Short Trips:Farewells
A Doctor Who short story. No major plot clues or spoilers will appear here until well after the thing's released. When that's happened I might talk about a few bits of it in a bit more detail, and whether or not anyone liked it at all. In the meantime let me tempt you with a few notes of no interest.
This story grew from a visual image of the first Doctor on a mountain top near the end of his life, reunited with his childhood mentor. Everything else stemmed from that.
It's a story about dying influenced by Buddhist tradition, and about how history can be as fluid as the future, because we construct them both together. As something that explores the Doctor's past, it also attempts to offer a way to reconcile a number of conflicting past histories, whilst allowing room for the reader to accept or deny what he chooses.
Not many reviews so far, unsurprisingly, though Richard McGinlay who punningly describes the collection as a 'good buy' on the review site http://sci-fi-online.50megs.com rates the story as one of the more effective ones.
"The Three Paths, by Ian Potter, forms a companion piece to The Mother Road, as the First Doctor approaches the end of his life but realises that he needn’t fear the change. Continuity-wise, this story successfully walks a line between such diverse accounts of the Doctor’s and Gallifrey’s past as Planet of the Spiders, Lungbarrow and Death Comes to Time."
I'm looking forward to reading The Mother Road and seeing just how I've formed a companion piece to it, I suspect there may have been a piece of Jacqueline Rayner cunning in story placement here. He also seems pleased at my explicitly creating a gap for more Ben and Polly stories.
Lawrence Conquest once again has kind words in his current incarnation on Outpost Gallifrey
"The Three Paths - The 1st Doctor going back to Gallifrey? Should be heretical, but is quite perfect."
Jane Aland on Amazon.co.uk reviews it very generously as
"a beautiful story that sees the 1st Doctor returning to Gallifrey to visit his mentor and come to terms with the future."
Notes of no interest
.P 211
The opening is a pastiche of the kind of 19th Century travel writing that is these days republished in cheap copyright free editions, and introduces the ideas of triple ambiguity, names defining reality and the filtering of experience through belief systems, which recur through the story. It also pays tribute to the comic Max Wall, the Malbec grape and Pis Buin sun cream, and tips a hat to the writers of Travels Without the TARDIS regarded by many UK readers as the funniest non-fiction Doctor Who book ever published. Actually there's probably more than a hint of Frazer's Golden Bough and Graves' The White Goddess to the narrative voice as well and the exploration of mythology those books undertake is also mirrored in the main story.
To my mind this opening passage is probably set in a fictional Latin American country colonised by French Christians in the 18th Century but you're welcome to build your own world from the clues provided, it could just as easily be a rewritten Gallifrey, or a metaphor for the way later writers have built their own ideas on top of Doctor Who's original 1960s ethos.
The dream sequence hints at a number of motifs from previous Doctor Who fiction, whilst hopefully not excluding readers who miss the references. In another deliberate triple ambiguity the father figure seen here may well be the Doctor's actual father as depicted in the works of Lance Parkin and Jon Blum and Kate Orman, a character from Marc Platt's Lungbarrow or just a dream version of a soft toy.
The garland is of sarlains, the Gallifreyan flower of Remembrance, conveniently described as like both daisy and rose, that re-occurs through Who fiction from Paul Cornell's Timewyrm- Revelation on, and which symbolically links the first Doctor as gardener motif introduced in The Three Doctors with the Buddhist parable of the daisy introduced in The Time Monster. There is a lot of this kind of 'tidying-up' here too.
P 212
The boat is clearly both Charon's and the TARDIS and the severed hand could be easily read as either symbolic, a memory of a real event (significant one-armed men have turned up in Doctor Who a couple of times) or as an echo of the Hand of Omega.
The Doctor's rheumatism being exacerbated by cold is first mentioned in The Space Museum. This is the kind of thing you find out if you manage to stay awake through it while researching the Doctor's companion Vicki for another story. I can't wholeheartedly recommend the experience, though both Jeremy Bulloch's eyebrows and the bit where the Doctor is interrogated are quite entertaining.
