DW plot ideas

[beccaelizabeth]

I'm reading a how-to book on TV scriptwriting so I'm kicking around TV script ideas, at the moment Doctor Who.

Have an idea for the Doctor, Martha, and Jack.



Because it's about Martha it's about wanting to heal people being in tension with the Doctor's usual style of blowing things up a lot. Secondarily it's about the thing where she really wants to be with the Doctor but he wants to be with the whole universe.

Because it's about Jack then it's about immortality, pros and cons, and the thing where he's all ready to make a connection but he'll end up losing people. Immortality he really wants to share, the idea of being with someone forever.

For the Doctor it's about what he does to these people he draws into his orbit, the long term consequences of ever having known him. He offers to show them the universe but after they've known him they're never quite the same. Plus there's the thing where mostly he might get them killed, but there's a whole seperate problem with them being immortal, so he's between a rock and a hard place. And there's being lonely. Really, really, really lonely. Alone in his head like he'd never been before.

So what we want for temptation is someone who can seem to offer them what they think they want most.

And then set it up so they have to reject it.


Also, just for fun, throw in a leadership styles divergence between Jack and the Doctor. It might be that Jack *likes* following the Doctor's orders, but if he genuinely believes his duty leads in a different direction... potential for conflict.

Also we've seen what the Doctor considers a Very Bad Thing - shoot down a retreating enemy. The Doctor always wants to give them a chance. Jack is more military, he wants to end the threat. Even though Jack also has a forgiveness thing and the Doctor also a ruthless streak there's ways to set them at odds over that.

It's difficult to get Jack involved in any story off-earth... unless it's also set in the future, when we know he'll be but we don't know what he'll be so that's kind of no fun.

It's easy to get Jack involved in any story on-earth... but then there's an issue if he seems to be alone.

Still, alien offers shiny to Earth and has to be violently rejected is a classic DW plot which can be retooled for many circumstances, and gives us nice high stakes to be playing in the background anyways. The personal stakes are always more in jeopardy because whilst we aren't going to blow up the Earth (we seen when that happened already) we may well blow up the friendship.

So the shiny alien could be offering immortality and a ticket to the stars. Show you the universe. Just wants to be friends.

Sets him up as the Doctor, or with a bit of careful tweaking the anti-Doctor.
He has to be heartless and way smaller on the inside.

When the Doctor travels with people they get smarter and more capable. Well, ideally. Sometimes they just get emotionally traumatised. But say they get to learn a lot.
Anti-Doctor would leave them dumber and less capable.

Doctor wanders around randomly helping to free planets.
Anti-Doctor therefore needs crew to help enslave them. But with kindness and snuggles and similar offers of immortality.

That's kind of what Four to Doomsday was about, in the subtext. They nearly got turned into immortal androids, no heart but no death. And then they would have been used to conquer earth.
Only the thing where people have to be copied and killed rather takes the temptation out of it.

Cybermen again do the immortality thing, no heart and no death and conquest. But they lose even more, no free will and no individuality.

So we need something more subtle and more plausible in order to be tempting. Something that really does look like immortality at first glance.


There's another thing, where sometimes companions leave to get married, and they marry someone who is like the Doctor except-for. So, younger, more human, more interested, or maybe more martial. So Martha has this whole romance that maybe she'll accept isn't going anywhere. So she could be tempted by someone that was like the Doctor except-for. Less martial - less violent - apparently offering to let her help save the universe by actually healing it and not blowing it up at all. That's got to be pretty damn tempting.

But I hate the marriage exit because it's personality sucking and makes it all about the guy.
So we make the alien be someone who literally sucks out personality and makes themselves the center of everything.

They're so smart because they steal smarts to use. They're a bit like the Doctor because they've got him in their power enough to steal bits of him. They're a bit like Jack - probably the flirty chat up bit - and they can use that, but Jack loses it. Making Jack not-flirting be a sign of the apocalypse. And then being around them would make Martha dumber.

I rather like that on a meta level.

Because clearly the episode revolves around her noticing, being smart, figuring things out, and deciding that what she would lose (herself) isn't hardly worth what she could gain (the universe, immortality, a guy that thinks like the Doctor and shags like Jack).

It's deciding that being a paving slab just ain't worth it. Walked all over never ends well.



But a really good solution to a DW means teamwork, everyone using their strengths.
The Doctor and Jack have to be in on the solution too.
Tech toys aren't an answer, they're the magic wand not the spell, so it has to be some personal / personality thing that works.

The Doctor's temptation would be to join a collective mind, to never be alone in his head again. Which wouldn't sound tempting to people who like the quiet, but since when is that the Doctor's thing? So there's this massive community of minds, planets worth of minds, all joined together in this ubersmart collective that represents itself with one shiny immortal guy. So the Doctor would be tempted by the company... but in no way about to make himself just one more cog. He's the spanner in the works. As both lifestyle and attitude statement.

Jack's temptation would be that everyone they'd join - the whole collective - would be as immortal as he is. Not just long lived and collectively immortal the way they are already, every single one of them would live like he does. Forever, if they chose.

... that leaves an obvious way he can both use his unique qualities to defeat them and choose a harsher penalty than the Doctor is willing to.

Jack would kill himself - temporarily of course - and take the collective with him. Not just all at once like stabbing himself is stabbing all of them, just taking the immortality back so the ship can be destroyed.


... ooh, way he can be encountered off earth - he went to check on these dudes while they were still out away from Earth and they already ate him! And with the Doctor being what he mostly wants in all the universe the collective goes looking for the Doctor. That makes it not a coincidence, which is always fun. And then when they start to absorb the Doctor it would be in some ways exactly what Jack wants - he gets to be with the Doctor forever, and he gets to kind of become the Doctor. And yet it's all the things he totally doesn't want too, because of destroying him as an individual. So Jack wouldn't do that to them.

The collective would turn it's attention to Earth because of Martha and the Doctor loving it best. That would put Earth in danger without actually setting it on Earth, and would keep team Torchwood out of it. But then they could arrive in orbit - we'd have a countdown, messages sent on ahead, that kind of thing - and then Jack would do his party trick and Torchwood would blow them all up (because he'd told them to). And the Doctor would be mad at Torchwood and mad at Jack.

And also a bit blown up which doesn't improve anyone's day.



Martha would reject the collective's advances... Martha would be less vulnerable to them because of not being psychic. They'd have to court her in words. The Doctor would be all hearing their shiny link from as soon as they met. So her rejecting the collective would be his wakeup call and so it would be Martha saves Doctor saves the world again.

And incidentally saves Jack.



There's still the teensy tiny issue of how Jack gets out there... maybe they seed little crystal shards of themselves across the universe looking for compatible life forms and he picked one up in the course of his duties.


I like crystals. Shiny. And people can be right there and visible yet totally far away at the same time. Becoming part of the crystal means being shut away from each other even if they're also joined up. Like being connected via computer but neverever getting out again.



I've had most of this idea before, but I constructed it from a slightly different angle this time. Started with characters.



I might eventually write it.
Don't know as I'll write it as a spec script.
To do so would require much more study, and learning the usual shape of an episode, the timing and stuff.
And then there's the thing where the chances of it being useful / selling are miniscule.
Writing fanfic just kind of works right then.

But I decided to write down my intention to have a future career in Doctor Who writing, so now I'm making plans with that in mind.


Which is kind of fun.