The Nth Doctor

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3537950.html

This is the story of several film treatments for Doctor Who written between 1987 and 1994 by Mark Ezra, Johnny Byrne, Denny Martin Flinn, the not-yet-disgraced Adrian Rigelsford, John Leekley and Robert DeLaurentis. Apart from Rigelsford, these are all serious writers with serious records, and it's interesting to see how the pressures of cinematic production and consumption formed what now seems the inevitable Philip Segal end product of 1996. Various plot elements came and went - one can see some threads emerging in New Who of both the RTD and Moffat eras; some of the outlines are clearly a four-part TV story written as a film script. It's interesting that the one-off female sidekick and the streetwise kid sidekick became established at a relatively early stage. My jaw dropped at the brief involvement of Leonard Nimoy, which I don't think I'd known about, but I was less surprised at the crucial role of the Gallifrey One convention in the story.

Anyway, I think this really is for completists only. Normally when I say that, it's about something that isn't very good; in this case it's because none of these scripts was ever made, and none is likely to be made now, so they are of limited relevance to the wider history of Who. ( )