Sunday 31 August 2008

The World's Book

In one of his flash-in-the-pan blog posts, Lawrence Miles posted up his go at an episode of Doctor Who, named The Book of the World. It has several typical Milesian traits: a bad-ass group of bad guys that don't quite operate in normal ways, pseudo-companions of the Doctor that Lawrence clearly cares about more than the Doctor himself, and a Doctor that has been run ragged down until there's hardly anything left of him.

(Another way to express these concepts: he's put in Faction Paradox, Compassion and then had the Doctor chained up for a while. Yep, it's the television equivalent of Interference.)

And it takes a long time to get going. Aside from the Doctor turning up very late, he doesn't do much until very late in the piece. The first part is largely Lawrence showing off how wonderful he is by writing big set pieces and lots of characters he's given a lot more thought to than he has the Doctor. When things do get moving, they zip along, but by then he's way over time and over budget.

Not to say that some interesting things aren't set up. There are elements there that would definitely play out over the series, and would be more interesting that arcs we've had previously. Indeed, I would like to learn more about what he envisioned, but the odds of that are less than slim.

In fact, it's not like anyone else will see this current vision of his. Can't find it online anymore. I don't know why he does that. At best, here is what the Faction Paradox community thought about it.

[END]

4 comments:

Foo said...

Didn't Lawrence get pissy about Stephen Moffat 'stealing' all his ideas from this for Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead in series 4?

I also read something where Mr Miles refused to watch Jekyll on the grounds that it was written by Stephen Moffat? I will be the first to say that it wasn't perfect, but it was DAMN good. A solid 8 or 9 out of 10.

Does Lawrence really want a go at writing for the new series?

Jamas Enright said...

I got the feeling Lawrence thinks the DW team should have begged him to write for it, but then this is Mad Larry we are talking about...

Foo said...

Why is he mad? Is he angry or crazy...or a bit of both?

Some interesting interviews with him (am yet to read them all): http://web.archive.org/web/20050228231330/planeteleven.co.uk/features/lmia/index.php

Jamas Enright said...

Link didn't quite post properly. Looks like his old site.
Mad as in crazy, generally.