the Seventh Doctor, have a burial plot all picked out in the Land of Sacrificed Cult TV Icons. Your ass is mine.
Doctor: I don’t wish to be rude, Death, but I *was* hoping for some rest.
Death: Well, if that’s what you want. Or...
Doctor: ...or?
Death: ...or maybe we could spend the next chunk of eternity making out like pre-pubescent rabbits?
(The Doctor stares at Death for a long moment.)
Doctor: (Clears throat and checks no one is watching) D’you think that Time might be disposed towards a threesome, mayhaps?
Death: (Shrugs.) Only if Pain gets to watch.
(The Doctor leaps to his feet and takes Death’s arm.)
Doctor: Oh, why not? Mind you, Death, it *has* been a long time... Will you promise me something?
Death: What?
Doctor: *Don’t* be gentle with me.
Death: Oh, we won’t.
(The pair walk off towards the lake silhouetted by the setting sun.)
Showing posts with label 27 Up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 27 Up. Show all posts
Thursday, November 5, 2009
7th Doctor - Alixion (i)
An Alternate Programme Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Serial 7P/4 - Addiction
An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Evil Insect Elixir
D O C T O R W H O
Serial 7P/4 - Addiction
Part One
Aboard the mighty time-ship TARDIS, the Doctor stalks up and down with the slow realization he’s finally run out of master-plans and intricate schemes battling the higher forces of creation and tricking evils from the Dawn of Time into blowing themselves up with some old Gallifreyan antiques the Doctor picked up at a car-boot sale on Dronid.
Desperately, the Doctor scans his 500 year diary for someone... anyone!... to begin a massive chessgame with innocent bystanders as pawns and the whole universe at stake, but he’s done them all. The ancient wolves of Fenric, the reconstituted Dustbin Umpire, Bertie Bassett, he’s been there, done that, angsted about it and acted like a complete bastard with a question mark fetish.
Worse, his new companion Kate Tollinger is beginning to twig at what a pathetic and uninteresting loser the Doctor is when he’s not acting as Time’s Pimp and defending the laws of the universe. In mad desperation to restore some of his street cred, the Doctor quickly finds one last entity in all of time and space who is so downright evil, monstrous and callous they need the Doctor to go out of his way to destroy them utterly to every last molecule:
"My bank manager!" the Doctor vows darkly.
Being an upper-class, pampered rich bitch, Kate has never had to suffer the pain and humiliation of trying to extend an overdraft with no credit rating whatsoever. But even SHE thinks this mindless vendetta against some tweed-wearing git for not forking out a few mazumas for the Doctor to neuter his robot dog is fool hardly and beggars logic.
The Doctor assures Kate that he’s not talking about some nonentity from a small branch of GalactaBank on Ursa Minor, he’s talking about the Brotherhood of Darkened Time, an order of druidic monks who wear cloaks and burn incense. Who also happen to be the finest accountants in all of creation and the only ones stopping higher evolutionaries like the Time Lords of Gallifrey from being arrested by the Shadow Proclamation for massive financial irregularities.
Proving his point, the Doctor immediately pilots the TARDIS to the Head Office of these outer-space bank-tellers – and arrives on a far distant asteroid honeycombed with tunnels and passengers like a worm-ravaged apple core. Kate is slightly unimpressed by this badly-lit underground maze of deserted and dusty passages, but the Doctor points out it’s a relief they’ve not arrived on a Monday morning when the place is REALLY busy.
Completely ignorant of the giant beetles scuttling in the shadows with their giant glowing red eyes, or of the mysterious hooded figure stalking their every movement, the Doctor and Kate wander around looking for a reception desk – idly noting the mysterious scratches in solid rock and the odd smell of rotting human flesh.
They finally notice the mysterious hooded figure who’s been walking behind them after he clears his throat very loudly and shouts "HEY, I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU, YOU UNOBSERVANT TOSSERS!!!"
This turns out to be Brother Galen, a rather stressed accountant of the Brotherhood who shows signs of a truly cocaine-fueled superiority complex. Having listened to the Doctor and Kate waffle on for ages, Galen knows exactly who they are, where they came from, why they are here, and the Doctor’s inside leg measurement. It is only later the Doctor realizes neither he nor Kate mentioned such a measurement, and grows secretive and suspicious. Well, slightly more than usual, anyway.
Galen leads them to the Main Office – a Gothic church filling a cavern at the heart of the asteroid, lit by burning lanterns. It’s got a whole CS Lewis vibe to it, and Galen explains that this monumental architectural folly was constructed in a few hours by his fellow monks who were, like him, on a speed-crazed frenzy of efficiency.
It transpires that all of the Brotherhood of Darkened Time have their mental faculties expanded and their perceptions heightened by a delicate combination of a strict monastic lifestyle and very hard drugs. The end result is a bunch of coke-heads doing tax returns in perfect silence with pen and ink in quiet contemplation of the galactic stock exchange while their leader, Bank Manager Koporahn, grooves to ABBA’s "Money, Money, Money" played over his Hatichami Compact Disc Jog Person in the main study hall.
Using all their self-control, the Doctor and Kate manage to stop giggling too obviously at the sight of all these pathetic monks in silence twitching and sniffing white powder, while also noticing the beetle-shaped logo designs absolutely everywhere.
Finally granted an audience in the Bank Manager’s private office, the leader of the Brotherhood of Darkened Time immediately starts offering the time travelers’ a small forest’s worth of pamphlets about how hip and cool they’ll be to join the order of cosmic fiscal analysts.
The Doctor and Kate eventually get a word in edgeways and explain they are not new members to this incredibly suspicious and unconvincing religious banking scheme, whereupon the Bank Manager tells them in no uncertain terms to "get the fuck out of his life" and stop wasting his precious time.
Galen explains the Doctor is in fact a dissatisfied customer, and the Bank Manager reacts with a truly cruel and unusual punishment: he gives the Doctor a guided tour of their primitive abode, showing him the unhygienic toilet facilities, their small vegetable garden, their soul-crushing work which forces them to take massive amounts of cocaine to keep them going in an order where no one can talk or make friends or make love on top of the photocopier at an office party...
The Doctor and Kate are soon reduced to tears – but whether these are tears of sympathy or outright boredom we will never know! The Bank Manager has everyone have a complimentary can of "Beetle Juice 5000" energy drink (described by the World Health Organization as "Your Midlife Crisis Wake-Up Call" that gives a caffeine buzz of no shorter than eleven days and a resulting comedown of twenty-seven years).
The Doctor and Kate immediately make a run for it, checking the handy office layout map above the front door to navigate their way back to the TARDIS – only for Kate to continually insist that they’re going the wrong way and wandering deeper and deeper into the asteroid.
Finally the Doctor’s resolve cracks and he listens to Kate, who turns out to be absolutely right. However, this means that the map at the church was completely wrong – and designed to trick unsuspecting travelers straight into the forbidden caverns beyond.
The Doctor is amazed: this is clearly a clever trap which means that he has finally met a manipulative bastard as callous and morally bankrupt as himself!
"JACKPOT! Oh, if only Ace could see me now!" he whispers in awe.
Kate meanwhile points out that the Bank Manager can’t be THAT clever if he allowed her to drink the magical "Beetle Juice 5000" that, like all other members of the Brotherhood of Darkened Time, allows her to use more than 10 per cent of her brain power and thus remember the correct route back to the time machine.
Thus, not only is the Bank Manager as ruthless a chess master as the Doctor, he’s also got exactly the same awful bad luck and incredibly terrible contingency planning.
"Oh, this just gets better and better!" the Doctor cackles evilly, rubbing his question-mark umbrella with sinister glee.
But then the moment is ruined as he promptly trips over the bones of a monk picked clean by the nasty alien beetles that absolutely everyone in the audience have noticed patrolling the caves and even now are watching from the shadows while Sylvester McCoy does one last pratfall in his time as the Seventh Doctor.
Completely unaware of the mortal peril that they’ve just avoided, the Doctor and Kate race back to the monastery to make a complaint about the appalling health and safety standards on this asteroid. In order to communicate in a society where no one may speak, the Doctor forces Kate to wear a sandwich board with the words "ONE OF THE MONKS HAS DIED HORRIBLY – RUN FOR YOUR LIVES" written on it.
"Do you really think this will help the situation?" asks Kate.
The Doctor shrugs. "Who cares?"
Part Two
In their second interview with the Bank Manager, the Doctor notes that it’s rather convenient that the poor monk what got killed happened to be part of a cult that ensures he has no friends, family or indeed anyone that might ever notice he’d gone off for a walk and then been filleted like a Taiwanese chicken nugget.
The Bank Manager stares at him for a long time before quietly asking the Doctor, "And your point being?"
Realizing yet again he is finally confronting an enemy that WON’T suddenly blab all their evil plans at the slightest of provocations, the Doctor decides to play the long game. Or at least as long a game as he can get out of these painfully-under-running three-parters!
Deciding to tried and true methods, the Doctor suggests he and the Bank Manager go for a nice picnic in the dark catacombs outside leaving Kate to loiter around in the church looking for clues and stuff to justify her presence in the story.
In what could be a cunning bluff... or a REALLY cunning double bluff... or a NOT-AT-ALL cunning triple bluff... the Bank Manager agrees and he and the Doctor skip off, hand-in-hand, into the darkness while Kate quickly comes to the conclusion she doesn’t actually give a damn if any of these druggie accountants live or die anyway.
To pass the time, the decadent safe cracker immediately decides to break into the tiny communal vegetable garden and then wreck it as though it belonged to Blue Peter.
There she discovers what looks like an illegal distillery being run by none other than the Doug Anthony Allstars – a stand up comedy punk band from Australia whose mere presence in this story at all destroys the faintest hints of logic and credibility it may have once possessed.
So taken aback by this narrative black hole, Kate is taken completely by surprise as the three musicians beat the crap out of her and tie her to the chair, intending to make her a key ingredient in "Beetle Juice 5000"! Alas, for the purposes of dramatic tension, they are unable to explain what the hell they’re on about before Brother Galen clubs them unconscious, unties Kate and they run away through a secret passage.
The DAAS trio recover and muse on the deep irony that the rules of their order means they have no idea WHICH monk came to Kate’s rescue, so they’ll just have to dope themselves up with "Beetle Juice 5000" until their heightened perceptions make them work out the truth. Whereupon they can steal his ration of cocaine!
Meanwhile, the Doctor and the Bank Manager are creeping up a tunnel when the Doctor unleashes his final masterstroke – he has absolutely NO plan of any kind whatsoever! Which means, of course, that the Bank Manager cannot POSSIBLY have a contingency plan... unless, of course, he was expecting the Doctor to try and kung-fu-kick him to death while screaming "MORE TEA, VICAR?!?" in a strange falsetto.
Finally the Bank Manager cracks and offers to explain the whole evil plan, revealing the Brotherhood of Darkened Time was relocated to this asteroid as part of a complicated scheme to refine "Beetle Juice 5000" – once all the monks are addicted to it, the Bank Manager will use their mighty financial powers to make it THE energy drink of the new millennium and the Bank Manager will be filthy, stinking rich.
The Doctor nods at this diabolically ingenious scheme... before realizing that it doesn’t actually make the slightest bit of sense! How do yuppie accountants "refine" energy drinks? And how does making them solitary faceless monks help? And what does all this have to do with the things eating people on this asteroid?
Alas this has all been a cunning ploy to distract the Doctor while the Bank Manager drop-kicks him into a deep dark pit full of giant buck-toothed beetles that tend to rip human beings apart and strip their puny pink flesh from their weak little bones!
The Doctor gurns in suitably appropriate mortal terror.
Part Three
Luckily, there’s one more episode to go, so the Doctor quickly tries to talk his way out of the problem by making small talk with the ravenous alien beetles. Amazingly enough this works long enough for the Doctor to climb out of the pit and punch the Bank Manager in the kidneys until he falls into the pit instead.
Pausing momentarily to wax philosophically about how two equally-matched mental opponents have to resort to low-brow physical violence to resolve anything, the Doctor runs off very quickly indeed.
The Bank Manager meanwhile has a funky aftershave that stops the beetles tearing him apart and he sends the ferocious invertebrates after the Time Lord – but giant starving beetles are actually really rubbish at being blood hounds and go in entirely the wrong direction and scuttle into the church.
Yes, it seems the Bank Manager has made yet another fundamental mistake and sent the very hungry death monsters into an all-you-can-eat monk buffet and unsurprisingly they "forget" about his rules for only eating monks who wander into their territory.
This leads to some truly kickass scenes of monks getting shredded limb from limb by roaring flesh-munching insects, some of them snatching up female monks and flying around the room while biting her head off, and this amazingly cool bit where a monk hides behind a curtain but there’s already a beetle there and it rips his arms off... I swear, it’s only beaten by the bit where the only surviving monk makes it to the front door, opens it, and there’s this drooling beetle waiting right outside the door and it totally swallows him in one bite. Infuckingcredible.
...
What? I can’t enjoy insectoid monastic carnage all of a sudden? Screw you, so-called moral guardians! I’m maladjusted am I? Well, define "well-adjusted" you bastards!
Ahem.
The Doctor meanwhile, as is often the case in these sort of adventures, bumps entirely by accident into Kate and Brother Galen, and they alone survive the inevitable beetle massacre. The fact they are the main characters with speaking parts helps too, if you want to be completely meta-textual about the whole thing...
Creeping into the cavern next to the vegetable garden, the Doctor finds sacks of weird gunge that is the principle ingredient of "Beetle Juice 5000". "This goo," the Doctor soliloquizes, "WHAT’S IT FOR??!"
Deciding that the safest place to hide while the human population of the asteroid are drastically reduced, the Doctor, Kate and Galen hide in TARDIS. There, the amazing technology of the TARDIS console BBC Micro reveals the horrible truth – not only is the main ingredient of "Beetle Juice 5000" made entirely from the shit of the giant green beetles on this asteroid, but...
"BEETLE SHIT IS PEOPLE!!!" the Doctor exclaims in horror.
After the requisite Soylent Green jokes, everyone gets back to the plot. It turns out that if a beetle eats someone smart, eating that beetle’s excrement will make YOU smart. Thus, the Bank Manager has been letting the beetles eating smart people, using the beetle shit in "Beetle Juice 5000" to make people MORE smart, then feeding them to the beetles, over and over again in a cycle of ever-increasingly intellectual fecal matter consumption!
The Doctor is awestruck at the audacious manipulation of this Machiavellian scheme, while Kate and Galen are just incredibly nauseous about the whole damn idea.
The Time Lord realizes he is up against a foe that actually might be dangerous enough to finish off what Dustbins, Cybermen and Ice Cream Vendors could never dream of... and he might even kill the godlike Seventh Doctor and all!
"The Bank Manager may be able to sacrifice the Brotherhood of Darkened Time to create the elixir of pure mental power," the Doctor proclaims, "but I can whip up a complete revolution in under 25 minutes and bring down the entire infrastructure of the Bank Manager’s evil plan!"
However, it quickly strikes the Time Lord that all the monks have been eaten, so there isn’t anyone left alive to whip into a people’s army and fight for the Doctor. This revelation takes the wind out of the Doctor’s sails, but then he hits upon a completely novel plan:
"Of course! If the beetles have eaten all the monks, then I’ll just have to get the BEETLES themselves to rise up against the Bank Manager – that can’t be too difficult, can it, Kate?"
Kate, for her parts, thinks the Doctor is a "completely deluded little Scotsman with a barely-suppressed death wish" and leaves him to his suicidal attempts to promote socialist equality amongst a hive of man-eating monster insects.
Huffing, the Doctor strides to the pit of bugs and politely asks, "Could I interest you in a brand new lower intestine, sir or madam?" and in moments is taking tea with the hideous sluggy Hive Queen.
