Part 13 (2/2)
Therefore, I am bound to have different values and customs.'
'Your former self was polite enough.'
'True. But at such a cost. I was on the verge of becoming neurotic.'
Peri gave up. It was pointless arguing. He had an answer to everything. All she wanted now was to go home and she told the Doctor so.
'Before abandoning me forever,' he said, 'I would suggest you wait a little while. You may well find that my new persona isn't as disagreeable as you think.'
I hope so, she shouted inside her head.
'But whatever else happens, I am the new Doctor. This is me whether people like it or not.'
The statement was as bland and as sterile as it sounded.
Peri hoped that she had caught a glimpse of a smile as he uttered it.
If she hadn't, this particular incarnation of the Time Lord would prove to be a very difficult person indeed.
DIVERGENT CONTINUITY.
PART ONE: After saying goodnight to his twin sons, Professor Archie Sylvest leaves for a publisher's party and drinks with Vestal Smith. He is, however, diverted from this activity by the arrival of Reginald Smith, husband of the aforementioned, on Archie's front doorstop. The scene in the TARDIS wardrobe has been cut. Instead, a newly-garbed Doctor and Peri enter the console room arguing, and the Doctor goes straight into the ”Do you know what a Peri is?” dialogue. After Peri fends him off with her mirror, the Doctor falls to the floor and into a sort of autistic trance, rocking gently back and forth without demonstrating any other sign of communication. Outside the twins' home, a ginger tomcat senses the arrival of Azmael and the subsequent kidnapping. Later, Archie Sylvest returns home, having got very drunk with Reginald Smith and paid him off to keep quiet about Vestal. The scenes with Fabian and Elena have been completely removed. Instead, we take the opposite viewpoint: the adventures of Hugo Lang and his squadron. When the squadron challenges Azmael's freighter and follows it to t.i.tan Three, Mestor telepathically creates 'a ma.s.sive [blue] aurora borealis' that surrounds the freighter and lashes out at the pursuing s.h.i.+ps. Hugo's fighters are picked off one by one, until finally the Lieutenant himself is attacked and crashes his s.h.i.+p.
PART TWO: The Doctor and Peri actually witness Hugo's crash-landing. Hugo doesn't pa.s.s out in the TARDIS; instead, the Doctor gives him a quick chop to the neck and renders him unconscious.
The twins are forced to use chalk and a blackboard to do their equations. Although Azmael tells the Doctor the truth straight off the bat, their discussion is actually much shorter than on TV. All that garbage about a temporal transmat and a ten-second offset is gone; the Doctor just converts the revitalising modulator into a matter transporter. Instead of explaining the desperate situation to Peri, the Doctor simply shoves her into the modulator and transports her back to the TARDIS. The cliffhanger has, to all intents and purposes, been cut (yes, the Doctor has to kick the modulator once or twice, but isn't that just technology for you?).
PART THREE: The 'death-by-embolism' scene has been cut.
Azmael is called before Mestor; he is embarra.s.sed and humiliated in front of his courtiers, but we do not see what is actually said.
When the TARDIS arrives on Jaconda, the Doctor and his companions witness the devastation wrought by the gastropods as the Time Lord recites the legend of the giant slugs (they don't find any sort of mural). They also find a starving child, whom Peri wants to help; the Doctor tells her that the only way to help is to destroy that which has devastated Jaconda. Later, they return to the TARDIS to materialise closer to Azmael's laboratory. Hugo actually considers deserting the Doctor and Peri and piloting the TARDIS alone, but the Doctor is no fool; when Hugo becomes trapped in gastropod slime, the Doctor doesn't feel any real inclination towards saving a potential thief. Mestor doesn't insist that Azmael reveal all to the twins it's the Time Lord's decision so that entire discussion has been cut. After explaining the plan, he threatens to kill Romulus and Remus if they don't a.s.sist him (an action seen earlier in the TV episode). They understand his desperation, however, and agree to help. A brief typo calls Drak 'Drax'. Although quite angry, the Doctor doesn't try to throttle Azmael. Hugo doesn't rush in to warn the Doctor (Mestor himself will deliver the news later), and the cliffhanger is therefore cut.
PART FOUR: An unconscious Hugo is brought in by the Jacondans. Even though Noma arrrives to take the Doctor to Mestor, the leader of the gastropods materialises in hologram form right in Azmael's laboratory. While considering why Mestor wants to destroy Jaconda's sun, the Doctor takes a quiet moment to reflect on his many past companions. Romulus and Remus don't need to delete their equations, as they've never used the computer. Azmael doesn't give the Doctor his ring. Although Hugo tells the Doctor he will lead the Jancondans, he really just wants to blackmail the Chamberlain for all he's worth.
