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khaosworksWhile I'm still trying to whack the next whofic into shape (man, I suck at plotting), here's what I threatened to do some posts ago: a sort of Cliff's Notes for all the continuity easter eggs in "The Last Battle". Yes, this is pure ego, but maybe some may actually be interested in where it comes from.
Continuity-wise, this story takes place between the novel The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin and Rose, the first episode of the 2005 season. It is very obvious that the Doctor in TiD is meant to be an older Eighth Doctor, and Lance keeps insisting it all fits in continuity, so I'm placing it there.
...He sometimes thought that it was a product of a kind of reverse solipsism; a paranoid fear that if people didn't see him, didn't know him, he didn't exist.
This is a metacommentary on the long absence of the Doctor from our screens. To an entire generation of children growing up, the Doctor really didn't exist except as a historical curiosity. We fans kept him alive in novels, comic strips and audio plays, but we were the only ones who saw him.
...She had kissed him, to his surprise, before she left in the last of the battle TARDISes.
For the 'shippers out there, I've deliberately left the identity of this mystery woman vague so you can insert whomever you want in here. You can probably guess that I meant it to be Romana, though, but it could be anyone, really. Battle TARDISes, or War TARDISes, bristling with weaponry, were first seen in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip story "The Stockbridge Horror", and have been mentioned several times in the books and audios.
..."I'm glad you're with me, Doctor," she said, "at the end of all things." It was from one of his favourite books. She had remembered that, too.
Okay, this I made up. There's no mention anywhere I can find in the licensed spin-offs about the Doctor liking Tolkien. But I thought that line was appropriate.
...he had put it back together the last time, performed the most spectacular conjuring trick in the universe by restoring the Time Lords to a continuum that had forgotten them.
A reference to what must have happened between the last Eighth Doctor novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles, and Rose. Quick summary for those not in the know: in the novels, Gallifrey got blowed up [sic] real good in The Ancestor Cell. At the end of tGC, the Doctor knows how to restore the planet, but it definitely gets blowed up again before Rose in the Time War, so he had to have restored it in the interim. To lose a planet once is a misfortune. To lose it twice may be construed as carelessness.
...shifting the temporal harmonics to take care of any incoming attacks that tried to sneak in through a parallel universe where those defences didn't exist.
A very subtle allusion to the Dalek Empire audio series. In Project Infinity, the Daleks grab hold of a technology that allows them to search for a parallel universe where the Daleks reign supreme. It's a simple extrapolation to apply this type of technology to weaponry.
...It was funny — he had lived in this particular body longer than most, and yet it hadn't seemed all that long, like he had never quite been given the chance to prove himself.
Another metacomment. The Eighth Doctor was around from 1996 to 2005 if you count all the spin-off fiction, but only had one outing on screen, in the Doctor Who television movie. Most people agree that, no matter what you think of the TVM, Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor was the best thing about it.
...Perhaps he and the Time Lords had brought it down on themselves. He wondered what if, back at the start of it all on Skaro, he had simply said "No."
In the "Dalek" episode of Doctor Who Confidential, Russell T. Davies suggests that the Time War began when the Time Lords asked the Doctor to avert the Daleks' creation on Skaro in Genesis of the Daleks.
...The universe shuddered, and brief alternatives flickered in and out of existence...
This is the "cover-my-ass" sentence. With this one, I manage to insert an out if this story is ever seemingly contradicted by subsequent "official" continuity. Love those history changes.
...Forty-two of him...
In an unpublished chapter of Lance's book The Dying Days, titled "Valeyard of the Daleks", Jason Kane meets the Forty-Second Doctor and his wife.
...been beaten senseless with a perigosto stick and then piled on top of the rest of the bodies. Rassilon would weep.
Perigosto is a Time Lord sport, first mentioned in The Green Death. Rassilon, founder of the Time Lords, would weep, because the spin-off media, particularly in the audio play Zagreus, establishes that Rassilon liked having everything nice and preserved and stagnant, to maintain Time Lord society and history just the way he wanted it, in perpetuity.
...The Eye was the key, as always... As long as it existed, the Time Lords would neither flux, nor wither.
The Eye of Harmony, the source of power for all Gallifrey, makes the Time Lords "neither flux, nor wither" is a direct quote from the Time Lord history books, read out by the Doctor in The Deadly Assassin.
..her Cloister Bell was ringing so hard that he was getting a headache.
As stated in Logopolis, the Cloister Bell is the TARDIS's internal alarm system, sounding in cases of "wild catastrophes, with sudden calls to man the battle stations."