One thankfully-unseen sequence later, the Doctor is strolling towards the bloodstained ruin of the Church with an army of socialist beetles behind him. There they find that the Bank Manger and his sole surviving followers (unsurprisingly, the DAAS trio, who are the only remaining speaking parts from the Brotherhood of Darkened Time) are stocking up huge amounts of "Beetle Juice 5000" cans into a bitchingly cool planet hopper parked out the back of the church.
Easily capturing Kate and Galen, the Bank Manager demonstrates both his amazing chess master skills but truly badass credentials by shooting his remaining monks to make them confess where the Doctor’s got to – an act of lateral thinking and sheer nastiness that even Kate Tollinger, daughter of a bloodsoaked gangland boss, can appreciate.
As the Doctor and his army of beetles close in, the Bank Manager unveils his lethal and rather unwieldy doomsday device composed entirely of empty "Beetle Juice 5000" cans and some bubblegum. This dastardly mechanism does exactly what it says on the tin, and unfortunately the tin says "MIND RAPIST – GUARANTEED TO SUCK YOUR BRAINS OUT AND LEAVE YOU A CATATONIC LUMP OF FLESH".
Knowing that the Doctor will most likely be expecting him to start on his companion, the Bank Manager uses the Mind Rapist on Galen instead, but this double bluff proves slightly less than in any way helpful as the now-vegetable-ized monk knew nothing of any use whatsoever!
The Doctor arrives and the Bank Manager cunningly claims that this all part of his plan and all the Doctor has achieved is to tidy up all the loose ends on the asteroid. The Doctor retorts that this is precisely what he wants the Bank Manager to think, as he has been using the Bank Manager all along to affect the evolution of the Beetles. The Bank Manager retorts that this is just another layer in this onion of intricate villainy...
...anyway, eventually the Bank Manager threatens to blow Kate’s head off with a pump-action sawn-off shotgun. "Is THAT part of your plan, Doctor? Huh?"
The Doctor agrees that it is, which is why he’ll surrender himself to the Mind Rapist, allowing the Bank Manager to drain the Time Lord’s knowledge and use it to conquer the universe which is pretty much on the Bank Manager’s long-term goal list. In fact, he’ll conveniently put on a straightjacket to make it that much easier.
The Bank Manager asks precisely HOW the Doctor could possibly turn this situation to his advantage – and then realizes. "By all the Gods of Purgatory... HE HAS REVERSED THE POLARITY OF THE NEUTRON FLOW!" the Bank Manager exclaims in horror.
Yes, the Mind Rapist won’t suck the Doctor’s mind out through his eyeballs but instead grant him all the powers of a God of the Fourth, to create and destroy all of reality at whim.
"Why didn’t I think of doing that?" the Bank Manager explains, and then reverses the reversed neutron flow polarity and then activates the Mind Rapist, and its deadly force ravages the Time Lord.
"If anybody’s thinking of rescuing me – I suggest THEY GET THEIR SKATES ON!" the Doctor screams desperately, writhing in his straightjacket as his lives, his very consciousness is sucked away...
...and burnt onto a compact disc the Bank Manager pockets quickly pockets for future mischief.
Then, suddenly, the Doctor’s eyes pop open, glowing with abominable light. It turns out the little Scottish Time Lord has actually known precisely what he was doing all along – while everyone was arguing he drank an entire keg of "Bug Juice 5000" which has increased his mental power 100 times, and even after the whole Mind-Raping business has left him with godlike powers.
The Elixir-fueled Doctor laughs evilly, as the sugar buzz from a keg of energy drinks leads the Time Lord into what can only be described as "a voyage to trip-out city". Falling through strange geometric patterns and swirling clouds, the Doctor sees a hideous shadow rising above him: his Inner Fuckwit, brought to the surface by imbibing chemicals "too broad and too deep and way too illegal for the small screen".
"YOU ARE EVIL!" booms the monster. "YOU UNRAVEL TIMELINES AND JEOPARDIZE YOUR COMPANIONS! YOU CAUSE UPSET AND GRIEF, USE PEOPLE LIKE TOOLS, ACT AS THOUGH THE COSMOS IS YOUR GAME BOARD TO PLAY ON AS YOU WILL... AND SERIOUSLY, WHAT IT IS WITH THE QUESTION MARKS?!"
Facing the deepest, darkest facet of his own psyche, the Doctor promptly gives it a two-fingered salute.
This final battle between the Doctor and his own obsession to defeat evil abruptly ends as, out in the real world, the Time Lord suddenly goes cross-eyed and smoke starts to pour from his ears. Then he falls over and blows some saliva bubbles.
The Bank Manager takes a moment to come to terms with this latest of plot developments. After prodding the Doctor with his toe a few times, the evil mastermind comes to the conclusion that the Doctor ISN’T faking and is genuinely insane following the curb stomp battle from confronting what is rotten within himself.
"Which means, I win!" the Bank Manager laughs. "Plus I know more than you’ve forgotten! HA!"
To be on the safe side, the Bank Manager throws the gibbering lunatic into a confinement cell, just in case this is some final cunning stratagem. He then runs for his planet hopper spaceship, cackling, "The Doctor is finished! Forever! He’ll never be the amoral chess player on a thousand boards ever again! IN YOUR FACE, CARTMEL MASTERPLAN!"
Kate watches the space hopper take off, hurtling through a secret passage leading out of the asteroid and into deep space, and reflects that all in all today has been a rather strange day.
Aboard his ship, the Bank Manager quickly slides his CD-ROM into his navigation computer, granting him the secrets of time and space and power all of known creation...
...when the DAAS trio, a bit pissed off with all his murder attempts, promptly jump him, snap his neck, sing a little song, and accidentally send it hurtling through time and space to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean during the era of the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire.
Back on the asteroid, Kate is left alone as the completely insane Doctor babbles incoherently at the walls of his cell. "I fear I have lost my marbles!" he gibbers. "My plot is losing it! All of my eggs are in a strange basket and the square of my hypotenuse is nowhere NEAR the square of my other two sides! Oh cruel fate, I have made my escape but my mind is running amock!"
Finally sick of this inane chatter, Kate gags the Doctor to shut him up giving her a chance to emote and reflect how the Doctor has lost a battle against the evil in himself and been left so completely destroyed, an empty man with no trace of a soul left...
It is around now she discovers that the Doctor’s cellular contractual renewal handily covers "losing mind" as well as "damaging body" and the gagged-and-straightjacket-ed Doctor is twitching like a mordant epileptic watching that dodgy episode of Pokémon.
Suddenly, the Doctor’s skin glows a blinding white as he shifts, ripples and distorts inside his straightjacket which rapidly becomes too small for him. The rotund, grey-haired maniac breaks free of his gag and straightjacket – a completely new man.
Unfortunately, he’s not much saner than the last one.
"Waitress!" he yells at Kate. "Waitress! Getting a bit peckish in here! Could DO with a FEED! Waitress?!" he shouts and, convinced he can smell some poached salmon, immediately runs off out of the church back to the TARDIS, screaming for hors-d’oeuvres at the top of his voice.
Kate rushes after him, rightly guessing her chances of survival will be better with the fat psycho demanding "mutton dressed as lamb with mousse dressed as Marie Antoinette for desert" are higher than loitering around an asteroid of ferocious man-eating insects.
And so the story ends with the disturbing sight of the new Doctor, painfully squeezed into the old Doctor’s golfing gear, kicking the TARDIS console and screaming, "WHEN SHE GOT THERE THE CUPBOARD WAS BARE SO THE POOR MONGREL STARVED TO DEATH!!" at the top of his voice.
"Fear not this foul play, Kate," he adds, popping on a pair of pince nez spectacles. "For the game is not yet done until the final BARB ratings are tallied!"
Serial 7P/4 - Addiction
An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Evil Insect Elixir
D O C T O R W H O
Serial 7P/4 - Addiction
Part One
Aboard the mighty time-ship TARDIS, the Doctor stalks up and down with the slow realization he’s finally run out of master-plans and intricate schemes battling the higher forces of creation and tricking evils from the Dawn of Time into blowing themselves up with some old Gallifreyan antiques the Doctor picked up at a car-boot sale on Dronid.
Desperately, the Doctor scans his 500 year diary for someone... anyone!... to begin a massive chessgame with innocent bystanders as pawns and the whole universe at stake, but he’s done them all. The ancient wolves of Fenric, the reconstituted Dustbin Umpire, Bertie Bassett, he’s been there, done that, angsted about it and acted like a complete bastard with a question mark fetish.
Worse, his new companion Kate Tollinger is beginning to twig at what a pathetic and uninteresting loser the Doctor is when he’s not acting as Time’s Pimp and defending the laws of the universe. In mad desperation to restore some of his street cred, the Doctor quickly finds one last entity in all of time and space who is so downright evil, monstrous and callous they need the Doctor to go out of his way to destroy them utterly to every last molecule:
"My bank manager!" the Doctor vows darkly.
Being an upper-class, pampered rich bitch, Kate has never had to suffer the pain and humiliation of trying to extend an overdraft with no credit rating whatsoever. But even SHE thinks this mindless vendetta against some tweed-wearing git for not forking out a few mazumas for the Doctor to neuter his robot dog is fool hardly and beggars logic.
The Doctor assures Kate that he’s not talking about some nonentity from a small branch of GalactaBank on Ursa Minor, he’s talking about the Brotherhood of Darkened Time, an order of druidic monks who wear cloaks and burn incense. Who also happen to be the finest accountants in all of creation and the only ones stopping higher evolutionaries like the Time Lords of Gallifrey from being arrested by the Shadow Proclamation for massive financial irregularities.
Proving his point, the Doctor immediately pilots the TARDIS to the Head Office of these outer-space bank-tellers – and arrives on a far distant asteroid honeycombed with tunnels and passengers like a worm-ravaged apple core. Kate is slightly unimpressed by this badly-lit underground maze of deserted and dusty passages, but the Doctor points out it’s a relief they’ve not arrived on a Monday morning when the place is REALLY busy.
Completely ignorant of the giant beetles scuttling in the shadows with their giant glowing red eyes, or of the mysterious hooded figure stalking their every movement, the Doctor and Kate wander around looking for a reception desk – idly noting the mysterious scratches in solid rock and the odd smell of rotting human flesh.
They finally notice the mysterious hooded figure who’s been walking behind them after he clears his throat very loudly and shouts "HEY, I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU, YOU UNOBSERVANT TOSSERS!!!"
This turns out to be Brother Galen, a rather stressed accountant of the Brotherhood who shows signs of a truly cocaine-fueled superiority complex. Having listened to the Doctor and Kate waffle on for ages, Galen knows exactly who they are, where they came from, why they are here, and the Doctor’s inside leg measurement. It is only later the Doctor realizes neither he nor Kate mentioned such a measurement, and grows secretive and suspicious. Well, slightly more than usual, anyway.
Galen leads them to the Main Office – a Gothic church filling a cavern at the heart of the asteroid, lit by burning lanterns. It’s got a whole CS Lewis vibe to it, and Galen explains that this monumental architectural folly was constructed in a few hours by his fellow monks who were, like him, on a speed-crazed frenzy of efficiency.
It transpires that all of the Brotherhood of Darkened Time have their mental faculties expanded and their perceptions heightened by a delicate combination of a strict monastic lifestyle and very hard drugs. The end result is a bunch of coke-heads doing tax returns in perfect silence with pen and ink in quiet contemplation of the galactic stock exchange while their leader, Bank Manager Koporahn, grooves to ABBA’s "Money, Money, Money" played over his Hatichami Compact Disc Jog Person in the main study hall.
Using all their self-control, the Doctor and Kate manage to stop giggling too obviously at the sight of all these pathetic monks in silence twitching and sniffing white powder, while also noticing the beetle-shaped logo designs absolutely everywhere.
Finally granted an audience in the Bank Manager’s private office, the leader of the Brotherhood of Darkened Time immediately starts offering the time travelers’ a small forest’s worth of pamphlets about how hip and cool they’ll be to join the order of cosmic fiscal analysts.
The Doctor and Kate eventually get a word in edgeways and explain they are not new members to this incredibly suspicious and unconvincing religious banking scheme, whereupon the Bank Manager tells them in no uncertain terms to "get the fuck out of his life" and stop wasting his precious time.
Galen explains the Doctor is in fact a dissatisfied customer, and the Bank Manager reacts with a truly cruel and unusual punishment: he gives the Doctor a guided tour of their primitive abode, showing him the unhygienic toilet facilities, their small vegetable garden, their soul-crushing work which forces them to take massive amounts of cocaine to keep them going in an order where no one can talk or make friends or make love on top of the photocopier at an office party...
The Doctor and Kate are soon reduced to tears – but whether these are tears of sympathy or outright boredom we will never know! The Bank Manager has everyone have a complimentary can of "Beetle Juice 5000" energy drink (described by the World Health Organization as "Your Midlife Crisis Wake-Up Call" that gives a caffeine buzz of no shorter than eleven days and a resulting comedown of twenty-seven years).
The Doctor and Kate immediately make a run for it, checking the handy office layout map above the front door to navigate their way back to the TARDIS – only for Kate to continually insist that they’re going the wrong way and wandering deeper and deeper into the asteroid.
Finally the Doctor’s resolve cracks and he listens to Kate, who turns out to be absolutely right. However, this means that the map at the church was completely wrong – and designed to trick unsuspecting travelers straight into the forbidden caverns beyond.
The Doctor is amazed: this is clearly a clever trap which means that he has finally met a manipulative bastard as callous and morally bankrupt as himself!
"JACKPOT! Oh, if only Ace could see me now!" he whispers in awe.
Kate meanwhile points out that the Bank Manager can’t be THAT clever if he allowed her to drink the magical "Beetle Juice 5000" that, like all other members of the Brotherhood of Darkened Time, allows her to use more than 10 per cent of her brain power and thus remember the correct route back to the time machine.
Thus, not only is the Bank Manager as ruthless a chess master as the Doctor, he’s also got exactly the same awful bad luck and incredibly terrible contingency planning.
"Oh, this just gets better and better!" the Doctor cackles evilly, rubbing his question-mark umbrella with sinister glee.
But then the moment is ruined as he promptly trips over the bones of a monk picked clean by the nasty alien beetles that absolutely everyone in the audience have noticed patrolling the caves and even now are watching from the shadows while Sylvester McCoy does one last pratfall in his time as the Seventh Doctor.
Completely unaware of the mortal peril that they’ve just avoided, the Doctor and Kate race back to the monastery to make a complaint about the appalling health and safety standards on this asteroid. In order to communicate in a society where no one may speak, the Doctor forces Kate to wear a sandwich board with the words "ONE OF THE MONKS HAS DIED HORRIBLY – RUN FOR YOUR LIVES" written on it.
"Do you really think this will help the situation?" asks Kate.
The Doctor shrugs. "Who cares?"
Part Two
In their second interview with the Bank Manager, the Doctor notes that it’s rather convenient that the poor monk what got killed happened to be part of a cult that ensures he has no friends, family or indeed anyone that might ever notice he’d gone off for a walk and then been filleted like a Taiwanese chicken nugget.
The Bank Manager stares at him for a long time before quietly asking the Doctor, "And your point being?"
Realizing yet again he is finally confronting an enemy that WON’T suddenly blab all their evil plans at the slightest of provocations, the Doctor decides to play the long game. Or at least as long a game as he can get out of these painfully-under-running three-parters!
Deciding to tried and true methods, the Doctor suggests he and the Bank Manager go for a nice picnic in the dark catacombs outside leaving Kate to loiter around in the church looking for clues and stuff to justify her presence in the story.
In what could be a cunning bluff... or a REALLY cunning double bluff... or a NOT-AT-ALL cunning triple bluff... the Bank Manager agrees and he and the Doctor skip off, hand-in-hand, into the darkness while Kate quickly comes to the conclusion she doesn’t actually give a damn if any of these druggie accountants live or die anyway.
