Doctor Who And The Nature Of Fear (Series 34 Episode 4)

Clara is in her flat. She goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind her. Suddenly Doctor Who pops out from behind the shower curtain

Doctor Who: Clara, are you alone?

Clara: I was!

Doctor Who: And yet look…

Doctor Who points at the bathroom door.

Clara: It’s… a door?

Doctor Who: And? And?

Clara: And… What, exactly, am I supposed to be looking at, Doctor?

Doctor Who: If someone believes they’re truly alone in the house, why would they lock the bathroom door behind them.

Clara: Habit?

Doctor Who: What if they don’t believe they’re truly alone at all?

Clara: No, I’m definitely sure it’s just out of habit.

Cut to: Doctor Who and Clara are in the TARDIS control room. Doctor Who is pressing buttons and pulling levers on the control panel.

Doctor Who: What’s the first thing you see when you sit down on the toilet? The door! And what do doors do? They open! And when are we at our most vulnerable? When we’re on the toilet. Now imagine if outside every bathroom door there is a monster that wants to eat you. If you didn’t lock that door, it’d kick it open and catch you with your trousers down and you’d have no chance to fight back.

Clara: And that’s why we lock the bathroom door? Because they’re are monsters in our house that only come out when no-one else is around and you’re sitting on the toilet on your own?

Doctor Who: Exactly.

Clara: Doctor, do you think that maybe you’re the monster? I mean, it was you that appeared in my bathroom.

Doctor Who: Don’t be absurd. It’s the most common fear in the world, imagining someone bursting in on you while you’re sat there. It’s terrifying.

Clara: Anyway, Doctor, can you stop somewhere right now because I really really need the toilet.

Doctor Who: We can’t stop now. I don’t know where we are.

Clara: I really don’t care.

Clara reaches across the control panel and pulls on a swanee whistle, causing the TARDIS to dematerialise instantly.

Doctor Who: Clara what have you done? That’s the emergency toilet stop. We could be near any public convenience in the entire universe.

Clara: Sorry, Doctor. I’ll just be a mo.

Clara runs out of the TARDIS into a row of shabby looking toilet cubicles. She kicks the nearest one open. It flies open, hitting a schoolboy who was sat there on the head and knocking him out. As he slumps back he drops a marker pen on the floor.

Clara: Oh my, I’m so sorry.

Clara moves to the next cubicle, finds it empty, and shuts the door.

The camera switches to a viewpoint just behind the slumped form of the boy. As the toilet in the next cubicle flushes he begins to wake. We hear the TARDIS huff its way back into space, and as the boy leaves the door swings back shut and we see that the graffiti he was writing on the wall says:

WHO WOZ ERE
ERE WHO WOZ
WOZ WHO ERE?
YES WHO WOZ

Then we see a sign saying GALLIFREY SCHOOL FOR BOYS above the exit. Also we see that the marker pen was actually a sonic screwdriver. And then text whooshes in to the screen saying THE BOY WAS DOCTOR WHO, followed almost instantly by NEXT WEEK and a picture of a Dalek emerging from a toilet cubicle.

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Notes:

1. I wrote this in 2014
2. Presumably after watching this episode of Doctor Who.
3. Very old satire is the best kind of satire.
4. Anyway, I dont know why this wasn’t already on here but it is now.

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Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there lived a king. It seems absurd but it’s true.

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Notes:

1. Written on October 14th, 2022

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The New Sound

A few years after the catastrophe, they reinvented sound for the silence, so if you were rich enough you could hear again. It worked by some sort of pressure manipulation within the walls of your skull, and although I’m sure they could have come up with some elegant design for the devices the demand was so high they didn’t really bother. Subsequently it looked like you were wearing suction cups on your ears, the sort of toilet plungers they have in old cartoons that I have no idea whether really existed or not.

If I’d been in charge, I’d have made them look like seashells, iridescent surfaces flickering through visual equivalents to the simulated audio pulsations being forced through the wearer’s skull. But anything can look cool when it signifies wealth and privilege, I suppose, and everyone wanted a pair. They were this year’s hottest fad, even more popular than those hairy sweets everyone seems to like.

For Christmas I bought our kids an hour at one of the sound booths, each of them taking turns while the others stroked their desserts and stared in awe and wonder at the expressions on their siblings’ faces as the pressure undulations stimulated sections of their brain dormant since birth.

Our hour was up before I got a chance to use them. On the way home, through eyes stinging with barely suppressed tears, I tapped out “What was it like?” They replied with several thumbs up, two love hearts, and fifty seven consecutive Ed Sheeran emojis.

Now the tears flowed. They would not stop.

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Notes:

1. Written on December 12, 2022
2. Song title taken from this song that I used to love
3. And still like quite a bit

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A Tale of King Arthur’s Court

The King called for a feast, for it was Christmas, and so every single bird and every single beast of the country was caught and killed and brought to the kitchens of Camelot to be roasted in the marrow of its own bones. Every fruit from every tree and every root from every bush that wasn’t deadly poisonous in its own right was brewed up and fermented and distilled until it was as intoxicating as a single glance from Queen Guinevere herself. And twelve days of merriment was enjoyed by all who had earned their place around the table.

At the end of the feast, and the beginning of the new year, the Knights set forth for distant lands in search of supplies for next year’s gathering. By Merlin’s estimates there were ten feasts until they brought about the end of the world and the death of all things. Lancelot claimed he could get that down to eight if he tried, and everyone laughed and clapped him on the back, as he drank one last pitcher of sweetly rotting mead before climbing up onto his horse and setting out into the mist of the early morn.

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Notes:

1. Written on the 20th October, 2022

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Oxygen Dreams

Pumped in extra thick, 40/60 mix, euphorics for a sullen crew. Out past Jupiter the hallucinations kick in, open sky visions, phantom smell of rain, insectoid hums, gravitational tugs on calcium-filled bones, nostalgic visions scraped thin off childhood media memories.

You’d think we’d be used to the dark now, used to the float. But in my dreams I still scream as I fall.

Wake up.

Fall some more.

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Notes:

1. Written on October 19th, 2022

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If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi.

Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.

(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more).

Thank you!