...after his fourth self had prevaricated, and his seventh self had not gone far enough, his eighth self, running for so long and hiding behind a mask of boyish wonder denying the darkness and weight of his responsibilities...
The Fourth Doctor had the chance to destroy the Daleks at their conception, but hesitated, in Genesis of the Daleks, merely delaying their development by a thousand years. The Seventh Doctor blew up Skaro's sun in Remembrance of the Daleks, incinerating the Dalek homeworld (or so he thought), but that took place in the future, and obviously wasn't enough.
...he could take that final step. Coward, killer, everything in between.
And here we come to why I wrote the story. In The Parting of the Ways, the Ninth Doctor has the chance to destroy the Daleks (but will fry Earth's inhabitants as well, but he knows that humans will still survive in space colonies), but he stops short. The Dalek Emperor asks him to choose between coward and killer, and he chooses "coward, any day." Earlier, in Dalek the lone Dalek taunts the Doctor about the aftermath of the Time War by saying, "And the coward survived." And yet, the Doctor says he was the one who pushed the button that destroyed both sides — so why "coward"?
So it boils down to a couple of questions: What did the Dalek mean by that, and why didn't the Doctor just blow the damn Daleks to hell? Answer 1: he wasn't at the front lines of the final battle, and this is why. Answer 2: he already did that once. It didn't work, and he had to live with what he did.
There. More than you ever wanted to know about how my continuity-drenched mind works. None of this, I hope, was absolutely necessary for you to enjoy the story. If they were, I failed. What I hope these notes do for you though, is to be able to read it over again and enjoy it on a whole different level.
Continuity-wise, this story takes place between the novel The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin and Rose, the first episode of the 2005 season. It is very obvious that the Doctor in TiD is meant to be an older Eighth Doctor, and Lance keeps insisting it all fits in continuity, so I'm placing it there.
...He sometimes thought that it was a product of a kind of reverse solipsism; a paranoid fear that if people didn't see him, didn't know him, he didn't exist.
This is a metacommentary on the long absence of the Doctor from our screens. To an entire generation of children growing up, the Doctor really didn't exist except as a historical curiosity. We fans kept him alive in novels, comic strips and audio plays, but we were the only ones who saw him.
...She had kissed him, to his surprise, before she left in the last of the battle TARDISes.
For the 'shippers out there, I've deliberately left the identity of this mystery woman vague so you can insert whomever you want in here. You can probably guess that I meant it to be Romana, though, but it could be anyone, really. Battle TARDISes, or War TARDISes, bristling with weaponry, were first seen in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip story "The Stockbridge Horror", and have been mentioned several times in the books and audios.
..."I'm glad you're with me, Doctor," she said, "at the end of all things." It was from one of his favourite books. She had remembered that, too.
Okay, this I made up. There's no mention anywhere I can find in the licensed spin-offs about the Doctor liking Tolkien. But I thought that line was appropriate.
...he had put it back together the last time, performed the most spectacular conjuring trick in the universe by restoring the Time Lords to a continuum that had forgotten them.
A reference to what must have happened between the last Eighth Doctor novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles, and Rose. Quick summary for those not in the know: in the novels, Gallifrey got blowed up [sic] real good in The Ancestor Cell. At the end of tGC, the Doctor knows how to restore the planet, but it definitely gets blowed up again before Rose in the Time War, so he had to have restored it in the interim. To lose a planet once is a misfortune. To lose it twice may be construed as carelessness.
...shifting the temporal harmonics to take care of any incoming attacks that tried to sneak in through a parallel universe where those defences didn't exist.
A very subtle allusion to the Dalek Empire audio series. In Project Infinity, the Daleks grab hold of a technology that allows them to search for a parallel universe where the Daleks reign supreme. It's a simple extrapolation to apply this type of technology to weaponry.
...It was funny — he had lived in this particular body longer than most, and yet it hadn't seemed all that long, like he had never quite been given the chance to prove himself.
Another metacomment. The Eighth Doctor was around from 1996 to 2005 if you count all the spin-off fiction, but only had one outing on screen, in the Doctor Who television movie. Most people agree that, no matter what you think of the TVM, Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor was the best thing about it.
...Perhaps he and the Time Lords had brought it down on themselves. He wondered what if, back at the start of it all on Skaro, he had simply said "No."
