Azurine

Episode availability

Companion status

• Bess features in this story

Episodic cast list

* Dannette Vassar's name misspelt.
** Miscredited "Baxter=Marshave" for Episode 3.

Production crew

Notes

• A dwad.net trailer features before Episode 1.

Writer's comments / notes

Looking at the submissions page, I noticed that they had put out a specific call for comedic scripts and historical scripts, so I decided to combine the two.
But as much as I love the classic historicals, I couldn't find a time period that inspired me. Plus, while I knew I wanted to have an alien-free story (mainly for the sake of novelty), I couldn't quite shake my urge to add in at least a couple of sci-fi elements.
So the idea mutated into kind of a future historical; the same basic principle as The Romans or The Myth Makers in the classic series, where the Doctor and his companion land in a major historical event, but all the famous, legendary figures involved are revealed to be incompetent buffoons. But instead of the past, the whole thing takes place during a fictional future disaster.
Originally, it was intended as a story featuring the Barbieri Doctor and Georgie, who I thought were the incumbents at the time (more on this later). I wanted to play with the idea of the Doctor presenting as a very old man, a thread that got backgrounded fairly early on.
The original version of the story still revolved around the cyclical Azurine event, but a major plot point was that the Doctor was having a very hard time putting his finger on exactly why all this felt so familiar. There would have been a lot of playful prodding at his assumed infirmary and potential senility before the reveal that he had indeed had an encounter with Azurine before, in a previous incarnation, and had vowed to stop the next incident before it happens. But he got distracted by other adventures, forgot about this colossal event, and doesn't remember key details until it's almost too late to prevent history repeating itself.
I was very excited to get to play with Georgie, and her business background. The idea was that she would go undercover to infiltrate Knightston Industries, and her executive instincts would take over; she would get distracted from the task at hand by getting overly involved in office politics, and wind up streamlining the company she and the Doctor were trying to take down into a more efficient evil corporation, inadvertently climbing up the corporate ladder and engendering both the hatred of the workers she was supposed to be liberating, as well as the murderous wrath of her ambitious fellow executives.
It would all work out in the end, of course.
Of course, the trouble with all that was that when I first pitched, I hadn't listened to the most recent story, which was Masquerade (195).
I had no idea that the Barbieri Doctor had regenerated.
By the time my pitch had been accepted and I started to break down the story in earnest, it was clear that I'd have to rethink some of the ideas; not just to make them a better fit for Matthew Chambers' Doctor, but to include the new companion Bess.
And it was extra challenging since, at the time when I started writing, all I had to base my writing of the Chambers Doctor on was the opening instalment of Unforgotten (196), his first story.
I felt very lucky, then, that he hit the ground running, and locked in on his character almost immediately!
Reconfiguring the story for Matthew Chambers proved easier than I expected (and fun, to boot; he's a delightful actor to get to write for!), but I still needed to figure out how to handle Bess, a very different character from Georgie. With her being from the distant past, I quickly settled on the anti-authoritarian attitude and acute awareness of class issues, as described in her character bio, that would have her getting directly involved with the workers; while the Chambers Doctor was best suited to running around the halls of power, tweaking authority and causing chaos, Bess would make for a good window into the ground level consequences of his actions.
To add a little depth to what is at heart a fairly frothy story, I liked the idea of Bess being disappointed and disillusioned at how little has changed socially and economically in the many, many centuries since her time. There was supposed to be a kind of parallel between the cyclical nature of Azurine events and the cyclical nature of revolution, decline, and economic indoctrination, though I'm not sure how much that comes through in the actual writing. And because there were intended to be tensions between Bess and this more manipulative, secretive Doctor (an aspect which ultimately got downplayed in the same way R. Douglas Barbieri quickly went from an imperious and cranky old man to the warm, deeply compassionate figure that were perhaps a better match to his strengths as a performer), I wanted her to take him to task at the end for the ways keeping her out of the loop actively made the situation worse.
To that end, one of my favorite aspects of the story, which was not there originally, was that of the artificially intelligent computer IDAHO.
Playing off the original concept of the Chambers Doctor as a bit of a 7^th Doctor style chessmaster, I wanted to explore the idea of him putting a piece into place that ultimately doesn't get used. He gives IDAHO free will with the intent of it acting as a kind of sleeper agent to help him take down Knightston, but events shift in a way where that becomes unnecessary. And then events shift even further, in such a disastrous manner that IDAHO only has sentience long enough to die, and its one act as a conscious entity is to save the life of Gav and offer him a chance to move past his anger and make a new start. There was just something in the moral complexity of that chain of events that I found interesting to try and explore, however briefly.
And so, when Bess tears into him at the end, I wanted her words to hit him harder than she could ever possibly know, and that was my way of adding a little bit of thematic weight to a story that, again, is mostly idiots blowing each other and themselves up.
Overall, I'm fairly pleased with how it all turned out; there were a couple of plot lines from the early versions of the story that I would have liked to have seen come into action, but it was already a lot of moving parts. It's interesting to me how it wound up in tone, too: half-Jon Pertwee with its ecological, anti-corporate concerns, and half-Graham Williams over-the-top pantomime. Not two of my preferred eras, so it's a bit weird to me that it all shook out like that.
If I could change anything, I kind of wish I'd had room for the original version of the Callandara St. Vienne character; in the first couple of versions, she was an actual full character, a living, breathing Holo-Vid actress that Knightston recruited to try and seduce the location of the Azurine from Dean. But it would turn out that Callandara was just as unconvincing a Mata Hari in real life as she was in any of her Holo-Vid performances; and that it was ultimately a moot point anyway as Dean was entirely devoted to his wife and utterly oblivious to Callandara's overtures. The second gag was that Callandara would quickly get distracted from her mission when she found out about the TARDIS. Tired of only acting out virtual reality fantasies and wanting to experience real travel and adventure, she would have quickly went from ineptly trying to tempt Dean to relentlessly pursuing the Doctor to make her a companion. Ultimately, I like the ways she winds up being used in the story. But the other idea could have been a lot of fun... especially if it had been with the Barbieri Doctor. Ah, well...

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