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RTD's thoughts on Journey's End
Sep. 24th, 2008 03:12 pmMy copy of "A Writer's Tale" just arrived and nothing else is getting done. It's a wonderful, riveting and extremely honest read. "Honest" isn't a word we always associate with RTD but there is a real candour about this huge, year-long e-mail exchange. First, it makes you appreciate the relentless pressure of the job. He made himself ill worrying about the Bad Wolf Bay scene in JE not working and was still rewriting it a matter of days before it was shot - hours, even - and by that point he'd two weeks to deliver the script for the 2008 Xmas special.
I haven't read every word yet - it's over 500 pages - but obviously his thoughts on the Doctor/Rose ship particularly intrigued me. There's absolutely no question of his total commitment to it. His original intention was to keep the Hand-in-a-Jar in reserve until DT regenerated, and then use it to grow a human Tenth Doctor who returns to Rose. However, at a fairly early stage of planning the finale, he decided to integrate the duplicate Doctor into the plot against Davros, a decision he seems to have come to regret.
Hence his problem with the Bad Wolf Bay scene, which he agonised over - that's not too strong a word:
( Read more... )
BTW, the book includes almost complete scripts of VOTD, PIC and the finale, as well as huge chunks of FOP, which he massively rewrote. Midnight and Turn Left succumbed to lack of space, but the scripts are available on the BBC Writers Room site. It's surprising how much an original script differs from even the best transcription. For example, in the online transcript of JE, a stage direction describes the Doctor as "utterly broken" after Davros's rant. A reasonable assumption, but RTD didn't put it in, which leaves one wondering how much was filled in by the director or DT himself.
I haven't read every word yet - it's over 500 pages - but obviously his thoughts on the Doctor/Rose ship particularly intrigued me. There's absolutely no question of his total commitment to it. His original intention was to keep the Hand-in-a-Jar in reserve until DT regenerated, and then use it to grow a human Tenth Doctor who returns to Rose. However, at a fairly early stage of planning the finale, he decided to integrate the duplicate Doctor into the plot against Davros, a decision he seems to have come to regret.
Hence his problem with the Bad Wolf Bay scene, which he agonised over - that's not too strong a word:
( Read more... )
BTW, the book includes almost complete scripts of VOTD, PIC and the finale, as well as huge chunks of FOP, which he massively rewrote. Midnight and Turn Left succumbed to lack of space, but the scripts are available on the BBC Writers Room site. It's surprising how much an original script differs from even the best transcription. For example, in the online transcript of JE, a stage direction describes the Doctor as "utterly broken" after Davros's rant. A reasonable assumption, but RTD didn't put it in, which leaves one wondering how much was filled in by the director or DT himself.
