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From: The Last Doctor <mike@xenocyte.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.drwho
Subject: Re: The Lemonade Treatment
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2024 23:16:25 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Agent Jakanov <mouth@onlegs.org> wrote:
> Which Doctor Who stories would you give the "lemonade treatment"?  That 
> is, make lemonades out of the lemon, which means to improve the taste or 
> quality, either by rewriting it or making a follow up story that makes 
> it look better.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We don’t have the pressures that the
production team were under - especially in those early days.

But … in the words of the Disney version of Mary Poppins “Let’s start at
the very beginning - it’s a very good place to start”.

An Unearthly Child. The first episode was fantastic. But the next three -
meh. It wasn’t a historical story - it was a dull mess of fantasy cavemen.
And the Doctor’s characterisation - like that of the Sixth Doctor - was
very unsympathetic.

So if I was starting again - An Unearthly Child would lead straight into
The Daleks. And a bunch of padding would get cut from the scripts for the
Daleks  - I think we could lose about 2 episodes of time and not miss a
single meaningful story moment. So in the revised Universe, we’d have the
opener followed by a tighter, five episode version of The Daleks. The three
“Tribe of Gum” scripts would be redlined and the author told to come back
later with a different version of the Fire Makers with less repetition and
more modern dialogue - pointing out that the TARDIS is translating, and no
primitive two word sentences. Give the characters longer names. And do the
whole thing in two episodes.



-- 
“The timelines and … canon … are rupturing” - the Doctor