{"id":6026,"date":"2011-09-17T09:08:43","date_gmt":"2011-09-17T14:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=6026"},"modified":"2015-03-29T15:03:56","modified_gmt":"2015-03-29T15:03:56","slug":"more-on-doctor-who-spin-off-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=6026","title":{"rendered":"More on Doctor Who Spin-Off Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago, I mused on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=5987\">potential <i>Doctor Who<\/i> spin-offs<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not the only one.  SyFy&#8217;s Blastr website yesterday posted an article on <a href=\"http:\/\/blastr.com\/2011\/09\/5-doctor-who-characters-w.php\">the five modern <i>Who<\/i> characters who deserve spin-off series<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>River Song<\/i>\n<li>Liz X<\/li>\n<li>Canton Everett Delaware III<\/li>\n<li>Sally Sparrow<\/li>\n<li>Martha Jones<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Let&#8217;s set aside the fact that the last two won&#8217;t happen &mdash; Carey Mulligan has a movie career, and Freema Ageyman is working on <i>Law &#038; Order: UK<\/i>.  What about the other three?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d have no problems with any of the first three.  But to me, two of them &mdash; River Song and Canton &mdash; would have series that are, essentially, <i>Doctor Who<\/i> without the Doctor.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a discussion thread about the article at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.trekbbs.com\/showthread.php?p=5230706\">TrekBBS<\/a>, and I wrote a comment that, due to the bulletin board&#8217;s maintenance, wasn&#8217;t posted, but fortunately I was able to snag the comment from the website form.  Here&#8217;s what I wrote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Sally Sparrow concept would be interesting, though it won&#8217;t happen because Carey Mulligan is busy with other things.  I&#8217;d probably recast it as a <i>Spaced<\/i>-esque sitcom, though.  For that matter, you could do an <i>Office<\/i>-style sitcom with Donna Noble, the best temp in Chiswick.  Or a college sitcom with a pre-regeneration Mels from &#8220;Let&#8217;s Kill Hitler.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>If you get the idea that I think the next spin-off should be a sitcom, you&#8217;re right.  You can&#8217;t just do &#8220;<i>Doctor Who<\/i> without the Doctor&#8221;; that road leads to diminishing returns.  You need to think outside the box completely.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I wouldn&#8217;t object to a period 1970 Canton series (or special), though I&#8217;d probably do it as a <i>Torchwood 1970<\/i>, with Jack.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re going to do a Martha series, drop the alien hunting completely.  Have her join Doctors Without Borders or do something freelance like that, and she gets involved in medicine and politics in sub-Saharan Africa.  Show Martha making a difference to make the world a better place.<\/p>\n<p>Michelle Ryan&#8217;s Lady Christina de Souza would also be awesome.  You could do a <i>Modesty Blaise<\/i>-style criminal caper series, with her always one step ahead of the law, and she has a UST relationship with the Interpol agent who knows she&#8217;s up to no good but can&#8217;t prove it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The other thought that occurs to me.<\/p>\n<p>You don&#8217;t need a spin-off that can run for years and years.  Most of the Blastr ideas seem like ideas that could run for a while.  Maybe the approach should be a series of six episodes that runs for a single year.  Concepts set <i>in<\/i> the <i>Doctor Who<\/i> universe, like my oft-stated wish for a Madame de Pompedour <i>Masterpiece Theatre<\/i>-style costume drama.<\/p>\n<p>Hell, you know what I would do?  (And it&#8217;s totally different than the idea <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=5987\">I alluded to here<\/a>, by the way.  Or my wish for an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=1120\">Abslom Daak<\/a> series.)  Option Poul Anderson&#8217;s <i>The High Crusade<\/i>, and turn that into a <i>Doctor Who<\/i> universe story.  Start it out as a sequel to &#8220;The Time Warrior.&#8221;  What if Linx sent out a distress signal before he died, and what if a Sontaran ship, contemporary to the Middle Ages, visits Earth to investigate?  The Sontaran lands in England, he gets overwhelmed, a bunch of knights investigate his ship, and then&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re whisked off into space!<\/p>\n<p>Then, for a couple of episodes, we have some 13th century knights against the might of the Sontaran war machine, and the series follows their wacky adventures!<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s thinking outside the box. :h2g2:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago, I mused on potential Doctor Who spin-offs. I&#8217;m not the only one. SyFy&#8217;s Blastr website yesterday posted an article on the five modern Who characters who deserve spin-off series: River Song Liz X Canton Everett Delaware III Sally Sparrow Martha Jones Let&#8217;s set aside the fact that the last two<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=6026\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;More on Doctor Who Spin-Off Thinking&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4082,319,430,11,9],"class_list":["post-6026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doctor-who","tag-doctor-who","tag-martha-jones","tag-michelle-ryan","tag-river-song","tag-torchwood","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}