To pass the time, the decadent safe cracker immediately decides to break into the tiny communal vegetable garden and then wreck it as though it belonged to Blue Peter.
There she discovers what looks like an illegal distillery being run by none other than the Doug Anthony Allstars – a stand up comedy punk band from Australia whose mere presence in this story at all destroys the faintest hints of logic and credibility it may have once possessed.
So taken aback by this narrative black hole, Kate is taken completely by surprise as the three musicians beat the crap out of her and tie her to the chair, intending to make her a key ingredient in "Beetle Juice 5000"! Alas, for the purposes of dramatic tension, they are unable to explain what the hell they’re on about before Brother Galen clubs them unconscious, unties Kate and they run away through a secret passage.
The DAAS trio recover and muse on the deep irony that the rules of their order means they have no idea WHICH monk came to Kate’s rescue, so they’ll just have to dope themselves up with "Beetle Juice 5000" until their heightened perceptions make them work out the truth. Whereupon they can steal his ration of cocaine!
Meanwhile, the Doctor and the Bank Manager are creeping up a tunnel when the Doctor unleashes his final masterstroke – he has absolutely NO plan of any kind whatsoever! Which means, of course, that the Bank Manager cannot POSSIBLY have a contingency plan... unless, of course, he was expecting the Doctor to try and kung-fu-kick him to death while screaming "MORE TEA, VICAR?!?" in a strange falsetto.
Finally the Bank Manager cracks and offers to explain the whole evil plan, revealing the Brotherhood of Darkened Time was relocated to this asteroid as part of a complicated scheme to refine "Beetle Juice 5000" – once all the monks are addicted to it, the Bank Manager will use their mighty financial powers to make it THE energy drink of the new millennium and the Bank Manager will be filthy, stinking rich.
The Doctor nods at this diabolically ingenious scheme... before realizing that it doesn’t actually make the slightest bit of sense! How do yuppie accountants "refine" energy drinks? And how does making them solitary faceless monks help? And what does all this have to do with the things eating people on this asteroid?
Alas this has all been a cunning ploy to distract the Doctor while the Bank Manager drop-kicks him into a deep dark pit full of giant buck-toothed beetles that tend to rip human beings apart and strip their puny pink flesh from their weak little bones!
The Doctor gurns in suitably appropriate mortal terror.
Part Three
Luckily, there’s one more episode to go, so the Doctor quickly tries to talk his way out of the problem by making small talk with the ravenous alien beetles. Amazingly enough this works long enough for the Doctor to climb out of the pit and punch the Bank Manager in the kidneys until he falls into the pit instead.
Pausing momentarily to wax philosophically about how two equally-matched mental opponents have to resort to low-brow physical violence to resolve anything, the Doctor runs off very quickly indeed.
The Bank Manager meanwhile has a funky aftershave that stops the beetles tearing him apart and he sends the ferocious invertebrates after the Time Lord – but giant starving beetles are actually really rubbish at being blood hounds and go in entirely the wrong direction and scuttle into the church.
Yes, it seems the Bank Manager has made yet another fundamental mistake and sent the very hungry death monsters into an all-you-can-eat monk buffet and unsurprisingly they "forget" about his rules for only eating monks who wander into their territory.
This leads to some truly kickass scenes of monks getting shredded limb from limb by roaring flesh-munching insects, some of them snatching up female monks and flying around the room while biting her head off, and this amazingly cool bit where a monk hides behind a curtain but there’s already a beetle there and it rips his arms off... I swear, it’s only beaten by the bit where the only surviving monk makes it to the front door, opens it, and there’s this drooling beetle waiting right outside the door and it totally swallows him in one bite. Infuckingcredible.
...
What? I can’t enjoy insectoid monastic carnage all of a sudden? Screw you, so-called moral guardians! I’m maladjusted am I? Well, define "well-adjusted" you bastards!
Ahem.
The Doctor meanwhile, as is often the case in these sort of adventures, bumps entirely by accident into Kate and Brother Galen, and they alone survive the inevitable beetle massacre. The fact they are the main characters with speaking parts helps too, if you want to be completely meta-textual about the whole thing...
Creeping into the cavern next to the vegetable garden, the Doctor finds sacks of weird gunge that is the principle ingredient of "Beetle Juice 5000". "This goo," the Doctor soliloquizes, "WHAT’S IT FOR??!"
Deciding that the safest place to hide while the human population of the asteroid are drastically reduced, the Doctor, Kate and Galen hide in TARDIS. There, the amazing technology of the TARDIS console BBC Micro reveals the horrible truth – not only is the main ingredient of "Beetle Juice 5000" made entirely from the shit of the giant green beetles on this asteroid, but...
"BEETLE SHIT IS PEOPLE!!!" the Doctor exclaims in horror.
After the requisite Soylent Green jokes, everyone gets back to the plot. It turns out that if a beetle eats someone smart, eating that beetle’s excrement will make YOU smart. Thus, the Bank Manager has been letting the beetles eating smart people, using the beetle shit in "Beetle Juice 5000" to make people MORE smart, then feeding them to the beetles, over and over again in a cycle of ever-increasingly intellectual fecal matter consumption!
The Doctor is awestruck at the audacious manipulation of this Machiavellian scheme, while Kate and Galen are just incredibly nauseous about the whole damn idea.
The Time Lord realizes he is up against a foe that actually might be dangerous enough to finish off what Dustbins, Cybermen and Ice Cream Vendors could never dream of... and he might even kill the godlike Seventh Doctor and all!
"The Bank Manager may be able to sacrifice the Brotherhood of Darkened Time to create the elixir of pure mental power," the Doctor proclaims, "but I can whip up a complete revolution in under 25 minutes and bring down the entire infrastructure of the Bank Manager’s evil plan!"
However, it quickly strikes the Time Lord that all the monks have been eaten, so there isn’t anyone left alive to whip into a people’s army and fight for the Doctor. This revelation takes the wind out of the Doctor’s sails, but then he hits upon a completely novel plan:
"Of course! If the beetles have eaten all the monks, then I’ll just have to get the BEETLES themselves to rise up against the Bank Manager – that can’t be too difficult, can it, Kate?"
Kate, for her parts, thinks the Doctor is a "completely deluded little Scotsman with a barely-suppressed death wish" and leaves him to his suicidal attempts to promote socialist equality amongst a hive of man-eating monster insects.
Huffing, the Doctor strides to the pit of bugs and politely asks, "Could I interest you in a brand new lower intestine, sir or madam?" and in moments is taking tea with the hideous sluggy Hive Queen.
One thankfully-unseen sequence later, the Doctor is strolling towards the bloodstained ruin of the Church with an army of socialist beetles behind him. There they find that the Bank Manger and his sole surviving followers (unsurprisingly, the DAAS trio, who are the only remaining speaking parts from the Brotherhood of Darkened Time) are stocking up huge amounts of "Beetle Juice 5000" cans into a bitchingly cool planet hopper parked out the back of the church.
Easily capturing Kate and Galen, the Bank Manager demonstrates both his amazing chess master skills but truly badass credentials by shooting his remaining monks to make them confess where the Doctor’s got to – an act of lateral thinking and sheer nastiness that even Kate Tollinger, daughter of a bloodsoaked gangland boss, can appreciate.
As the Doctor and his army of beetles close in, the Bank Manager unveils his lethal and rather unwieldy doomsday device composed entirely of empty "Beetle Juice 5000" cans and some bubblegum. This dastardly mechanism does exactly what it says on the tin, and unfortunately the tin says "MIND RAPIST – GUARANTEED TO SUCK YOUR BRAINS OUT AND LEAVE YOU A CATATONIC LUMP OF FLESH".
Knowing that the Doctor will most likely be expecting him to start on his companion, the Bank Manager uses the Mind Rapist on Galen instead, but this double bluff proves slightly less than in any way helpful as the now-vegetable-ized monk knew nothing of any use whatsoever!
The Doctor arrives and the Bank Manager cunningly claims that this all part of his plan and all the Doctor has achieved is to tidy up all the loose ends on the asteroid. The Doctor retorts that this is precisely what he wants the Bank Manager to think, as he has been using the Bank Manager all along to affect the evolution of the Beetles. The Bank Manager retorts that this is just another layer in this onion of intricate villainy...
...anyway, eventually the Bank Manager threatens to blow Kate’s head off with a pump-action sawn-off shotgun. "Is THAT part of your plan, Doctor? Huh?"
The Doctor agrees that it is, which is why he’ll surrender himself to the Mind Rapist, allowing the Bank Manager to drain the Time Lord’s knowledge and use it to conquer the universe which is pretty much on the Bank Manager’s long-term goal list. In fact, he’ll conveniently put on a straightjacket to make it that much easier.
The Bank Manager asks precisely HOW the Doctor could possibly turn this situation to his advantage – and then realizes. "By all the Gods of Purgatory... HE HAS REVERSED THE POLARITY OF THE NEUTRON FLOW!" the Bank Manager exclaims in horror.
Yes, the Mind Rapist won’t suck the Doctor’s mind out through his eyeballs but instead grant him all the powers of a God of the Fourth, to create and destroy all of reality at whim.
"Why didn’t I think of doing that?" the Bank Manager explains, and then reverses the reversed neutron flow polarity and then activates the Mind Rapist, and its deadly force ravages the Time Lord.
"If anybody’s thinking of rescuing me – I suggest THEY GET THEIR SKATES ON!" the Doctor screams desperately, writhing in his straightjacket as his lives, his very consciousness is sucked away...
...and burnt onto a compact disc the Bank Manager pockets quickly pockets for future mischief.
Then, suddenly, the Doctor’s eyes pop open, glowing with abominable light. It turns out the little Scottish Time Lord has actually known precisely what he was doing all along – while everyone was arguing he drank an entire keg of "Bug Juice 5000" which has increased his mental power 100 times, and even after the whole Mind-Raping business has left him with godlike powers.
The Elixir-fueled Doctor laughs evilly, as the sugar buzz from a keg of energy drinks leads the Time Lord into what can only be described as "a voyage to trip-out city". Falling through strange geometric patterns and swirling clouds, the Doctor sees a hideous shadow rising above him: his Inner Fuckwit, brought to the surface by imbibing chemicals "too broad and too deep and way too illegal for the small screen".
"YOU ARE EVIL!" booms the monster. "YOU UNRAVEL TIMELINES AND JEOPARDIZE YOUR COMPANIONS! YOU CAUSE UPSET AND GRIEF, USE PEOPLE LIKE TOOLS, ACT AS THOUGH THE COSMOS IS YOUR GAME BOARD TO PLAY ON AS YOU WILL... AND SERIOUSLY, WHAT IT IS WITH THE QUESTION MARKS?!"
Facing the deepest, darkest facet of his own psyche, the Doctor promptly gives it a two-fingered salute.
This final battle between the Doctor and his own obsession to defeat evil abruptly ends as, out in the real world, the Time Lord suddenly goes cross-eyed and smoke starts to pour from his ears. Then he falls over and blows some saliva bubbles.
The Bank Manager takes a moment to come to terms with this latest of plot developments. After prodding the Doctor with his toe a few times, the evil mastermind comes to the conclusion that the Doctor ISN’T faking and is genuinely insane following the curb stomp battle from confronting what is rotten within himself.
"Which means, I win!" the Bank Manager laughs. "Plus I know more than you’ve forgotten! HA!"
To be on the safe side, the Bank Manager throws the gibbering lunatic into a confinement cell, just in case this is some final cunning stratagem. He then runs for his planet hopper spaceship, cackling, "The Doctor is finished! Forever! He’ll never be the amoral chess player on a thousand boards ever again! IN YOUR FACE, CARTMEL MASTERPLAN!"
Kate watches the space hopper take off, hurtling through a secret passage leading out of the asteroid and into deep space, and reflects that all in all today has been a rather strange day.
Aboard his ship, the Bank Manager quickly slides his CD-ROM into his navigation computer, granting him the secrets of time and space and power all of known creation...
...when the DAAS trio, a bit pissed off with all his murder attempts, promptly jump him, snap his neck, sing a little song, and accidentally send it hurtling through time and space to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean during the era of the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire.
Back on the asteroid, Kate is left alone as the completely insane Doctor babbles incoherently at the walls of his cell. "I fear I have lost my marbles!" he gibbers. "My plot is losing it! All of my eggs are in a strange basket and the square of my hypotenuse is nowhere NEAR the square of my other two sides! Oh cruel fate, I have made my escape but my mind is running amock!"
Finally sick of this inane chatter, Kate gags the Doctor to shut him up giving her a chance to emote and reflect how the Doctor has lost a battle against the evil in himself and been left so completely destroyed, an empty man with no trace of a soul left...
It is around now she discovers that the Doctor’s cellular contractual renewal handily covers "losing mind" as well as "damaging body" and the gagged-and-straightjacket-ed Doctor is twitching like a mordant epileptic watching that dodgy episode of Pokémon.
Suddenly, the Doctor’s skin glows a blinding white as he shifts, ripples and distorts inside his straightjacket which rapidly becomes too small for him. The rotund, grey-haired maniac breaks free of his gag and straightjacket – a completely new man.
Unfortunately, he’s not much saner than the last one.
"Waitress!" he yells at Kate. "Waitress! Getting a bit peckish in here! Could DO with a FEED! Waitress?!" he shouts and, convinced he can smell some poached salmon, immediately runs off out of the church back to the TARDIS, screaming for hors-d’oeuvres at the top of his voice.
Kate rushes after him, rightly guessing her chances of survival will be better with the fat psycho demanding "mutton dressed as lamb with mousse dressed as Marie Antoinette for desert" are higher than loitering around an asteroid of ferocious man-eating insects.
And so the story ends with the disturbing sight of the new Doctor, painfully squeezed into the old Doctor’s golfing gear, kicking the TARDIS console and screaming, "WHEN SHE GOT THERE THE CUPBOARD WAS BARE SO THE POOR MONGREL STARVED TO DEATH!!" at the top of his voice.
"Fear not this foul play, Kate," he adds, popping on a pair of pince nez spectacles. "For the game is not yet done until the final BARB ratings are tallied!"
7th Doctor - Crime of the Century (ii)
Book(s)/Other Related –
Doctor Who & The Pernicious Recession
Doctor Who Versus The Paradise Club (Canada Only)
Ridiculously Hyperbolic And Generic Story Titles Vol. III
Fluffs - Sylvester McCoy seemed criminally badass in this story.
"You can’t intimidate us with a show of armed force. Tell him he can’t! This is not going to happen! Tell him it’s not going to happen! Go on! Tell him! Tell him, tell him, tell him, tell him, tell him!"
"Thank you, Julia, I can actually REMEMBER my own lines you know!"
Goofs -
What precisely IS the sale of the century? Trying to convince the audience that Kate shouldn't die in the ditch but become a full-fledged wise-cracking bitch-in-sheep’s-clothing companion?
How has Kate made it as a safe cracker when she insists on admitting her secret profession to random strangers who haven’t even ASKED her what she does for a living?
Fashion Victims -
Again, when it comes to giant lumbering alien insects, the Metatraxi set out to make the Zarbi look like the height of sophistication.
Technobabble -
"Do you know what this is? Amazing, isn’t it? It’s a portable telephone, completely wireless and no bigger than an army walkie-talkie. AND it's small enough for me to carry around in my own car!"
"Pity it’ll give you brain cancer though."
"What?"
"Nothing."
Links and References -
There are numerous scenes where Sam says, "Hey, I remember that guy!" and the Doctor asks, "Hey, remember me from last story?" or someone saying "Hey, look at that Ice Cream Vendor stuff from last story!" and I simply cannot be bothered to note any specific occurrence.
Untelevised Misadventures -
Every year, the Doctor turned up at Kate's birthday parties with presents designed to mould her into the amoral criminal he could use for his nefarious master-plans throughout time and space. This lead, unsurprisingly, to a restraining order being placed on him.