In the "Dalek" episode of Doctor Who Confidential, Russell T. Davies suggests that the Time War began when the Time Lords asked the Doctor to avert the Daleks' creation on Skaro in Genesis of the Daleks.
...The universe shuddered, and brief alternatives flickered in and out of existence...
This is the "cover-my-ass" sentence. With this one, I manage to insert an out if this story is ever seemingly contradicted by subsequent "official" continuity. Love those history changes.
...Forty-two of him...
In an unpublished chapter of Lance's book The Dying Days, titled "Valeyard of the Daleks", Jason Kane meets the Forty-Second Doctor and his wife.
...been beaten senseless with a perigosto stick and then piled on top of the rest of the bodies. Rassilon would weep.
Perigosto is a Time Lord sport, first mentioned in The Green Death. Rassilon, founder of the Time Lords, would weep, because the spin-off media, particularly in the audio play Zagreus, establishes that Rassilon liked having everything nice and preserved and stagnant, to maintain Time Lord society and history just the way he wanted it, in perpetuity.
...The Eye was the key, as always... As long as it existed, the Time Lords would neither flux, nor wither.
The Eye of Harmony, the source of power for all Gallifrey, makes the Time Lords "neither flux, nor wither" is a direct quote from the Time Lord history books, read out by the Doctor in The Deadly Assassin.
..her Cloister Bell was ringing so hard that he was getting a headache.
As stated in Logopolis, the Cloister Bell is the TARDIS's internal alarm system, sounding in cases of "wild catastrophes, with sudden calls to man the battle stations."
...after his fourth self had prevaricated, and his seventh self had not gone far enough, his eighth self, running for so long and hiding behind a mask of boyish wonder denying the darkness and weight of his responsibilities...
The Fourth Doctor had the chance to destroy the Daleks at their conception, but hesitated, in Genesis of the Daleks, merely delaying their development by a thousand years. The Seventh Doctor blew up Skaro's sun in Remembrance of the Daleks, incinerating the Dalek homeworld (or so he thought), but that took place in the future, and obviously wasn't enough.
...he could take that final step. Coward, killer, everything in between.
And here we come to why I wrote the story. In The Parting of the Ways, the Ninth Doctor has the chance to destroy the Daleks (but will fry Earth's inhabitants as well, but he knows that humans will still survive in space colonies), but he stops short. The Dalek Emperor asks him to choose between coward and killer, and he chooses "coward, any day." Earlier, in Dalek the lone Dalek taunts the Doctor about the aftermath of the Time War by saying, "And the coward survived." And yet, the Doctor says he was the one who pushed the button that destroyed both sides — so why "coward"?
So it boils down to a couple of questions: What did the Dalek mean by that, and why didn't the Doctor just blow the damn Daleks to hell? Answer 1: he wasn't at the front lines of the final battle, and this is why. Answer 2: he already did that once. It didn't work, and he had to live with what he did.
There. More than you ever wanted to know about how my continuity-drenched mind works. None of this, I hope, was absolutely necessary for you to enjoy the story. If they were, I failed. What I hope these notes do for you though, is to be able to read it over again and enjoy it on a whole different level.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 07:11 pm (UTC)"Timelord(s) of Gallfrey", ttto "Donald MacGillavry"
Unless it's already been done — it seems obvious enough — but TSOR didn't reveal it.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 07:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-19 03:04 am (UTC)I may have to write it myself after all.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 07:25 am (UTC)Dalek Porn
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 07:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-25 04:58 pm (UTC)Brwosing your doctor who-tagged entries after![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
autographedcat here recommended your canon flexibility essay.
I read the Dalek's use of "coward" differently. It's implying that the Doctor survived the Time War because he ran; it's trying to get in a dig at the Doctor, whether or not it actually believes the Doctor ran. As we find out in the rest of Dalek, the Doctor survived because he was the one who was outside pressing the button. You and I know (and so does the Doctor, if only intellectually) that that must have taken more courage than not doing it - to, with a necessary action, leave yourself the only one. I think the Dalek's sequence of revelations throughout the rest of Dalek bear my interpretation out as a literary parallel.
I also think the Doctor was correct by his moral code not to commit genocide at the command of the Time Lords in Genesis of the Daleks, though I think what the Doctor thinks about it swings back and forth all the time. If he had done it of his own decision (as he has at times committed genocide in defense of himself, his companions, other people, a planet, or the universe), it'd've been different. But with the Time Lords' intereference it's a much dodgier, more clouded matter - which of course is why it's a fascinating thing to write stories about.
Now I suppose I ought to read the story.