Rob's Things

Continuing with the theme of my previous posts, here another one of the ideas I had a while back.

Those of you with good memories will remember that I once tweeted it to Steven Moffat.

The idea… Groundhog Day in the TARDIS

The idea for the story outline was something like this.

We join the story as the TARDIS crew are just finishing off saving some poor unfortunates from death and destruction and are heading back to the blue box.

As they dematerialise, a strange glow appears around the TARDIS which is unseen by the travellers inside.

The next bit revolved around seeing the TARDIS flying through the time vortex, something we didn’t see until very late in Series5

As the TARDIS falls through the time vortex, the glow around the vessel expands and we see the a fork appear in the time vortex. Its obvious which path they should take but the glow draws them in the other direction.

The next thing we see is the crew materialise in the same place they just left at the very start of the episode. 

Initially confused, they realise that the death and destruction part is about to happen all over again unless they stop it. Which they do “again” (and comment that they saved everyone much faster this time) and leave “again”, only to have the same glow around the TARDIS and end up back at the start “again”.

The resolution of this predicament is that the Doctor and his companion(s) must split up to look for something out of the ordinary, whilst also stopping the death and destruction problem at the same time. 

I won’t let you in on what I had planned for the “out of the ordinary” part because that would spoil the surprise if I ever got anyone interested in this story.

Lots more ideas in the old noggin, which I’ll share in due course.

They do say that great minds think alike, don’t they?

I’d love to think that what I’m about to post elevates me to the ranks of Steven Moffat and Neil Gaiman but I’ve got absolutely no proof to back up what I’m about to tell you. 

If you trust me, then read on. Otherwise you’ll just have to take my word for it.

It was about the time that The Eleventh Hour aired when I had one of my ideas. A bit like the one I posted earlier today. A question had started me off and the idea grew from there.

What happened to all the old TARDISes?

RTD seeded this question in The Stolen Earth by explaining that Daleks were good at disabling TARDISes. I realised that the Daleks must have disabled a fair few of them in the Time War, so where did they all go.

So I started putting together an idea and here’s the path my imagination lead me down.

We open with a couple of alien kids running through the woods, playing. They are brother and sister but the elder sibling is faster and runs on ahead. As the lead kid looks back to check on their playmate, a subsidence hole opens up in the ground and the kid falls into a cavern. 

As the kid calls out for help, the camera draws back and we see that the cavern is not empty. Scattered around the walls are roundels indicative of Classic Doctor Who Timelord technology (I was thinking Frontios here). The kid has fallen into the wreckage of a crashed TARDIS. 

Sensing the child is injured, the heart of the old TARDIS reaches out to the kid with it’s last glowing embers and we cut to the credits as the we see a pair of eyes glowing in the darkness.

Back in the old Blue Box, a signal is received. A TARDIS distress signal. Its an old and faint signal and the Doctor explains that since its so weak they’ve only picked it up now they’ve moved close enough in Time and Space to read it.

*side note: Time and “Relative” dimensions in space, the Time Vortex moves them between where they were and where they’re going and I may have been inserted as to why we never see any other TARDISes in the vortex*.

Our TARDIS crew would go to the planet of the crashed TARDIS but it would be years after the original story and the kid had grown up repairing the TARDIS with what they’d learnt from teaser. 

The critical part of the story then revolved around the fact that the kid (the brother) had done something wrong with the early reconstruction and in an attempt to draw power from the universe had caught the other kid (his sister) in an accidental beam which unravelled her existence from history. The conflict was then how to repair the “damage” perhaps have the brother become a new recurring enemy.

So you can imagine my amazement when I watched the Time of Angels and saw people erased from history. Then when The Pandorica Opened we saw just why TARDIS’s aren’t destroyed and why they have to be left somewhere to die. Finally when we saw the TimeLord distress boxes, House’s planet and the TARDIS graveyard in The Doctor’s Wife, I realised that my story would never make it out of my imagination and into print.

Could have been a good old romp though.