Groovy DVD Extras -
All 478 episodes of the hit animated spin-off series "Mighty Mutant Hero Cyber Samurai Metatraxi" for kids.
Dialogue Disasters -
Doctor: If I had a hat, I'd take it off to you.
Kate: You ARE wearing a hat.
Doctor: So sue me.
Metatraxi: Single combat? Groovy!
Kate’s narration of getting jiggy with Prince:
"I feel the familiar melancholy of winter coming on. But it's not all chill and gloom. Autumn is also the season for losing virginity with gorgeous pop-stars. My heart beats faster in familiar excitement. Am I in the mood or in the mode? I do so hate being kept waiting with nothing to amuse myself. The vestigial guilt I feel for slipping all those date-rape drugs into my beloved’s drink will be worth the orgasmic climax; the sound that follows the most gratifying sound in the world before the sheets need changing. It’s all so romantic. You understand, I'm invoking the concept of romance ironically?"
Doctor: I need your help, both of you.
Kate: I’ll help you, but I want nothing more to do with HIM!
Sam: Oh, love please!
Kate: After the way you treated mummy? You never even tried to hide them, all those other women!
Sam: You don’t understand what was between her and me!
Doctor: Ahem, we have to work together as a team...
Sam: Don’t let it come between us!
Kate: It came between us a long time ago!
Doctor: You have to set aside personal differences...
Kate: I’m not going to set aside what HE did!
Sam: Your mother and I had our difficulties!
Kate: Difficulties?
Sam: But there’s no need for you to get in the middle of all that!
Kate: In the middle was where I always was, right between the two of you but I’m not there any more! Mummy’s gone and now I’m as far away from you as humanly possible!
Doctor: Oh, for fuck’s sake! Mel and Glitz would be more help!
Dialogue Triumphs -
Doctor: Whatever else I might do, I specialize putting people at risk – people I like and care about.
Kate: And I fall into that category? That’s very charming of you, Doctor. (long pause) I take it, it is ME we’re talking about? (longer pause) Doctor? (even longer pause) Screw you then!
The Doctor muses on the irrationality of human beings -
"That’s the nature of sexual intercourse. You end up doing it with people you shouldn’t be having sexual intercourse with."
Sam: I know all about losing things. Why do you think I’m here, wasting my time doing crosswords and aggravating my piles for thirty grand scores? Because I lost the lot! I used to have it all and I lost it all on Black Monday!
Doctor: Oh, one of THOSE. They happen every few decades, inevitable, brief and periodic cycles.
Sam: It’s all every well having that point of view when you’re a bloody time traveler – try to being a small-to-medium-sized business enterprise and THEN see how brief they seem. And how inevitable? I don’t think it HAD to happen! I’d like to get my hands on the blokes responsible, the lad who caused. Mark my words, someone’s made a nice little profit out of ruining us all. They did it all deliberately to make a killing!
Doctor: Shut up, Sam! JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Sam: But, Doctor...
Doctor: I have had it UP TO HERE with all this self-pitying social relevancy... you’re a fucking gangland boss! Stop whinging about how unfair life is because YOUR bank balance is no longer in six figures! BOO-FUCKING-HOO! I was all ready to try and get into this gritty social realism, get rid of all the science fiction aspects and become as hardcore as "The Bill" or "London’s Burning" but MOTHER OF FUCKING CHRIST – a posh sword-fighting cat burglar and her Cockney gangster dad! VERY FUCKING REALISTIC I DON’T THINK! And, I could even have coped, even with the new Earthbound format with authentic-based contemporary characters IF YOU WEREN’T ALL SUCH TOTAL ASSHOLES! Hmmm, planet Zog in the 82nd Century or Thatcher’s Britain – I wonder which one will be more fun and interesting? That’s it, I quit!
Sam: Sylv, you’re going way off script...
Doctor: FUCK THE SCRIPT! I QUIT THIS WHOLE FUCKING SHOW! IT’S NOT EVEN LIKE THIS IS EVER GOING TO GET BROADCAST ANYWAY!
Sam: Mmmm. You got a point there, Doc.
UnQuotable Quote -
Kate: He's rather good, isn't he?
Viewer Quotes -
"Dudes! Wanna read my girl-on-girl slash-fic with Kate Tollinger and Soolin from Blake's 7? It's fucking AWESOME!!" - Steve Moffat (1992)
"Wouldn’t the cliffhangers work better if the audience *weren’t* rooting for the villains to put a bullet through Kate’s head?"
- Richard Curtis (2010)
"It was good to see a McCoy episode where the Seventh Doctor has set up a complicated plan, and we're watching him in different places trying to get it all to come together. I can't for the life of me think of another Doctor Who story that has ever followed that pattern."
- I.M. Amoron (1990)
"Not a lot of opinions about this one. I was going to write a rousing discussion of Kate’s false-sounding posh bird accent, and of the Metatraxi, but I honestly didn’t give this another thought."
- Doctor Who Review Monthly (1997)
"DULL of the Century more like! Ha-ha-HAA! I laugh at this story. Actually, I give out a sort of high-pitched giggle, but the point still stands, I feel." - Adrian Mole (1991)
"Kate feels fresh as a dew-soaked daisy whereas Ace is the rotten old near-to-death thistle. Oh, if only I could have taken her roughly from behind over the kitchen table!" - Jo Ford Prefect (2010)
"The Metatraxi? AGAIN? What, did someone lose a bet or something?"
- Hugh Laurie (2011)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"The convergence of the different subplots toward the end of the play seemed a little haphazard to me. Sort of like when you forget whether or not the grenade you're playing catch with is live or not, you know what I mean? You don't? Boy, have YOU missed out!"
Sylvester McCoy Speaks!
"It's great fun and very exciting to get a new companion. Andrew created my Doctor's character, and Ace's character and now this new character. Well, I say 'new'. As long as no one ever saw Emma Peel in The Avengers, they'd swear she was totally original. She's got a nice buttock-rhythm, has young Julie, when she's doing all the necessary running up and down corridors..."
Julia Sawalha Speaks!
"True story, I can't actually fly a helicopter in real life. Or crack safes. Or sword-fight with drug smugglers during armed sieges. It's amazing what they can do on telly, isn't it? I'm really enjoying having all the limelight focused on me for a change. Which I love. I'm quite a narcissist, really. I hate doing soliloquies and things like that if I'm not actually the one supposed to them. It can get really annoying for other people, I find, if I just turn up unannounced at rehearsals and start doing other people's lines."
Ben Aaaaronovitch Speaks!
"This story has Andrew Cartmel written all over it. Which is rather odd, considering I'M the bloody writer!"
Trivia -
The new companion was originally called Lady Raine Creevey Cunningham Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe-Smythe-Smythe-Smythe-Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dob. Unfortunately, there were just so MANY Lady Raine Creevey Cunningham Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe-Smythe-Smythe-Smythe-Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dobs in the phone book it was inevitable they'd all get sued unless they chose a name that was slightly less common.
Rumors & Facts –
The Sale of the Century will never reach the heights of The Chess of Fenric or Ghost Light or The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy or Battlefield: Earth... well, to be blunt, this is probably the most no-fist utterly-pathetic story that was thrown at Sylvester McCoy like a frisbee at a Hawaiian luau. Even Romp of the Rani kicks this story’s ass in terms of providing quality entertainment.
The realization amongst the production team were that they were slaving away over episodes that would never be shown and, due to a legal embargo, would not even be admitted to being made for twenty long years, had disastrous effects on all concerned.
Why bother with fast paced plots, snappy dialogue and consistent characterization if no one would appreciate it? So as production began on the third story of the season, it was decided to just let things become over-talkative, snail-paced and as unlike Doctor Who as possible. This would have the benefit of allowing cast and crew alike practice for other, proper television programs that networks were willing to admit they had filmed.
To this end script editor Andrew Cartmel, script writer Ben Aaaronovitch and costume designer Ken Trew just stopped giving a shit. They would work together on a story that would speak the contemporary language of television, employing realistic scenarios and scenarios. After all, working out how defeat an alien invasion isn’t any good writing experience for The Bill, is it? Being able to plot out historical mysteries and ontological time paradoxes won’t get you a job on Casualty. And the ability to give Dustbins interesting dialogue is nothing to be proud of on the set of London’s Burning.
Thus they decided the next story would feature an authentically nineties set of characters (even though it wasn’t even one year into the decade yet). It would feature no science fiction content whatsoever, focusing on armed sieges and drug smuggling, underworld crims and proper police procedure. Director Alan Waring was also quite eager to do a socio-political thriller that DIDN’T feature a time traveling alien with a sonic screwdriver.
The team justified these desires to producer John Satan-Turner on the grounds that this story could be a significant turning point for Doctor Who, just like how Head From Ace had introduced the Third Doctor, Liz Shaw, UNIT, the Nestle Consciousness, Bessie, the Earthbound format, colour broadcast, new theme music, new title sequences and a wealth of reactionary working-class stereotypes.
This story would introduce... um... a mansion house on contemporary Earth and some generic criminals that the Doctor could draw upon for information rather than working out anything for himself. This gritty realism, they said, would make Doctor Who just like Edge of Darkness!
JST merely arched an eyebrow and asked, "You mean the Edge of Darkness where the main character wanders around talking to ghosts and then turns into a tree after getting zapped by radiation in a plot lifted wholesale from that Blake’s 7 episode where Gan dies?"
Realizing that this new direction of Doctor Who was completely and utterly stuffed, they just decided to focus their attention on getting this goddamned season over with. Once again, Cartmel used tried and trusted method of basing an entire story around a gimmicky pre-credit sequence which had failed so utterly spectacularly with the season opener, Live Aid.
The plot flowed organically out from this sequence, rather like a malignant tumor, and soon The Sale of the Century was born (so named so everyone could at least put it on their CVs and say they worked on a game show). This story would introduce a brand new companion to replace Ace, who would continue the gritty realism of being a super-posh safe-cracking lock-picking Kate Tollinger.
Working together, Cartmel and Aaaaronovitch managed to thrash out a full twenty-minutes of script that actually relied on Kate being a posh criminal, before deciding they’d just let her become another tart in a miniskirt for the dads to drool over. Unfortunately, this meant that remaining three-and-a-bit episodes had absolutely no plot of any kind whatsoever and, when it was pointed out that the crew were about to start filming in three minutes, Cartmel knew something had to be done.
Since Aaaaronovitch had already written for the show, creating the new monster race the Metatraxi and said race’s costumes were still available, it was decided to bring them back after a hiatus of five episodes. Cartmel made the decision that the Metatraxi be forced to talk like Michelangelo the Ninja Turtle on dope on the grounds that if Season 27 were ever broadcast then the McCoy-bashers would need something cringe-worthy to rail against. Because, apparently Kate Tollinger’s behavior wouldn’t achieve that on its own.
Ultimately, The Sale of the Century sets out to introduce Kate and fill up ninety-minutes of screen time, ninety minutes of your life that you will never ever get back. In this, it succeeds admirably. You can’t even complain about the story and characters because none of them can stick in the memory long enough to grate.
Superfluous rather hard-hitting, with twists as pointless as they are signposted and a plot literally running on the spot until there are no discernable differences in the narrative whatsoever, it is clear that The Sale of the Century’s ability to blank out the minds of lower beings was what ensured no one remembered making it in the first place.
Having finally run out of the energy and madness that had defined the last four series, it was no surprise that McCoy finally wanted out, following Sophie Aldred and in turn being followed by JST himself who was beginning to wonder if other career opportunities actually existed or were just fever dreams inside his own exhausted brain.
The end was nigh... and about time too!
Doctor Who & The Pernicious Recession
Doctor Who Versus The Paradise Club (Canada Only)
Ridiculously Hyperbolic And Generic Story Titles Vol. III
Fluffs - Sylvester McCoy seemed criminally badass in this story.
"You can’t intimidate us with a show of armed force. Tell him he can’t! This is not going to happen! Tell him it’s not going to happen! Go on! Tell him! Tell him, tell him, tell him, tell him, tell him!"
"Thank you, Julia, I can actually REMEMBER my own lines you know!"
Goofs -
What precisely IS the sale of the century? Trying to convince the audience that Kate shouldn't die in the ditch but become a full-fledged wise-cracking bitch-in-sheep’s-clothing companion?
How has Kate made it as a safe cracker when she insists on admitting her secret profession to random strangers who haven’t even ASKED her what she does for a living?
Fashion Victims -
Again, when it comes to giant lumbering alien insects, the Metatraxi set out to make the Zarbi look like the height of sophistication.
Technobabble -
"Do you know what this is? Amazing, isn’t it? It’s a portable telephone, completely wireless and no bigger than an army walkie-talkie. AND it's small enough for me to carry around in my own car!"
"Pity it’ll give you brain cancer though."
"What?"
"Nothing."
Links and References -
There are numerous scenes where Sam says, "Hey, I remember that guy!" and the Doctor asks, "Hey, remember me from last story?" or someone saying "Hey, look at that Ice Cream Vendor stuff from last story!" and I simply cannot be bothered to note any specific occurrence.
Untelevised Misadventures -
Every year, the Doctor turned up at Kate's birthday parties with presents designed to mould her into the amoral criminal he could use for his nefarious master-plans throughout time and space. This lead, unsurprisingly, to a restraining order being placed on him.
Groovy DVD Extras -
All 478 episodes of the hit animated spin-off series "Mighty Mutant Hero Cyber Samurai Metatraxi" for kids.
Dialogue Disasters -
Doctor: If I had a hat, I'd take it off to you.
Kate: You ARE wearing a hat.
Doctor: So sue me.
Metatraxi: Single combat? Groovy!
Kate’s narration of getting jiggy with Prince:
"I feel the familiar melancholy of winter coming on. But it's not all chill and gloom. Autumn is also the season for losing virginity with gorgeous pop-stars. My heart beats faster in familiar excitement. Am I in the mood or in the mode? I do so hate being kept waiting with nothing to amuse myself. The vestigial guilt I feel for slipping all those date-rape drugs into my beloved’s drink will be worth the orgasmic climax; the sound that follows the most gratifying sound in the world before the sheets need changing. It’s all so romantic. You understand, I'm invoking the concept of romance ironically?"
Doctor: I need your help, both of you.
Kate: I’ll help you, but I want nothing more to do with HIM!
Sam: Oh, love please!
Kate: After the way you treated mummy? You never even tried to hide them, all those other women!
Sam: You don’t understand what was between her and me!
Doctor: Ahem, we have to work together as a team...
Sam: Don’t let it come between us!
Kate: It came between us a long time ago!
Doctor: You have to set aside personal differences...
Kate: I’m not going to set aside what HE did!
Sam: Your mother and I had our difficulties!
Kate: Difficulties?
Sam: But there’s no need for you to get in the middle of all that!
Kate: In the middle was where I always was, right between the two of you but I’m not there any more! Mummy’s gone and now I’m as far away from you as humanly possible!
Doctor: Oh, for fuck’s sake! Mel and Glitz would be more help!
Dialogue Triumphs -
Doctor: Whatever else I might do, I specialize putting people at risk – people I like and care about.
Kate: And I fall into that category? That’s very charming of you, Doctor. (long pause) I take it, it is ME we’re talking about? (longer pause) Doctor? (even longer pause) Screw you then!
The Doctor muses on the irrationality of human beings -
"That’s the nature of sexual intercourse. You end up doing it with people you shouldn’t be having sexual intercourse with."
Sam: I know all about losing things. Why do you think I’m here, wasting my time doing crosswords and aggravating my piles for thirty grand scores? Because I lost the lot! I used to have it all and I lost it all on Black Monday!
Doctor: Oh, one of THOSE. They happen every few decades, inevitable, brief and periodic cycles.
