Re: The Lemonade Treatment

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