The Doctor's chair, first seen in An Unearthly Child is unexpectedly revealed to be magnetic in The Dalek Masterplan. What seems more likely- that he made it to sooth his aches or restrain captives? Alright, both ideas are ridiculous, I know. Why not entertain both?
To my knowledge, Hi-Fi, Steven's toy panda, was last seen on screen in The Time Meddler, the reference to it being given away and returned is a slight expansion on Trey Korte's The Schoolboy's Story in Short Trips: Repercussions. If TV episodes now lost are one day recovered and reveal Steven subsequently lost Hi-Fi in a distant Galaxy, at Troy, on the run from Daleks, in Paris, Wimbledon, The Celestial Toyroom, or on the planet of the Elders, or even gave it to Iris Wildthyme I'd be delighted. Should this occur, this entire story can of course be dismissed blithely as just a dream by the Canon Lords. I'd be most delighted if was Troy or Wimbledon ideally.
P213
The coldness addresses the way the TARDIS blends in with local weather conditions in both Marco Polo and The Tenth Planet, and points out how lucky we are it didn't always do this.
It's also part of an attempt to create a space where the pre-existing text and cartoon stories with this crew can fit in. I'm positing a number of landings in locations the Doctor identifies as the coldest place in the world before the arrival in Antarctica that ends the first Doctor's days. Ideally of course, this story would have followed directly from the end of The Smugglers but if it had done Ben and Polly would have needed to be involved in a story that wasn't really theirs. Consider their tales another pair of paths untaken.The Doctor's workbench is a tribute to all the tat we suddenly discover he has in the console room during The Web Planet. The barometer is of course a nod to The Daleks and its Mercury McGuffin. There's evidence here that he keeps Bonsai trees, again keeping the gardener motif going.
The Doctor's ring is deliberately but obscurely linked to another item in the story later on. The reader who wishes to, may consider the two things a pair. It's an idea that seems mythically right to me, but too preposterous and unwieldy to present as literally true, certainly within a story this size anyhow.
There's a stupid joke here about The Five Doctors for those who like that kind of thing and have a chance of getting it, and lots of foreshadowing of the regeneration scene in The Power of the Daleks.
P 214
The lamp sequence is a homage to the famous Hartnell picture with a candle picture from Marco Polo that's echoed in a publicity shot for the Paul McGann TV movie and a nod to the literary first Doctor's everlasting matches, which have popped up more recently in the audio stories Zagreus and Caerdroia and Daniel O'Mahoney's novella The Cabinet of Light. I've always liked the idea of Maxwell's Demon, even though I reckon the Laws of Physics forbid a system being able to regulate itself in such a desirable way in practise. One suspects the energy required to intelligently monitor the system and react to it will always be greater than the energy captured somehow.
My description of the Doctor's home is based on lines from the TV story The Sensorites and the Virgin New Adventures novel series. Although I freely take Time Lord lore from all over the series here, I avoid calling the planet Gallifrey (or even Jewel) and refrain from naming the Doctor's people because the series did too at the time, and even when I'm mixing ideas from 60s TV, 90s books and 21st century web dramas it seems oddly jarring to put such words in the first Doctor's mouth or mind, retrospectively.
Much of the Galllifreyan fauna and flora comes from Will Swift's exhaustive exploration of things Time Lord on his website. Be warned there appear to be more forms of Gallifreyan plant life than their are Terran plants. I toyed for a while with naming a Gallifreyan bird a will swift in his honour but decided in the end, that was an indulgence too far. Weanskrike is my own invention however, as is the information about Beatitude flight.
P 215
The three mountain names arise from two diverging attempts to build on tales of the Doctor's mountain home and his hermit mentor. I decided there was no reason the two could not be one, (particularly if this story does turn out later to have just been a dream) and for good measure decided that the thematically linked mountain of the Kingmaker from the BBC's internet serial Death Comes to Time could be the same one too.
As certain events (and a rather mystical reinterpretation of the Time Lords) in Death Come to Time make it difficult to reconcile with the rest of Doctor Who, this began to lead me towards the notion of a now non-existent mythic time line in which that version of the mountain, Mount Plutarch could exist. This had the useful bonus of producing a shadowy feminine counterpoint to the Doctor's mentor for me, which readers so inclined might wish to think of in relation to figures like the Pythia, Penelope and Patience from previous stories.
