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]