Sam: It’s all every well having that point of view when you’re a bloody time traveler – try to being a small-to-medium-sized business enterprise and THEN see how brief they seem. And how inevitable? I don’t think it HAD to happen! I’d like to get my hands on the blokes responsible, the lad who caused. Mark my words, someone’s made a nice little profit out of ruining us all. They did it all deliberately to make a killing!
Doctor: Shut up, Sam! JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Sam: But, Doctor...
Doctor: I have had it UP TO HERE with all this self-pitying social relevancy... you’re a fucking gangland boss! Stop whinging about how unfair life is because YOUR bank balance is no longer in six figures! BOO-FUCKING-HOO! I was all ready to try and get into this gritty social realism, get rid of all the science fiction aspects and become as hardcore as "The Bill" or "London’s Burning" but MOTHER OF FUCKING CHRIST – a posh sword-fighting cat burglar and her Cockney gangster dad! VERY FUCKING REALISTIC I DON’T THINK! And, I could even have coped, even with the new Earthbound format with authentic-based contemporary characters IF YOU WEREN’T ALL SUCH TOTAL ASSHOLES! Hmmm, planet Zog in the 82nd Century or Thatcher’s Britain – I wonder which one will be more fun and interesting? That’s it, I quit!
Sam: Sylv, you’re going way off script...
Doctor: FUCK THE SCRIPT! I QUIT THIS WHOLE FUCKING SHOW! IT’S NOT EVEN LIKE THIS IS EVER GOING TO GET BROADCAST ANYWAY!
Sam: Mmmm. You got a point there, Doc.
UnQuotable Quote -
Kate: He's rather good, isn't he?
Viewer Quotes -
"Dudes! Wanna read my girl-on-girl slash-fic with Kate Tollinger and Soolin from Blake's 7? It's fucking AWESOME!!" - Steve Moffat (1992)
"Wouldn’t the cliffhangers work better if the audience *weren’t* rooting for the villains to put a bullet through Kate’s head?"
- Richard Curtis (2010)
"It was good to see a McCoy episode where the Seventh Doctor has set up a complicated plan, and we're watching him in different places trying to get it all to come together. I can't for the life of me think of another Doctor Who story that has ever followed that pattern."
- I.M. Amoron (1990)
"Not a lot of opinions about this one. I was going to write a rousing discussion of Kate’s false-sounding posh bird accent, and of the Metatraxi, but I honestly didn’t give this another thought."
- Doctor Who Review Monthly (1997)
"DULL of the Century more like! Ha-ha-HAA! I laugh at this story. Actually, I give out a sort of high-pitched giggle, but the point still stands, I feel." - Adrian Mole (1991)
"Kate feels fresh as a dew-soaked daisy whereas Ace is the rotten old near-to-death thistle. Oh, if only I could have taken her roughly from behind over the kitchen table!" - Jo Ford Prefect (2010)
"The Metatraxi? AGAIN? What, did someone lose a bet or something?"
- Hugh Laurie (2011)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"The convergence of the different subplots toward the end of the play seemed a little haphazard to me. Sort of like when you forget whether or not the grenade you're playing catch with is live or not, you know what I mean? You don't? Boy, have YOU missed out!"
Sylvester McCoy Speaks!
"It's great fun and very exciting to get a new companion. Andrew created my Doctor's character, and Ace's character and now this new character. Well, I say 'new'. As long as no one ever saw Emma Peel in The Avengers, they'd swear she was totally original. She's got a nice buttock-rhythm, has young Julie, when she's doing all the necessary running up and down corridors..."
Julia Sawalha Speaks!
"True story, I can't actually fly a helicopter in real life. Or crack safes. Or sword-fight with drug smugglers during armed sieges. It's amazing what they can do on telly, isn't it? I'm really enjoying having all the limelight focused on me for a change. Which I love. I'm quite a narcissist, really. I hate doing soliloquies and things like that if I'm not actually the one supposed to them. It can get really annoying for other people, I find, if I just turn up unannounced at rehearsals and start doing other people's lines."
Ben Aaaaronovitch Speaks!
"This story has Andrew Cartmel written all over it. Which is rather odd, considering I'M the bloody writer!"
Trivia -
The new companion was originally called Lady Raine Creevey Cunningham Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe-Smythe-Smythe-Smythe-Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dob. Unfortunately, there were just so MANY Lady Raine Creevey Cunningham Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe-Smythe-Smythe-Smythe-Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dobs in the phone book it was inevitable they'd all get sued unless they chose a name that was slightly less common.
Rumors & Facts –
The Sale of the Century will never reach the heights of The Chess of Fenric or Ghost Light or The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy or Battlefield: Earth... well, to be blunt, this is probably the most no-fist utterly-pathetic story that was thrown at Sylvester McCoy like a frisbee at a Hawaiian luau. Even Romp of the Rani kicks this story’s ass in terms of providing quality entertainment.
The realization amongst the production team were that they were slaving away over episodes that would never be shown and, due to a legal embargo, would not even be admitted to being made for twenty long years, had disastrous effects on all concerned.
Why bother with fast paced plots, snappy dialogue and consistent characterization if no one would appreciate it? So as production began on the third story of the season, it was decided to just let things become over-talkative, snail-paced and as unlike Doctor Who as possible. This would have the benefit of allowing cast and crew alike practice for other, proper television programs that networks were willing to admit they had filmed.
To this end script editor Andrew Cartmel, script writer Ben Aaaronovitch and costume designer Ken Trew just stopped giving a shit. They would work together on a story that would speak the contemporary language of television, employing realistic scenarios and scenarios. After all, working out how defeat an alien invasion isn’t any good writing experience for The Bill, is it? Being able to plot out historical mysteries and ontological time paradoxes won’t get you a job on Casualty. And the ability to give Dustbins interesting dialogue is nothing to be proud of on the set of London’s Burning.
Thus they decided the next story would feature an authentically nineties set of characters (even though it wasn’t even one year into the decade yet). It would feature no science fiction content whatsoever, focusing on armed sieges and drug smuggling, underworld crims and proper police procedure. Director Alan Waring was also quite eager to do a socio-political thriller that DIDN’T feature a time traveling alien with a sonic screwdriver.
The team justified these desires to producer John Satan-Turner on the grounds that this story could be a significant turning point for Doctor Who, just like how Head From Ace had introduced the Third Doctor, Liz Shaw, UNIT, the Nestle Consciousness, Bessie, the Earthbound format, colour broadcast, new theme music, new title sequences and a wealth of reactionary working-class stereotypes.
This story would introduce... um... a mansion house on contemporary Earth and some generic criminals that the Doctor could draw upon for information rather than working out anything for himself. This gritty realism, they said, would make Doctor Who just like Edge of Darkness!
JST merely arched an eyebrow and asked, "You mean the Edge of Darkness where the main character wanders around talking to ghosts and then turns into a tree after getting zapped by radiation in a plot lifted wholesale from that Blake’s 7 episode where Gan dies?"
Realizing that this new direction of Doctor Who was completely and utterly stuffed, they just decided to focus their attention on getting this goddamned season over with. Once again, Cartmel used tried and trusted method of basing an entire story around a gimmicky pre-credit sequence which had failed so utterly spectacularly with the season opener, Live Aid.
The plot flowed organically out from this sequence, rather like a malignant tumor, and soon The Sale of the Century was born (so named so everyone could at least put it on their CVs and say they worked on a game show). This story would introduce a brand new companion to replace Ace, who would continue the gritty realism of being a super-posh safe-cracking lock-picking Kate Tollinger.
Working together, Cartmel and Aaaaronovitch managed to thrash out a full twenty-minutes of script that actually relied on Kate being a posh criminal, before deciding they’d just let her become another tart in a miniskirt for the dads to drool over. Unfortunately, this meant that remaining three-and-a-bit episodes had absolutely no plot of any kind whatsoever and, when it was pointed out that the crew were about to start filming in three minutes, Cartmel knew something had to be done.
Since Aaaaronovitch had already written for the show, creating the new monster race the Metatraxi and said race’s costumes were still available, it was decided to bring them back after a hiatus of five episodes. Cartmel made the decision that the Metatraxi be forced to talk like Michelangelo the Ninja Turtle on dope on the grounds that if Season 27 were ever broadcast then the McCoy-bashers would need something cringe-worthy to rail against. Because, apparently Kate Tollinger’s behavior wouldn’t achieve that on its own.
Ultimately, The Sale of the Century sets out to introduce Kate and fill up ninety-minutes of screen time, ninety minutes of your life that you will never ever get back. In this, it succeeds admirably. You can’t even complain about the story and characters because none of them can stick in the memory long enough to grate.
Superfluous rather hard-hitting, with twists as pointless as they are signposted and a plot literally running on the spot until there are no discernable differences in the narrative whatsoever, it is clear that The Sale of the Century’s ability to blank out the minds of lower beings was what ensured no one remembered making it in the first place.
Having finally run out of the energy and madness that had defined the last four series, it was no surprise that McCoy finally wanted out, following Sophie Aldred and in turn being followed by JST himself who was beginning to wonder if other career opportunities actually existed or were just fever dreams inside his own exhausted brain.
The end was nigh... and about time too!
7th Doctor - Crime of the Century (i)
An Alternate Programme Guide by Ewen Campion-Clarke
Serial 7P/3 – The Sale of the Century
An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Absolute Authenticity
D O C T O R W H O
Serial 7P/3 – The Sale of the Century
Meet Kathleen "Adolescent Fantasy" Tollinger. If Emma Peel were an irritating cat burglar with daddy issues and demented sense of social entitlement that could inspire French peasants to mob justice, she would STILL be cooler and less annoying than Kate Tollinger, who doesn't even wear leather cat suits. For shame!
On Friday 13th October 1989, Kate pretentiously narrates her film noir life as she gatecrashes a rather crummy student party in Islington. Sneaking into the cloak room, Ms. Tollinger immediately sets out to make herself as unlikable as physically possible.
After insulting all the guests, the décor and artistic depreciation at the turn of the decade, Kate then announces she is a hardcore safe cracker here to steal anything she damn likes. The owner of the house is understandably put out at the snooty bitch, so she slips him some rohypnol and kicks him in the groin repeatedly.
Having demonstrated her tedious superiority complex, Kate begins to crack the lock of the safe while explaining in detail to all the kids watching how best to steal other people's hard-earned possessions and get rich off their misfortune.
As she opens the safe she finds a short Scotsman in a straw hat crammed inside. This is the Doctor, who promptly shouts "Oh, will you just shut the hell up!" to the unpleasant cow.
The new companion actually stops talking for four seconds, which is just enough time to get the opening title sequence underway before she starts banging on all over again.
Part One
In the armpit of West London on a miserable night, we meet Sam Tollinger – twenty years older, colder, more better yet strangely better groomed – sitting in a black car, doing the Times crossword and looking gritty and realistic as he keeps watch on a warehouse.
As he waits for a van of fellow criminals to arrive and help him steal a consignment antique coins worth 30 grand, Sam reflects bitterly how he lost his fortune on the financial meltdown on Black Monday and has been reduced to this sub-Sweeny bollocks ever since.
Sam regards the personal ads and finds a message to him from the Doctor, asking for his assistance in "the sale of the century". Sam tutts at the obvious title-drop and reflects the Doctor was such an asshole back in the sixties for not warning him about the inevitable cyclic nature of stock market crashes that occur every few decades.
Frankly, the Time Lord can just rot in a black hole before he gets any favors from Sam "da man" Tollinger.
Sam then notices another ad, also by the Doctor, asking for twelve CID operatives to keep an eye out for any suspicious-looking folk keeping an eye on West London warehouses.
Swearing mightily, Sam hastily drives off before the cops arrive. Using a phone, he warns the rest of his team that it's a trap and to ditch all the motors, shooters and stuff before they get caught.
Back at the Islington party, the Doctor explains to Kate that he's been stalking her for twenty years and sneaks into her room every night to read her diary, which is why he knew she would crack the safe tonight and also find him in said safe.
Kate calls him a total nutter, gives a longwinded speech that she is an honorable thief who acts for the noblest of reasons rather than greed... well, she sells out her criminal skills to the highest bidder, anyway. When the Doctor points out the hypocrisy of that, Kate takes out her frustrations by repeatedly kicking the unconscious host in the ribs. She then steals a beloved pearl necklace, laughs evilly and runs off into the night.
Shaking his head at her naiveté, the Doctor ducks into the kitchen and snatches a pepper grinder. This he intends to use against all the wild guard dogs in the garden who immediately set on Kate who has no clever plan beyond whining about how uncivilized this all is.
The Doctor defeats the guard dogs by throwing the pepper grinder and all the dogs immediately run to fetch it, allowing the Time Lord and his ghastly-excuse for an audience identification figure to escape.
Then aforementioned audience identification figure dives into a car, runs down the Doctor, reverses over him, then drives off into the night. As the bruised and bleeding Doctor crawls to the pavement, spitting out teeth, he mutters, "You bitch! You never mentioned that in your diary! You'd never find Bernice Summerfield leaving out important details like that, would you!"
Kate then goes to the rendezvous to wait for her client to arrive, and passes the time munching on some novelty ice cream that leaves her in a strange and trippy trance. The Doctor arrives and tells her off for playing with Martian confectionary when she has a life-long genetic predisposition to Ice Cream Vendor artifacts.
He's also actually the one that hired her to steal this stuff in the first place, so if she's expecting any kind of tip for tonight's work than she is going to be sorely disappointed.
Almost as disappointed as they are both going to be when a huge hulking bastard in a tuxedo lumbers into view – the pearl necklace has a homing device allowing the owners to send thugs round to reclaim them with far more violence than can be safely broadcast on BBC1...
Part Two
The Doctor reflects that this would, normally, be the point where Ace uses some high-explosives to get them out of this tricky plot situation and reflects marooning her in 1960s London may not, in the long run, have been a particularly wise move.
Luckily, Kate is also a hypocritical sociopath and immediately attacks the thug and tries to drown him in a bucket of frozen yogurt. "These are the fruits of MY hard work! My capers!" she screams insanely. "I worked HARD to get these! Who is HE to take it all away from us? YOU CAN’T GO ROUND JUST TAKING THINGS THAT DON’T BELONG TO YOU!!"
The Doctor boggles at the chutzpah as she sadistically murders the heavy in cold blood. Either the exposure to Martian ice cream is turning her into a merciless psychopath or else he’s managed to stumble across someone ALMOST as criminally insane as Ace herself!
"How gauche," Kate muses.
Just then Sam arrives, furious at the Doctor’s sabotage of his scam. Kate and her father take one look at each other and immediately get into such a clichéd and unimaginative argument it makes the Waltons look like the Windsors and the Doctor desperately has to scream at them both to stop at the top of his voice.
The Doctor explains he has got Kate to steal all the Martian tech that Sam had to sell to cover costs and hand it back to her estranged father for... actually, I don’t know why. It screams plot contrivance to me, and if anyone knows about contrived plots, it’s me, bitches!
The trio head for the dockland development site on the Isle of Dogs, the Tollingers bigging up that they are PROFESSIONAL criminals and thus much better people than those plebs who live their lives by NOT stealing everything nailed down for their own selfishness. Kate notes that is a grotty of mud enlivened by an occasional slab of concrete and the Doctor wonders if she EVER stops talking total bollocks?
Breaking into the compound, the Doctor decides the settings are grimy and realistic enough he can outline his latest cunning plan – using Sam and his flunkies, they have to fight their way into a military compound in Scotland past an army of mercenaries where Kate can then break into a special vault and stealing everything contained within.
Sam notes that the Doctor's plan is, using the complicated and technical terms of the trade, "full-frontal suicide" but the Time Lord reveals he has a secret weapon:
"The Artist Formally Known As 'Prince'!"
With the pop idol, Ice Cream Vendor weaponry, and Sam Tollinger’s expendable underworld contacts, they cannot fail – assuming they can stop Kate panting like a bitch on heat around the one person in the galaxy even MORE pretentious than she is...