DIVERGENT CHARACTERISATION.
THE SIXTH DOCTOR: When he regenerated, 'his features...matured slightly and his waste thickened a little, but overall his appearance was quite presentable.' His jacket is 'long and not dissimilar in design to that worn by an Edwardian paterfamilius. [...] The main problem [is] that each panel of the coat [is] quite different in texture, design and colour. This wouldn't [matter] quite so much if the colours...blended, but they [seem] to be cruelly, harshly, viciously at odds with each other.' Add to that a 'pair of black and yellow striped trousers, the hems of which [rest] on red spats, which in turn [cover] the tops of green shoes.
The whole ensemble [is] finished off with a waistcoat which [looks] as though someone [has] been sick on. [...] The final touch [is] a livid green watch chain that at some time must have been stolen from a public lavatory.' At one point, the Doctor wants jellybabies, a.s.serting that he ”[thinks] much better when [he's]
chewing.” During his confused ramblings, the Doctor veers through the personas of a Victorian actor, an Old Testament prophet, David Livingstone, Sherlock Holmes, Herk the Hunter, 'someone called Musk...the greatest explorer in the known universe', and a country squire. In his Sherlock Holmes persona, he tells Peri a story about how he deduced where babies come from, which, if true, would validate that he lived in a 'large city'
with (at least) his mother, and visited the zoo, where he saw storks all very unlikely.
PERI: She is twenty years old. She lives in the Bronx in New York, or close to it (within the distance of a train ride).
AZMAEL: His first name as Professor Edgeworth is 'Bernard'.
He's 'an elderly man with a s.h.i.+ny bald pate', wearing 'a long brown smock and [looking] a bit like Father Christmas without the beard.' It is known that he once had a wife, although she is now dead. In his childhood, '[he] found comfort in watching flas.h.i.+ng lights.' When Azmael left Gallifrey, the Time Lords were so concerned his knowledge and experience might fall in the wrong hands, they trumped up some charges and sent out an execution squad of Seedle warriors after him. The Seedle warriors tracked him to Vitrol Minor, where they 'set about eliminating the populace, justifying the genocide as the elimination of witnesses to the destruction of a Time Lord.' After three days of bloodshed, they realised their target had escaped. Azmael 'returned to Gallifrey and started proceedings to indict the Lord President and High Council', on grounds that they had broken their cardinal rule of non-interference by slaughtering the inhabitants of Vitrol Minor.
For their part, however, the Time Lords twisted the evidence to show Azmael hired the Seedle warriors himself. Furious, the renegade gunned down the entire High Council with a laser rifle.
The new High Council were in debt to him, but they decided to investigate his a.s.sa.s.sination methods instead so he took off for somewhere new. Finally, he found Jaconda 'after many years of travel'. Not long after that, a heavy storm caused the re-emergence of gastropod eggs, which were nourished by weather and hatched to reveal a gastropod army led by...
MESTOR THE MAGNIFICENT: 'Nearly two metres tall', 'everything about him [is] ugly even to other gastropods.' He '[stands] upright, using his tail as a large foot. To aid his balance, he [grew] two small, spindly legs, so that when he [walks] it [is]
necessary for him to gyrate his body from side to side.' He also grew 'two tiny arms and hands which [resemble] the forequarters of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And as with that particular dinosaur, they [serve] no useful function, except when he [speaks]. Then he [gesticulates] with them, prodding the air to emphasis a special point.' He has 'large rolls of fat that [cover] his body'; therefore, 'everything [wobbles] as he [moves]. So instead of a neat, mincing gait, he [appears] to undulate, like a large beached walrus, desperately struggling to regain the sea.' His 'face, what there [is]
of it, [is] humanoid in form. As he [does] not have a neck, head or shoulders, the features [have] grown where what would have been the underside of a normal slug's jaw. As though to add to the peculiarity of a gastropod with a human face, the features [are]
covered in a thin membrane.' This makes him look like he's 'swallowed someone and that the face of the victim [is] protruding through the skin covering his gullet.'
LIEUTENANT HUGO LANG: He's 'a tall, slim, good-looking man in his twenties. He...graduated top of his year from Star Fighter pilot school'. The Doctor knows that he is 'lazy and immature.'
Romulus and Remus: They are 'twelve year old identical twins'
who take 'enormous pleasure' from their parents' inability to tell them apart. Although they are mathematical geniuses, 'in many ways they [are] dumb.' For instance, 'it...required several psychologists and a battery of complex tests to establish the evidence' that they achieved any 'emotional maturation', and this feature is so lacking that they will 'forever remain immature mischief-makers with the mathematical ability to destroy the universe.'
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