The New Doctor! A Doctor Who Alternate History Story

Part 21 - Eglin Thompson, Script Editor, 1994 Interview

Murder in Space was going to be our effort to do real science fiction, as opposed to children's fantastic adventure. Of course, everything has to be sacrificed to Ian Levine's ego and his fixation with dredging out any old piece of the show. It's a wonder he didn't try to use Kamelion in Vienna, 1913.

So, the Vormics? They were going to be a genuine alien. Not some bloke with a few drips of rubber pasted to his nose and forehead, but a genuinely alien intelligence, an alien society.

The Vormics were based on colonial insects. Ants and Termites mostly. They were going to look very alien - compound eyes, antenna and segmented jaws, hard shells, insectoid exoskeletons, the actors would be bent over to simulate alien postures, they would have looked fantastic. I've seen the production drawings, it would have been so amazing.

But the key, would be the Doctor was going to be called in to investigate a murder among them. The Vormics were colonial entities, they were all 'sterile daughters' haploids from a central mother, genetically and physically identical to each other. Their society would be organized like an insect colony, everyone dedicated, everyone focused, with levels of intelligence and organization guiding things. It would be all workers, just being busy, with some drones keeping an eye on things as a kind of intellectual leisure and planning class, and then the central intelligence/mother/egg layer.

The Vormics were going to have no sense of self, they couldn't even comprehend murder - that took identity to kill and identity to realize someone had been killed. The Doctor was going to wrestle with this. He was called in to solve a murder for people who had trouble understanding what murder was.

So on the one level, it was a detective story, the Doctor solving the crime. And on another level, it was the Doctor exploring and coming to grips with this utterly alien society and alien reality.

I put so much work into that. It really was mine, in a way that none of the others were. Vienna, 1913, that was a stewpot and everyone had a piss in it. Volcano, well, that's its own story. And I wasn't involved in Monsters of Ness. So Murder in Space was mine.

And Ian comes along, and bam, it's out the window. It's all about Sontarans, now, god help us. Some fifth rate Doctor Who monster, trotted out for a bit of nostalgia. And Ian's proud as punch and going 'here, help me file off all the corners of your script that don't fit.' I almost told him to bugger off right then and there, you shouldn't be expected to be proofing illelligible scribbles while you're taking it up the arse.

I'll give it to Ian though, we were lucky. The Sontarans were all clone warriors, so we could adapt the script. He borrowed a lot of stuff from me for his Sontarans.

Mind you, Ian said, and he claims to this day, that he got a lot of the Sontaran backstory, how their society worked, where they came from and what they were about, from Robert Holmes himself, either before he died, or from notes from his estate.

Take that with a grain of salt - I mean, on the one hand, sure, Ian was a huge anorak about it and I wouldn't put it past him to badger Bob Holmes until he fed him a load of cock and bull to shut him up. But then, Ian's not the sort to keep any of that a secret, so if he did get it from Bob... well, it's out of character that he sat on it until he had to hold forth.

You want to know what I think, I think he made it up, all that Sontaran backstory. But his star wasn't riding very high right around then, people were getting fed up. I know I was. So if Ian was going to say 'Here's my views on the Sontarans...' Well, what's that worth? But if he said 'This is what Bob told me they were on about...' That's different. You see.

Anyway, we did a lot of work on the Vormics. Not just me, but the art department, set designers, props, costumes. There was some amazing work, and it could have been great. But so it goes.

We did talk about, if we got a second season, we'd bring all that out and maybe use the Vormics. But then, it wouldn't have been the same. The story, it was the story, you see, tailor made to explore the Vormics. Trot them out somewhere else, and they're just regular run of the mill monsters.

Which is basically what happened to them.

Anyway, a few years later, I decided to take them out and wrote a novel about the Vormics. Shopped it around. I even got some interest. But then it turned out that even though they'd never been used, not really, Millenium still owned the rights. I got on the phone with Ian and he was really generous, said 'ok' and 'no problem' right off. But the damage was done, the publisher backed off, the novel sank.

I still have it here. Do you want to read it?