Part Three
As the Doctor outlines his scam to Sam, Kate and the Artist formally known as Prince... um... actually I’m not entirely sure what happens next because this story is so interminably tedious it even manages to make a cat burglar and a pop star having unresolved sexual tension around plotting to undermine national security BORING!
Goddamn, just getting this far has been an endurance test to give any real plot details or observations. I’ve wasted a whole month’s dole on energy drinks to bolster myself through the first two episodes and even then I needed to take breaks every minute to gasp for air! I tried the DVD commentary, but everyone was just snoring! Even Clayton Hickman had lost consciousness by this point!
I think if anyone managed to watch this abortion all in one go should get a million pounds. Well, certainly a handshake from Steven Moffat and maybe a threesome with Karen Gillan and Alex Kingston, anyway! Dear God, I’m only THREE SECONDS into this stupefying episode and I’ve already lost the will to live!
Oh, I pine for the good old days when Doctor Who achieved the loftly heights of merely "extremely crap" and the most irritating thing about the companion was Ace’s lisp! Why couldn’t this story have been horribly edited like Goth Night or Silly Nemesis – are the BBC THAT inhumane nowadays?
In fairness, I can’t honestly say this story is padded. Mainly because my mind keeps wandering while I’m trying to watch it. Hey, see that speck of dust on the floor? How long has it been there, I wonder? Does it have a life cycle?
Anyway, I’ll try to focus on this story which is quite an arduous task. Fuck it, I’ll fast-forward to the cliffhanger where the episode should end and the plot collapse in a heap of its own ineptitude.
Hmm, it seems that although everyone’s bigging up Sam Tollinger and his gang of socially-realistic cutthroats, pickpockets and estate agents, none of them are actually good enough to do whatever the hell it is that the Doctor wants them to do.
Then some guy called Felnikov turns up. He was in the last story, you know, the one with Ace and the Ice Cream Vendors that didn’t suck as mighteously as this one? Yeah, he’s back and he’s got a squad of alien mercenary bastards on offer to be used as canon fodder.
"The Metatraxi," the Doctor exclaims, stunned at the diabolical evil of an enemy willing to appear twice in a single television season and thus risk overexposure and even MORE contempt and disgust from the viewing audience than a bunch of stoned surfer samurai insects would normally get anyway.
"I am SO disillusioned," Kate sighs theatrically.
"You are NOT helping," the Time Lord huffs.
Part Four
The Doctor decides that the best thing to do is to challenge the Metatraxi to one-on-one armed combat, with the Artist Formally Known as Prince acting as champion of the Earth in an ice-cream-eating competition. With the Martian praline on offer, they will easily defeat the alien insectoid warrior.
He then notices that Kate has just stabbed Prince to death for daring to resist her womanly wiles. She has single-handedly plunged the entire Earth into an intergalactic war of truly unprecedented carnage and destruction... but NO ONE turns down sex with Kate Tollinger.
"You're supposed to be my new companion, not an ongoing villain!" the Doctor despairs, and decides that Miss Hoity-Toity Safe Cracker will have to the ice cream eating for them – and if she puts on a few pounds, well tough luck!
At some point, the Metatraxi have attuned their translator microbes to "Kid-Friendly Ninja Turtle" settings for some reason and thus declare undying war on their enemies with cries of "Surf's up!"
Kate then defeats them in an ice-cream contest. According to this story’s wikipedia page, she does that because she is quarter-Martian on her mother’s side. I wonder what happened to Kate’s mother? Even wearing a cereal box on her head, painted bright green and nude from the waist down, she was a lot nicer than her daughter...
Yeah, speaking of the bitch herself, she has seized control of the Metatraxi and teamed up with Felnikov to try and steal something or other that will give the power to rule the world.
"I’m only in this for the money," Kate assures us. "Not that I’m greedy or anything. Knock the expenses off the top and split in two and we have financial security for the rest of our lives! The rest of those common little oiks can just starve!"
And then, stuff happens. You know, everyone goes to Scotland to do this "so-awesome-nothing-else-in-the-last-eighty-eight-years-can-possibly-compare" scam. Pah, Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels looks like the Manhattan Project compared to this shit!
Anyway, Kate and her gang reach the Scottish branch of the Touchwood Institute, a shadowy xeno-tech-reverse-engineering black ops outfit that are dedicated to creating weapons of mass destruction for the sole use of Margaret Thatcher and the British Empire.
Sam notes that they’ve had access to Ice Cream Vendor weaponry for twenty years and not done a damn thing with it, but the Doctor explains that Touchwood is run by total fuckwits too busy shagging and shooting each other to do anything halfway useful with what they find.
Someone... I dunno... Felnikov? I honestly dunno... points out that the Metatraxi couldn’t even win an ice-cream-eating competition so they probably will be too piss-weak to put up any serious resistance to armed guards, electric fences and robot security systems.
"Bummer, man! Bummer! Don’t rub it in, little dude!" the Metatraxi wail, but concede the point and bugger off the planet Earth right away, having done their bit to pad out these unconnected storylines. Nevertheless this is a step upwards to mediocrity. If you define a step up as 'the-narrative-grinding-to-a-standstill' anyway.
Realizing that he’s going to have to sort all this out himself, the Doctor storms off to a London club, has a cup of tea with some foppy civil servant and then beats him up with his question mark umbrella until he agrees to stop the entire operation.
Back at the ranch, Sam finally comes to terms with the unbelievable odds of having personally known the single individual who destabilized the entire western economy, throttles Felnikov with his bare hands and laughs like a madman while doing so.
Didn’t I mention Felnikov single-handedly caused the stock market crash because he’s an evil commie bastard who does those sort of things without rhyme or reason? I didn’t? Gosh, I wonder how I could have overlooked that brilliantly structured bit of characterization...
The Doctor arrives and realizes that he can clearly do much, much better for an ongoing regular cast of characters than this criminal psychopaths. In fact, the Touchwood Institute itself would be a better bet for likeable companions than the Tollingers.
However, with her ridiculous amount of useful abilities (from fencing champion and safe cracker to half-Martian helicopter pilot) makes it obvious that there aren’t any better options than Kate on offer.
The Doctor tries to look on the bright side. "Oh well, once I adjust the TARDIS telepathic circuits to translate your clichéd posturing into halfway-tolerable speech, this might just be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!"
"What makes you think I want travel through time and space to insufferable, bog-trotting oik like YOU?" she sniffs.
The Doctor puts on a pair of hypnotic spectacles and brainwashes Kate into being less of a gormless, toffee-nosed slapper. He then lures her into the TARDIS while still under hypnosis, so at least he'll be spared the whole "bigger on the inside" crap for once.
Serial 7P/3 – The Sale of the Century
An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Absolute Authenticity
D O C T O R W H O
Serial 7P/3 – The Sale of the Century
Meet Kathleen "Adolescent Fantasy" Tollinger. If Emma Peel were an irritating cat burglar with daddy issues and demented sense of social entitlement that could inspire French peasants to mob justice, she would STILL be cooler and less annoying than Kate Tollinger, who doesn't even wear leather cat suits. For shame!
On Friday 13th October 1989, Kate pretentiously narrates her film noir life as she gatecrashes a rather crummy student party in Islington. Sneaking into the cloak room, Ms. Tollinger immediately sets out to make herself as unlikable as physically possible.
After insulting all the guests, the décor and artistic depreciation at the turn of the decade, Kate then announces she is a hardcore safe cracker here to steal anything she damn likes. The owner of the house is understandably put out at the snooty bitch, so she slips him some rohypnol and kicks him in the groin repeatedly.
Having demonstrated her tedious superiority complex, Kate begins to crack the lock of the safe while explaining in detail to all the kids watching how best to steal other people's hard-earned possessions and get rich off their misfortune.
As she opens the safe she finds a short Scotsman in a straw hat crammed inside. This is the Doctor, who promptly shouts "Oh, will you just shut the hell up!" to the unpleasant cow.
The new companion actually stops talking for four seconds, which is just enough time to get the opening title sequence underway before she starts banging on all over again.
Part One
In the armpit of West London on a miserable night, we meet Sam Tollinger – twenty years older, colder, more better yet strangely better groomed – sitting in a black car, doing the Times crossword and looking gritty and realistic as he keeps watch on a warehouse.
As he waits for a van of fellow criminals to arrive and help him steal a consignment antique coins worth 30 grand, Sam reflects bitterly how he lost his fortune on the financial meltdown on Black Monday and has been reduced to this sub-Sweeny bollocks ever since.
Sam regards the personal ads and finds a message to him from the Doctor, asking for his assistance in "the sale of the century". Sam tutts at the obvious title-drop and reflects the Doctor was such an asshole back in the sixties for not warning him about the inevitable cyclic nature of stock market crashes that occur every few decades.
Frankly, the Time Lord can just rot in a black hole before he gets any favors from Sam "da man" Tollinger.
Sam then notices another ad, also by the Doctor, asking for twelve CID operatives to keep an eye out for any suspicious-looking folk keeping an eye on West London warehouses.
Swearing mightily, Sam hastily drives off before the cops arrive. Using a phone, he warns the rest of his team that it's a trap and to ditch all the motors, shooters and stuff before they get caught.
Back at the Islington party, the Doctor explains to Kate that he's been stalking her for twenty years and sneaks into her room every night to read her diary, which is why he knew she would crack the safe tonight and also find him in said safe.
Kate calls him a total nutter, gives a longwinded speech that she is an honorable thief who acts for the noblest of reasons rather than greed... well, she sells out her criminal skills to the highest bidder, anyway. When the Doctor points out the hypocrisy of that, Kate takes out her frustrations by repeatedly kicking the unconscious host in the ribs. She then steals a beloved pearl necklace, laughs evilly and runs off into the night.
Shaking his head at her naiveté, the Doctor ducks into the kitchen and snatches a pepper grinder. This he intends to use against all the wild guard dogs in the garden who immediately set on Kate who has no clever plan beyond whining about how uncivilized this all is.
The Doctor defeats the guard dogs by throwing the pepper grinder and all the dogs immediately run to fetch it, allowing the Time Lord and his ghastly-excuse for an audience identification figure to escape.
Then aforementioned audience identification figure dives into a car, runs down the Doctor, reverses over him, then drives off into the night. As the bruised and bleeding Doctor crawls to the pavement, spitting out teeth, he mutters, "You bitch! You never mentioned that in your diary! You'd never find Bernice Summerfield leaving out important details like that, would you!"
Kate then goes to the rendezvous to wait for her client to arrive, and passes the time munching on some novelty ice cream that leaves her in a strange and trippy trance. The Doctor arrives and tells her off for playing with Martian confectionary when she has a life-long genetic predisposition to Ice Cream Vendor artifacts.
He's also actually the one that hired her to steal this stuff in the first place, so if she's expecting any kind of tip for tonight's work than she is going to be sorely disappointed.
Almost as disappointed as they are both going to be when a huge hulking bastard in a tuxedo lumbers into view – the pearl necklace has a homing device allowing the owners to send thugs round to reclaim them with far more violence than can be safely broadcast on BBC1...
Part Two
The Doctor reflects that this would, normally, be the point where Ace uses some high-explosives to get them out of this tricky plot situation and reflects marooning her in 1960s London may not, in the long run, have been a particularly wise move.
Luckily, Kate is also a hypocritical sociopath and immediately attacks the thug and tries to drown him in a bucket of frozen yogurt. "These are the fruits of MY hard work! My capers!" she screams insanely. "I worked HARD to get these! Who is HE to take it all away from us? YOU CAN’T GO ROUND JUST TAKING THINGS THAT DON’T BELONG TO YOU!!"
The Doctor boggles at the chutzpah as she sadistically murders the heavy in cold blood. Either the exposure to Martian ice cream is turning her into a merciless psychopath or else he’s managed to stumble across someone ALMOST as criminally insane as Ace herself!
"How gauche," Kate muses.
Just then Sam arrives, furious at the Doctor’s sabotage of his scam. Kate and her father take one look at each other and immediately get into such a clichéd and unimaginative argument it makes the Waltons look like the Windsors and the Doctor desperately has to scream at them both to stop at the top of his voice.
The Doctor explains he has got Kate to steal all the Martian tech that Sam had to sell to cover costs and hand it back to her estranged father for... actually, I don’t know why. It screams plot contrivance to me, and if anyone knows about contrived plots, it’s me, bitches!
The trio head for the dockland development site on the Isle of Dogs, the Tollingers bigging up that they are PROFESSIONAL criminals and thus much better people than those plebs who live their lives by NOT stealing everything nailed down for their own selfishness. Kate notes that is a grotty of mud enlivened by an occasional slab of concrete and the Doctor wonders if she EVER stops talking total bollocks?
Breaking into the compound, the Doctor decides the settings are grimy and realistic enough he can outline his latest cunning plan – using Sam and his flunkies, they have to fight their way into a military compound in Scotland past an army of mercenaries where Kate can then break into a special vault and stealing everything contained within.
Sam notes that the Doctor's plan is, using the complicated and technical terms of the trade, "full-frontal suicide" but the Time Lord reveals he has a secret weapon:
"The Artist Formally Known As 'Prince'!"
With the pop idol, Ice Cream Vendor weaponry, and Sam Tollinger’s expendable underworld contacts, they cannot fail – assuming they can stop Kate panting like a bitch on heat around the one person in the galaxy even MORE pretentious than she is...
Part Three
As the Doctor outlines his scam to Sam, Kate and the Artist formally known as Prince... um... actually I’m not entirely sure what happens next because this story is so interminably tedious it even manages to make a cat burglar and a pop star having unresolved sexual tension around plotting to undermine national security BORING!
Goddamn, just getting this far has been an endurance test to give any real plot details or observations. I’ve wasted a whole month’s dole on energy drinks to bolster myself through the first two episodes and even then I needed to take breaks every minute to gasp for air! I tried the DVD commentary, but everyone was just snoring! Even Clayton Hickman had lost consciousness by this point!
I think if anyone managed to watch this abortion all in one go should get a million pounds. Well, certainly a handshake from Steven Moffat and maybe a threesome with Karen Gillan and Alex Kingston, anyway! Dear God, I’m only THREE SECONDS into this stupefying episode and I’ve already lost the will to live!
Oh, I pine for the good old days when Doctor Who achieved the loftly heights of merely "extremely crap" and the most irritating thing about the companion was Ace’s lisp! Why couldn’t this story have been horribly edited like Goth Night or Silly Nemesis – are the BBC THAT inhumane nowadays?
In fairness, I can’t honestly say this story is padded. Mainly because my mind keeps wandering while I’m trying to watch it. Hey, see that speck of dust on the floor? How long has it been there, I wonder? Does it have a life cycle?
Anyway, I’ll try to focus on this story which is quite an arduous task. Fuck it, I’ll fast-forward to the cliffhanger where the episode should end and the plot collapse in a heap of its own ineptitude.
Hmm, it seems that although everyone’s bigging up Sam Tollinger and his gang of socially-realistic cutthroats, pickpockets and estate agents, none of them are actually good enough to do whatever the hell it is that the Doctor wants them to do.
Then some guy called Felnikov turns up. He was in the last story, you know, the one with Ace and the Ice Cream Vendors that didn’t suck as mighteously as this one? Yeah, he’s back and he’s got a squad of alien mercenary bastards on offer to be used as canon fodder.
"The Metatraxi," the Doctor exclaims, stunned at the diabolical evil of an enemy willing to appear twice in a single television season and thus risk overexposure and even MORE contempt and disgust from the viewing audience than a bunch of stoned surfer samurai insects would normally get anyway.
"I am SO disillusioned," Kate sighs theatrically.
"You are NOT helping," the Time Lord huffs.
