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Original Robert Holmes Scripts for 'The Ultimate Foe'
Tom Tit
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Is the original Robert Holmes script for Episode 14 of 'Trial of a Timelord' (part 2 of 'The Ultimate Foe') online anywhere? Also, has his original script for Episode 13 ever seen the light of day?
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I'm a bit confused because this version says it was written by Eric Saward at the bottom. I was under the impression Robert Holmes died before he finished writing the story so Eric Saward finished it off and as you say JNT vetoed it because he didn't want to finish the show on a downer if the BBC decided to cancel it.
Thus he got Pip and Jane Baker to do a rewrite of Episode 14.
That's what I've read but I'm open to correction.
I wasn't being ignorant in not thanking you earlier; I just didn't expect a response so quickly, so early in the morning, and so left and came back later.
I was listening to Eric Saward's commentary for the episode from the DVD this morning and according to his telling: Robert Holmes was scheduled to write both parts. He got ill after writing the first one and so Eric Saward stepped in to write the second part, and also rewrote much of part 1 to fit in with it. JNT wasn't happy with the cliffhanger ending, Saward quit and Pip and Jane Baker were brought in to write their own ending.
Yes, I erroneously put Robert Holmes, where I meant to write Eric Saward in the original post. No script for episode 14 was ever written by Robert Holmes. Sorry if my typo confused anyone.
I would love to see the story as Robert Holmes would have written it.
(what does this even mean?)
Not only did the Bakers have to write it with no knowledge of what had originally been scripted, but even if they had, they were legally barred from using any of the plot of Saward's original script.
So the Bakers weren't the finest scriptwriters Doctor Who ever had, but they could turn in useable scripts, on time, on budget, and to very tight deadlines. Some of their dialogue is excruciating, but their characterisation was always very strong. Both Peri and Mel are written about well as they ever were in their Baker scripts. And, daft though the plotting may have been, Baker scripts always made some sort of narrative sense.
The Bakers were old fashioned scriptwriters, they wrote stories, with a beginning, middle and end. And that's something that Saward rarely did - look at Attack of the Cybermen, (don't argue about the credit, it's basically his script) or Resurrection of the Daleks - sure they look good, and contain lots of exciting set pieces, but there's little in the way of a coherent plot to join all the bangs and guns together, and the supporting characters are mainly one dimensional ciphers about whom we simply don't know enough to care one bit when they are killed in increasingly violent ways.
I can't stand the confusion in my mind!
Assuming the question isn't simply rhetorical...
For "catharsis" read "cleansing" and for "spurious" read "false" and it just about makes sense. Another case of the Bakers' being too near a thesaurus and too far from a dictionary, I fear.
"I don't know. (sudden thought) Unless someone wants us to think we're not orbiting this circulation of a circumference in a peripatetic mode. (amazed) Did I say all that?"