The spiralling path. I've only climbed Glastonbury Tor the easy way but apparently taking the scenic route pays dividends. In my mind's eye that's what the Doctor's doing here. Previously this passage referenced Salyavin, Fendahl and Rassilon stories of my own invention. We know the Doctor was told spooky stories by his hermit from State of Decay (which to my mind indicates he was once someone a lot more playful than the guru of The Planet of the Spiders might suggest), these are presumably some of them. My Salyavin is a Brer Rabbit-like Trickster, because that strikes me as the easiest way to make him both a criminal Time Lord society wants to hide away and the Doctor's childhood hero. This is all a moot point mind, because clearance hell meant it was easier not to reference these legendary Time Lord figures.
We know Gallifrey has silver leafed trees, so having a few silver apples in the moonlight was irresistible. A mythological allusion to join all the others in the ragbag of appropriated mythologies behind Doctor Who.
The hermit has only one eye like Odin, a Cornell invention I feel he also intended to have mythological resonance. We must presume, that the missing eye returns when he later regenerates into K'anpo.
P 216
The gift of a scarf is traditional when greeting a Buddhist master. The Doctor himself receives three gifts in this story, one in his dream, one in his past which is not quite explicitly spelled out and another at its conclusion.
The Tibetan tea in a Wodehousian teaset, is pretty much the standard Doctor Who mixture; mysticism, wit absurd eclecticism and, of course, shamelessly pilfering good stuff from other people's stories.
‘Transmigration of object' and the Doctor's pockets, two of the series greatest cop outs conflated! I've mucked about with transmigration of object before in Still Lives, and I probably will again if I keep writing these stories.
P 217
The don is a nod to Douglas Adams' Shada, and, obliquely perhaps, a hint that the hermit is on good terms with one of his race's greatest folk heroes.
The obols we must assume were acquired during the events of The Myth Makers, again the allusion to Charon is obvious.
Theta, Snail, Doctor, once again three names that define identity and history, a school name, a family name, and a self-chosen one.
P 218
There's a nod to The War Games and Marc Platt's Auld Morality in the image of the Doctor living forever with his books and games.
The hermit's parable came quite late after I'd found a slightly sillier voice for him than my initial imitation of K'anpo in The Planet of the Spiders. It's my favourite part of this story now, playing with triple ambiguity again, offering the Kingmaker and by extension Death Comes To Time a position in Time Lord lore for those who want it, and as a bonus including jocular abuse of people who eat fish and compose ring tones purely for my pleasure. I'm also quite pleased with the fact that the boy who consumes the fictions that shape him (in this fiction in a fiction) could be read as being the Doctor, one of his heroes, an echo of Trey Korte's Bobby, a non-existent nobody, or even a fan of the series.
P 219
The gift is of course, the Doctor's Five Hundred Year diary, first seen by us in The Power of the Daleks, but apparently seen by Ben and Polly at some point beforehand (You see? There have to be missing adventures with them and the first Doctor). Page a year is just my silly explanation of how you get so many years in such a slim volume. The skimmer flights are allusion to the Doctor's childhood friendship with the Master mentioned during the third Doctor's era and more specifically to Barry Letts novelisation of The Dæmons. Torvic comes from Joseph Lidster's expansion on that relationship in the audio story Master.
P 220
The small push is a foreshadowing of the hermit's intervention at the end of The Planet of the Spiders, bizarrely the image it brings to my head is the final scene of a joke about a monster called a Rary that I first read in Bronnie Cunningham's Puffin Joke Book as a small child. I supect this book may be where I get most of my ideas from.
The ending makes explicit my conflation of Gallifreyan geography, homages Philip Segal's 'kisses to the past', and hopefully allows the Doctor to face death with perhaps more dignity than The Tenth Planet did on screen.
I hope the story as a whole is a celebration of the Doctor's tangled history that also lets the character be free of it. I'd also like to imagine the story works well enough without these notes for a new fan to read it and feel intrigued by its mysteries rather than excluded. Please don't disabuse me of the notion.
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