Part Four
The Doctor decides that the best thing to do is to challenge the Metatraxi to one-on-one armed combat, with the Artist Formally Known as Prince acting as champion of the Earth in an ice-cream-eating competition. With the Martian praline on offer, they will easily defeat the alien insectoid warrior.
He then notices that Kate has just stabbed Prince to death for daring to resist her womanly wiles. She has single-handedly plunged the entire Earth into an intergalactic war of truly unprecedented carnage and destruction... but NO ONE turns down sex with Kate Tollinger.
"You're supposed to be my new companion, not an ongoing villain!" the Doctor despairs, and decides that Miss Hoity-Toity Safe Cracker will have to the ice cream eating for them – and if she puts on a few pounds, well tough luck!
At some point, the Metatraxi have attuned their translator microbes to "Kid-Friendly Ninja Turtle" settings for some reason and thus declare undying war on their enemies with cries of "Surf's up!"
Kate then defeats them in an ice-cream contest. According to this story’s wikipedia page, she does that because she is quarter-Martian on her mother’s side. I wonder what happened to Kate’s mother? Even wearing a cereal box on her head, painted bright green and nude from the waist down, she was a lot nicer than her daughter...
Yeah, speaking of the bitch herself, she has seized control of the Metatraxi and teamed up with Felnikov to try and steal something or other that will give the power to rule the world.
"I’m only in this for the money," Kate assures us. "Not that I’m greedy or anything. Knock the expenses off the top and split in two and we have financial security for the rest of our lives! The rest of those common little oiks can just starve!"
And then, stuff happens. You know, everyone goes to Scotland to do this "so-awesome-nothing-else-in-the-last-eighty-eight-years-can-possibly-compare" scam. Pah, Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels looks like the Manhattan Project compared to this shit!
Anyway, Kate and her gang reach the Scottish branch of the Touchwood Institute, a shadowy xeno-tech-reverse-engineering black ops outfit that are dedicated to creating weapons of mass destruction for the sole use of Margaret Thatcher and the British Empire.
Sam notes that they’ve had access to Ice Cream Vendor weaponry for twenty years and not done a damn thing with it, but the Doctor explains that Touchwood is run by total fuckwits too busy shagging and shooting each other to do anything halfway useful with what they find.
Someone... I dunno... Felnikov? I honestly dunno... points out that the Metatraxi couldn’t even win an ice-cream-eating competition so they probably will be too piss-weak to put up any serious resistance to armed guards, electric fences and robot security systems.
"Bummer, man! Bummer! Don’t rub it in, little dude!" the Metatraxi wail, but concede the point and bugger off the planet Earth right away, having done their bit to pad out these unconnected storylines. Nevertheless this is a step upwards to mediocrity. If you define a step up as 'the-narrative-grinding-to-a-standstill' anyway.
Realizing that he’s going to have to sort all this out himself, the Doctor storms off to a London club, has a cup of tea with some foppy civil servant and then beats him up with his question mark umbrella until he agrees to stop the entire operation.
Back at the ranch, Sam finally comes to terms with the unbelievable odds of having personally known the single individual who destabilized the entire western economy, throttles Felnikov with his bare hands and laughs like a madman while doing so.
Didn’t I mention Felnikov single-handedly caused the stock market crash because he’s an evil commie bastard who does those sort of things without rhyme or reason? I didn’t? Gosh, I wonder how I could have overlooked that brilliantly structured bit of characterization...
The Doctor arrives and realizes that he can clearly do much, much better for an ongoing regular cast of characters than this criminal psychopaths. In fact, the Touchwood Institute itself would be a better bet for likeable companions than the Tollingers.
However, with her ridiculous amount of useful abilities (from fencing champion and safe cracker to half-Martian helicopter pilot) makes it obvious that there aren’t any better options than Kate on offer.
The Doctor tries to look on the bright side. "Oh well, once I adjust the TARDIS telepathic circuits to translate your clichéd posturing into halfway-tolerable speech, this might just be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!"
"What makes you think I want travel through time and space to insufferable, bog-trotting oik like YOU?" she sniffs.
The Doctor puts on a pair of hypnotic spectacles and brainwashes Kate into being less of a gormless, toffee-nosed slapper. He then lures her into the TARDIS while still under hypnosis, so at least he'll be spared the whole "bigger on the inside" crap for once.
7th Doctor - Ice Time (ii)
Book(s)/Other Related –
Doctor Who: Price-Line
Doctor Who Discovers Meth Amphetamine
"Ace in the Hole!" The XXXX-Rated Inside Story
Fluffs - Sylvester McCoy seemed rather frosty in this story.
"It all depends on which side of your wall is buttered!"
"I’m not spending the rest of my life dead!"
"I’m the Ace Cream Vendor!"
Goofs -
Ace supports QPR?!
Fashion Victims –
Despite some truly stiff competition, it has to be Riana giving birth while wearing nothing but a grey soviet-issue tie and a cardboard hat characteristic of Mars’ third polar epoch.
Technobabble –
Felnikov is determined to "reverse the polarity of the antihistamine flow" no matter what the human cost.
Links and References -
In part four, Hashish waffles on about Martian history for no other reason than to confirm that Red China, Phobos, The Judgement of Ice Cream, and Frozen Crime are all internally consistent in their portrayals of the red planet and its civilization.
Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor once took Napoleon, Uncle Joe Stalin, Bobby Charlton and Sergeant Pepper on a pub crawl of Metulla Orionsis.
Groovy DVD Extras -
The alternate ending where Ace doesn’t actually leave and hangs around like a bad smell for the rest of the decade in books, audios, comic strips and DEAR GOD WOMAN LEAVE US ALONE!!!
Dialogue Disasters -
Sezwho: I wrote the rules of ice cream making, I can break them!
Doctor: I don’t fear you, Hashish. I only fear the munchies afterwards.
Ace: You always know what’s going on! It’s part of your character description in the BBC Writer’s Guide!
Doctor: Sam, you have a lean and hungry look. Would you like a pretzel?
Hashish offers a chilling insight into Martian philosophy:
"There is always ice cream! Ice cream unites us! Ice cream IS survival!"
Ace: You’re always so clinical! Can’t you appreciate gore?
Sam: Major, I know a lot of Russian jokes, but you’re the best one!
Ace: So. Is that it for us? I bet you’re already into other dodgy schemes with other dodgy people.
Doctor: Time is a dodgy business. Picking the tangles apart, string by string, doesn’t always work. Sometimes it needs slicing through.
Ace: Or blowing up.
Doctor: ...you’re just beyond help, aren’t you?
Felnikov: I know you despise waste and decadence, but have some more caviar and enjoy the fur coats.
Ace: Oh how banal.
Dialogue Triumphs -
Doctor: Don’t get angsty! I’M SICK OF ANGST!!
Sezwho: I long to sell my wares out there on the frozen fields. Why do you skulk in this dark hall? Why are you dressed like that? Are flares back in again? No matter. I am Sezwho. When the red planet was in peril, I founded the Ice Cream Vendors! I defended the city of Jabolite against the rebel blood-drinking squids of HG Wells and fought the kings of the fern gullies in battle! My advertising banners flew on a hundred cities and on the world and on the moons. No one challenged my ingredients and preservatives. I am reborn! I have vanquished the ultimate consumer resistance... DEATH ITSELF!
Doctor: I like Russian fur hats. Russian fur hats are groovy, baby.
Ace: Time, like a river, is full of dead fish and used condoms.
Riana: You can’t leave me! I’m having your child!
Sam: Oh leave it out... Look, there’ll be a check in the post.
Riana: That’s not right!
Sam: I know, I know, you wanted cash. You’ve been fab. Bye!
Sezwho on the Doctor:
"His stance is camp. One thing is clear. He is an old pervert."
Doctor: I thought it was for your own good!
Ace: It’s what it’s all been about, all the time, right from the start!
Toughen her up, rake over her past, Perivale, Fenric and all that and then dump her at the Academy to do your dirty work!
Doctor: Not MY work! You have such potential for good, as a catalyst...
Ace: You could have asked!
Doctor: Where would the fun be in that?
Ace: And all this is to test me? All these deaths and conspiracies? It’s people’s lives you’re playing with!
Doctor: Tch! There’s gratitude for you! I go to all the trouble to provide you cheap and effective psychotherapy and THIS is the thanks I get? You’re as bad as John and flipping Gillian!
UnQuotable Quote -
Sam: A hotel room, a bottle of Vodka and you. Very cozy. For this visit, I’ve even brought my own butt plug!
Viewer Quotes -
"Putting the Ice Cream Vendors in a Cold War setting is deliciously apt. Well, it’s not completely fucking stupid, like the last time they were in Doctor Who and trying to invade a tropical transvestite resort. So thumbs up there then!" - (2000)
"Well, if the Time Lords made the rules and I’m the Last Time Lord then... I repeal the rules! Huzzah! Ice cream for all!"
- David Tennant (2009)
"I think it’s worth bearing in mind that when we watched this story at the start, we would not have had any idea if Ace would get into the Academy or not. So to dispute authenticity is in a way questionable simply because the assumption of knowing the end point is already, inherently, inauthentic. I am SO fucking high right now."
- That Guy With The Glasses (2007)
"I found the idea of a motorcycle gang cruising around 60s London wearing Ice Cream Vendor helmets laughable, in fact it made me laugh so hard I nearly went to Ethiopia! Oh, it makes cringe in a fond and nostalgic way." Tony Abbot - (2006)
"I can’t commend enough the performances of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred here. In fact, I can’t commend them AT ALL!"
- "Sadly, I Wasn’t Enthralled" Magazine # 86 (1998)
"I felt really disappointed." - Mark Plate’s mum (2011)
"Oh look. Another old time Who monster converting people into their own kind! Dustbins, Cybermen, Protons, Wirrrrn, Krynoids and now the freaking Ice Cream Vendors! It just doesn’t DO anything for me! Is there some kinky fetish demographic this is targeted at?!"
- Jared "No Nickname" Hansen stumbles across a dark truth (2008)
"It didn’t disappoint me, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations, however vague they might have been. I don’t quite know what to think about it. Why am I even reviewing this? I’m not a TV critic! I’m a fireman for god’s sake..." - a fireman (1990)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"Fandom! Keep your disapproval to yourselves! Script writers are like gods – they are there to be railed at."
Sylvester McCoy Speaks!
"I was surprised by the ending. So there you go."
Sophie Aldred Speaks!
"The Russian setting was very demanding for some of the actors. I laugh at their suffering and inability to work out a consistent accent. I’m always amazed by the lack of quality and ability of the actors... hey I’ll say what I like, you oily little crap-wit! This is why I’m glad to get out of this mausoleum of mediocrity and I’m heading for a superbly-paid job at ITV on a proper program with my name in the opening credits where I SHALL TAKE MY RIGHTFUL PLACE IN THE PANTHEON OF QUALITY BROADCASTING! Or, failing that, I’ll go to Corners. SO GOOD RIDDANCE!"
Julia Sawalha Speaks!
"Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred made me feel very welcome in their own inimitable style – by sitting on the other side of the room and refusing to talk to me. But at least they never made me feel like the New Girl. Yes, it’s an interesting experience, playing your own mother. I’ve never given birth to myself before. Well, there was that time in Absolutely Fabulous... but this time I was possessed by an Ice Cream Vendor helmet. Which required a lot more grunting than normal. It would have been nice to play a woman of slightly higher standards than Riana when it comes to her choice in men. Still, anyone can fall for a cockney. That’s MY excuse in polite company, anyway."
Trivia -
Nigel Lambert appeared as an extra in the Tom Baker story "The Leisure Centre" and, if anything, his acting is much, much worse.
Rumors & Facts -
Due to complaints that the "facts" part of "Rumors & Facts" have been grossly underrepresented, it’s time to cut down on scurrilous and highly-unreliable tenth-hand bitching and talk of what REALLY happened in this story!
Thin Ice is set in the 1960s, heralds the return of the Martian Ice Cream Vendors and writes Sophie Aldred’s character of Ace out of Doctor Who, perhaps forever.
Right, now that’s out of the way, back to the slander and scandal!
Aldred had been strongly contemplating quitting Doctor Who ever since she discovered Andrew Cartmel and his mates contriving ever-more-ridiculous and dangerous reasons for her to take her clothes off. In 1989's "Battlefield: Earth", not only was there a completely pointless plotline involving Ace banging a nubile Asian chick with lots of hot, throbbing, XXX-rated, girl-on-girl action, but Ben Aaaaronovitch completely rewrote episode two so Ace would end up wearing a wet T-shirt. This hastily adjustment to the plot nearly killed Aldred and it was on Sylvester McCoy’s exclamation of "Shit! Should Sophie really be that colour?" that saved her life.
Thus Season 27's number one priority was to get Aldred the hell out of this show and away from the crowds of frustrated sci-fi writers wanting to molest her lifeless corpse.
As Mark Plate was the only one of those writers with an ounce of self-control (not that says much, you understand), he vowed to write out the character of Ace in as dispassionate and groovy-60s-nostalgia-style as possible by ripping off every single word of that Michael Caine flick, The Italian Job. Cartmel, for his part, loved this idea, as he had always wanted to write out a companion in a plagiarism of a popular movie absolutely everyone had seen – but he preferred a Cold War comedy flick with Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray.
Thus, Plate and Cartmel arm-wrestled each other, got drunk, and then bet each other they couldn’t write a Cold War Italian-Job-style heist movie WITHOUT Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray that ALSO wrote out Ace and ALSO brought back the Ice Cream Vendors, a race of confectionary-obsessed Martian lizards who John Satan-Turner was always happy to return in seasons that the BBC would not allow to be broadcast.
After glancing at a wikipedia entry for the Ice Cream Vendors, Mark Plate realized he had discovered a rift in time and space allowing him access to the internet of the 21st Century. This allowed him to log onto Outpost Gallifrey, print out lots of threads wondering what would occur in the unseen Season 27, and mercilessly copy them.
This lead to the very strange idea (attributed to either Nigel Verkoff or Tom Baker) that Ace's replacement actually be born in the middle of Ace's departure story as the ultimate bit of upstaging. This would also make Ace's replacement the youngest companion ever to be introduced as well as the only companion to be delivered by the Doctor (apart, of course, from Genghis Khan who joined the Second Doctor and Jamie in Season 6B to fight off the Trods).
Even the culmination of Ace's character arc came from totally random batshit ideas from fans, so when the Doctor finally brings his great plan for her to fruition it turns out to be... getting her O-levels at Prydon Acamedy. Which was very pathetic as this plot thread was already thoroughly explored in Survival. Still, no one ever accused fandom of originality. Because if they did, that would be half-way original.
...heh.
About the only idea Plate turned down was the trying retarded concept that Ace wouldn't actually leave in this story but STAY, hog the limelight from Kate Tollinger and continue to hang around like a stench of Slitheen flatulence. The idea was so monumentally awful that Plate reached THROUGH the crack in the universe, grabbed the throat of the idiot who suggested it and slapped them silly. Good for him.
Chosen to portray new semi-regular, "Dodgy Brigadier Substitute in B Minor" was Tom Georgeson. He previously appeared as a useless extra in such stories as Genocide of the Dustbins and Death Comes To Tom and was expecting to be slaughtered by the Ice Cream Vendors after giving a few lame-but-memorable one-liners. Meanwhile, Julia Sawalha was hired to play Kate Tollinger's seductive Russian Bond-Girl mother, and found herself immediately getting all the unwanted attention that Aldred was desperately trying to escape.
Her reaction later gave rise to the truly erroneous rumor that she considered Doctor Who "an actress graveyard". In fact, she really said she had to fake her death to keep the anoraks off her back and get any work. Ironically, one of those anoraks, a wee Scotty lad named Steve, gave her a job as a warped, repressed, power-mad bitch in Press Gang.
There might be some kind of subtext to this, but I’m honestly unsure.
Thin Ice was rehearsed and filmed in six weeks, on budget, on schedule, and without any of the cast actually noticing. They just thought Sophie Aldred's farewell party in one of the delicatessens in downtown Montreal had gone horribly out of hand – and, as such, the production is beautifully redolent of the classic 80s pop culture.
A total of 9 millions tuned in on Sunday, January 3, 1993 to watch Ace's goodbye. They were to be disappointed, as Thin Ice was never to be broadcast, and those 9 million viewers had tuned in every Sunday night for three years and watched a repeat of Eastenders in the insane belief a nitro-loving Time Lady might cameo simply to be written out. It is unknown if Cartmel, Aaaronovitch and Plate were amongst these deviants, but personally I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this turned out to actually be the case.
Though I do remember that episode where Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred had a flaming row in the Queen Vic, the former gesticulating as he pleads and justifies and the latter's Nitro-Nine threatening to spill out of her rucksack with every jack-booted tantrum thrown. But then I was on a lot of drugs at the time. Forget I said anything.
There are lots of good ideas in Thin Ice, but unfortunately there are a lot more rubbish ideas – chief amongst them setting half the story in Soviet Russia and having a bunch of Martian-groupie Hell's Angels obsessing over fish-fingers in a very boring and unfocussed manner. Thankfully Ace got an ending that was beautiful, poignant and true to the character rather than being turned into just another miniskirt-wearing-tart and of secondary importance to a new one.
Like THAT would ever happen!
In the final analysis, a story with lots of characters on different trajectories can either be a morass of confused names or an intriguing piece of character work, depending on just how well characterized these people are. Needless to say Thin Ice fails on all counts, providing a bunch of characters memorable only for their grotesque lack of credible motivations or realistic dialogue. The only pleasure they can give the audience is to die horribly on camera.
Some may call this a brilliant story, redolent of 1990-era McCoy.
Some might call this the fantastic culmination of a story arc four decades in the making.
And some might call it a very un-exciting, cringe-worthy four-episode treatise on why the Ice Cream Vendors are boring as hell sub-Klingon-confectionary-salesman best left to the shameful early years of Doctor Who when they could get away with such unsophisticated crap!
Yet it is all these things and somehow much, MUCH less.
Doctor Who: Price-Line
Doctor Who Discovers Meth Amphetamine
"Ace in the Hole!" The XXXX-Rated Inside Story
Fluffs - Sylvester McCoy seemed rather frosty in this story.
"It all depends on which side of your wall is buttered!"
"I’m not spending the rest of my life dead!"
"I’m the Ace Cream Vendor!"
Goofs -
Ace supports QPR?!
Fashion Victims –
Despite some truly stiff competition, it has to be Riana giving birth while wearing nothing but a grey soviet-issue tie and a cardboard hat characteristic of Mars’ third polar epoch.
Technobabble –
Felnikov is determined to "reverse the polarity of the antihistamine flow" no matter what the human cost.
Links and References -
In part four, Hashish waffles on about Martian history for no other reason than to confirm that Red China, Phobos, The Judgement of Ice Cream, and Frozen Crime are all internally consistent in their portrayals of the red planet and its civilization.
Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor once took Napoleon, Uncle Joe Stalin, Bobby Charlton and Sergeant Pepper on a pub crawl of Metulla Orionsis.
Groovy DVD Extras -
The alternate ending where Ace doesn’t actually leave and hangs around like a bad smell for the rest of the decade in books, audios, comic strips and DEAR GOD WOMAN LEAVE US ALONE!!!
Dialogue Disasters -
Sezwho: I wrote the rules of ice cream making, I can break them!
Doctor: I don’t fear you, Hashish. I only fear the munchies afterwards.
Ace: You always know what’s going on! It’s part of your character description in the BBC Writer’s Guide!
Doctor: Sam, you have a lean and hungry look. Would you like a pretzel?
Hashish offers a chilling insight into Martian philosophy:
"There is always ice cream! Ice cream unites us! Ice cream IS survival!"
Ace: You’re always so clinical! Can’t you appreciate gore?
Sam: Major, I know a lot of Russian jokes, but you’re the best one!
Ace: So. Is that it for us? I bet you’re already into other dodgy schemes with other dodgy people.
Doctor: Time is a dodgy business. Picking the tangles apart, string by string, doesn’t always work. Sometimes it needs slicing through.
Ace: Or blowing up.
Doctor: ...you’re just beyond help, aren’t you?
Felnikov: I know you despise waste and decadence, but have some more caviar and enjoy the fur coats.
Ace: Oh how banal.
Dialogue Triumphs -
Doctor: Don’t get angsty! I’M SICK OF ANGST!!
Sezwho: I long to sell my wares out there on the frozen fields. Why do you skulk in this dark hall? Why are you dressed like that? Are flares back in again? No matter. I am Sezwho. When the red planet was in peril, I founded the Ice Cream Vendors! I defended the city of Jabolite against the rebel blood-drinking squids of HG Wells and fought the kings of the fern gullies in battle! My advertising banners flew on a hundred cities and on the world and on the moons. No one challenged my ingredients and preservatives. I am reborn! I have vanquished the ultimate consumer resistance... DEATH ITSELF!
Doctor: I like Russian fur hats. Russian fur hats are groovy, baby.
Ace: Time, like a river, is full of dead fish and used condoms.
Riana: You can’t leave me! I’m having your child!
Sam: Oh leave it out... Look, there’ll be a check in the post.
Riana: That’s not right!
Sam: I know, I know, you wanted cash. You’ve been fab. Bye!
Sezwho on the Doctor:
"His stance is camp. One thing is clear. He is an old pervert."
Doctor: I thought it was for your own good!
Ace: It’s what it’s all been about, all the time, right from the start!
Toughen her up, rake over her past, Perivale, Fenric and all that and then dump her at the Academy to do your dirty work!
Doctor: Not MY work! You have such potential for good, as a catalyst...
Ace: You could have asked!
Doctor: Where would the fun be in that?
Ace: And all this is to test me? All these deaths and conspiracies? It’s people’s lives you’re playing with!
Doctor: Tch! There’s gratitude for you! I go to all the trouble to provide you cheap and effective psychotherapy and THIS is the thanks I get? You’re as bad as John and flipping Gillian!
UnQuotable Quote -
Sam: A hotel room, a bottle of Vodka and you. Very cozy. For this visit, I’ve even brought my own butt plug!
Viewer Quotes -
"Putting the Ice Cream Vendors in a Cold War setting is deliciously apt. Well, it’s not completely fucking stupid, like the last time they were in Doctor Who and trying to invade a tropical transvestite resort. So thumbs up there then!" - (2000)
"Well, if the Time Lords made the rules and I’m the Last Time Lord then... I repeal the rules! Huzzah! Ice cream for all!"
- David Tennant (2009)
"I think it’s worth bearing in mind that when we watched this story at the start, we would not have had any idea if Ace would get into the Academy or not. So to dispute authenticity is in a way questionable simply because the assumption of knowing the end point is already, inherently, inauthentic. I am SO fucking high right now."
- That Guy With The Glasses (2007)
"I found the idea of a motorcycle gang cruising around 60s London wearing Ice Cream Vendor helmets laughable, in fact it made me laugh so hard I nearly went to Ethiopia! Oh, it makes cringe in a fond and nostalgic way." Tony Abbot - (2006)
"I can’t commend enough the performances of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred here. In fact, I can’t commend them AT ALL!"
- "Sadly, I Wasn’t Enthralled" Magazine # 86 (1998)
"I felt really disappointed." - Mark Plate’s mum (2011)
"Oh look. Another old time Who monster converting people into their own kind! Dustbins, Cybermen, Protons, Wirrrrn, Krynoids and now the freaking Ice Cream Vendors! It just doesn’t DO anything for me! Is there some kinky fetish demographic this is targeted at?!"
- Jared "No Nickname" Hansen stumbles across a dark truth (2008)
"It didn’t disappoint me, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations, however vague they might have been. I don’t quite know what to think about it. Why am I even reviewing this? I’m not a TV critic! I’m a fireman for god’s sake..." - a fireman (1990)
Psychotic Nostalgia -
"Fandom! Keep your disapproval to yourselves! Script writers are like gods – they are there to be railed at."
Sylvester McCoy Speaks!
"I was surprised by the ending. So there you go."
Sophie Aldred Speaks!
"The Russian setting was very demanding for some of the actors. I laugh at their suffering and inability to work out a consistent accent. I’m always amazed by the lack of quality and ability of the actors... hey I’ll say what I like, you oily little crap-wit! This is why I’m glad to get out of this mausoleum of mediocrity and I’m heading for a superbly-paid job at ITV on a proper program with my name in the opening credits where I SHALL TAKE MY RIGHTFUL PLACE IN THE PANTHEON OF QUALITY BROADCASTING! Or, failing that, I’ll go to Corners. SO GOOD RIDDANCE!"
Julia Sawalha Speaks!
"Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred made me feel very welcome in their own inimitable style – by sitting on the other side of the room and refusing to talk to me. But at least they never made me feel like the New Girl. Yes, it’s an interesting experience, playing your own mother. I’ve never given birth to myself before. Well, there was that time in Absolutely Fabulous... but this time I was possessed by an Ice Cream Vendor helmet. Which required a lot more grunting than normal. It would have been nice to play a woman of slightly higher standards than Riana when it comes to her choice in men. Still, anyone can fall for a cockney. That’s MY excuse in polite company, anyway."
Trivia -
Nigel Lambert appeared as an extra in the Tom Baker story "The Leisure Centre" and, if anything, his acting is much, much worse.
Rumors & Facts -
Due to complaints that the "facts" part of "Rumors & Facts" have been grossly underrepresented, it’s time to cut down on scurrilous and highly-unreliable tenth-hand bitching and talk of what REALLY happened in this story!
Thin Ice is set in the 1960s, heralds the return of the Martian Ice Cream Vendors and writes Sophie Aldred’s character of Ace out of Doctor Who, perhaps forever.
Right, now that’s out of the way, back to the slander and scandal!
Aldred had been strongly contemplating quitting Doctor Who ever since she discovered Andrew Cartmel and his mates contriving ever-more-ridiculous and dangerous reasons for her to take her clothes off. In 1989's "Battlefield: Earth", not only was there a completely pointless plotline involving Ace banging a nubile Asian chick with lots of hot, throbbing, XXX-rated, girl-on-girl action, but Ben Aaaaronovitch completely rewrote episode two so Ace would end up wearing a wet T-shirt. This hastily adjustment to the plot nearly killed Aldred and it was on Sylvester McCoy’s exclamation of "Shit! Should Sophie really be that colour?" that saved her life.
Thus Season 27's number one priority was to get Aldred the hell out of this show and away from the crowds of frustrated sci-fi writers wanting to molest her lifeless corpse.
As Mark Plate was the only one of those writers with an ounce of self-control (not that says much, you understand), he vowed to write out the character of Ace in as dispassionate and groovy-60s-nostalgia-style as possible by ripping off every single word of that Michael Caine flick, The Italian Job. Cartmel, for his part, loved this idea, as he had always wanted to write out a companion in a plagiarism of a popular movie absolutely everyone had seen – but he preferred a Cold War comedy flick with Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray.
Thus, Plate and Cartmel arm-wrestled each other, got drunk, and then bet each other they couldn’t write a Cold War Italian-Job-style heist movie WITHOUT Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray that ALSO wrote out Ace and ALSO brought back the Ice Cream Vendors, a race of confectionary-obsessed Martian lizards who John Satan-Turner was always happy to return in seasons that the BBC would not allow to be broadcast.
After glancing at a wikipedia entry for the Ice Cream Vendors, Mark Plate realized he had discovered a rift in time and space allowing him access to the internet of the 21st Century. This allowed him to log onto Outpost Gallifrey, print out lots of threads wondering what would occur in the unseen Season 27, and mercilessly copy them.
This lead to the very strange idea (attributed to either Nigel Verkoff or Tom Baker) that Ace's replacement actually be born in the middle of Ace's departure story as the ultimate bit of upstaging. This would also make Ace's replacement the youngest companion ever to be introduced as well as the only companion to be delivered by the Doctor (apart, of course, from Genghis Khan who joined the Second Doctor and Jamie in Season 6B to fight off the Trods).
Even the culmination of Ace's character arc came from totally random batshit ideas from fans, so when the Doctor finally brings his great plan for her to fruition it turns out to be... getting her O-levels at Prydon Acamedy. Which was very pathetic as this plot thread was already thoroughly explored in Survival. Still, no one ever accused fandom of originality. Because if they did, that would be half-way original.
...heh.
About the only idea Plate turned down was the trying retarded concept that Ace wouldn't actually leave in this story but STAY, hog the limelight from Kate Tollinger and continue to hang around like a stench of Slitheen flatulence. The idea was so monumentally awful that Plate reached THROUGH the crack in the universe, grabbed the throat of the idiot who suggested it and slapped them silly. Good for him.
Chosen to portray new semi-regular, "Dodgy Brigadier Substitute in B Minor" was Tom Georgeson. He previously appeared as a useless extra in such stories as Genocide of the Dustbins and Death Comes To Tom and was expecting to be slaughtered by the Ice Cream Vendors after giving a few lame-but-memorable one-liners. Meanwhile, Julia Sawalha was hired to play Kate Tollinger's seductive Russian Bond-Girl mother, and found herself immediately getting all the unwanted attention that Aldred was desperately trying to escape.
Her reaction later gave rise to the truly erroneous rumor that she considered Doctor Who "an actress graveyard". In fact, she really said she had to fake her death to keep the anoraks off her back and get any work. Ironically, one of those anoraks, a wee Scotty lad named Steve, gave her a job as a warped, repressed, power-mad bitch in Press Gang.
There might be some kind of subtext to this, but I’m honestly unsure.
Thin Ice was rehearsed and filmed in six weeks, on budget, on schedule, and without any of the cast actually noticing. They just thought Sophie Aldred's farewell party in one of the delicatessens in downtown Montreal had gone horribly out of hand – and, as such, the production is beautifully redolent of the classic 80s pop culture.
A total of 9 millions tuned in on Sunday, January 3, 1993 to watch Ace's goodbye. They were to be disappointed, as Thin Ice was never to be broadcast, and those 9 million viewers had tuned in every Sunday night for three years and watched a repeat of Eastenders in the insane belief a nitro-loving Time Lady might cameo simply to be written out. It is unknown if Cartmel, Aaaronovitch and Plate were amongst these deviants, but personally I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this turned out to actually be the case.
Though I do remember that episode where Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred had a flaming row in the Queen Vic, the former gesticulating as he pleads and justifies and the latter's Nitro-Nine threatening to spill out of her rucksack with every jack-booted tantrum thrown. But then I was on a lot of drugs at the time. Forget I said anything.
There are lots of good ideas in Thin Ice, but unfortunately there are a lot more rubbish ideas – chief amongst them setting half the story in Soviet Russia and having a bunch of Martian-groupie Hell's Angels obsessing over fish-fingers in a very boring and unfocussed manner. Thankfully Ace got an ending that was beautiful, poignant and true to the character rather than being turned into just another miniskirt-wearing-tart and of secondary importance to a new one.
Like THAT would ever happen!
In the final analysis, a story with lots of characters on different trajectories can either be a morass of confused names or an intriguing piece of character work, depending on just how well characterized these people are. Needless to say Thin Ice fails on all counts, providing a bunch of characters memorable only for their grotesque lack of credible motivations or realistic dialogue. The only pleasure they can give the audience is to die horribly on camera.
Some may call this a brilliant story, redolent of 1990-era McCoy.
Some might call this the fantastic culmination of a story arc four decades in the making.
And some might call it a very un-exciting, cringe-worthy four-episode treatise on why the Ice Cream Vendors are boring as hell sub-Klingon-confectionary-salesman best left to the shameful early years of Doctor Who when they could get away with such unsophisticated crap!
Yet it is all these things and somehow much, MUCH less.
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