Occam's Doctor
"Occam's Doctor" is the title of my new spec script for Dr. Who, packed off recently to BBC Wales. In it, the Doctor discovers to his horror that he can't actually travel through time at all - he is just a being with a strange tendency to make discontinuous jumps through space, arriving at each new spatial location with a brand new set of beliefs about what has recently happened to him. He only appears to be travelling through time because of the curious non-continuous narrative style in which his adventures are presented to us, full of flashbacks and flash-forwards; actually they all happen in a perfectly normal temporal order.
In the end, Professor David Lewis turns out to be a shape-shifting alien. (Update: Of course this should come as no surprise, as everyone knows that there are possible worlds in which he's been a shape-shifting alien all along.)
(Update: It's not really very spectacular, btw: all that happens is that they discover that the predicate "is Professor David Lewis" refers to David Lewis at times up to time T, and to a Sontaran thereafter. I wish I'd made it more televisual in retrospect - the new series seems to have a much bigger fx budget).
Who the hell is David Lewis?
ReplyDelete(No regrets. Quod dixi dixi, and I'd dixi it again tomorrow.)
Let me guess, this is all because the clock on the TARDIS is broken, right?
ReplyDeleteA Sontaran? Shouldn't he turn into a Grue?
ReplyDelete'Discontinuous jumps through space' that invariably end at some place accessible using a £3 'day to go' rover ticket.
ReplyDeleteWell it would certainly explain the extraordinary jingoism/anglophobia of Mr Who. When did the BBC decide it would be a good idea to reinvent Dr Who as a self-help 'Empowerment' guru, who gets misty eyed about England that was, and England that will return. I fully expect a future episode to result in Dr Who recreating the British empire. Probably using the sodding sonic screwdriver. And yet I still watch it...
ReplyDeleteWell it would certainly explain the extraordinary jingoism/anglophobia of Mr Who.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you know what at least one of those words means.
Funny this is I had to reread that passage twice to see that I had written phobia rather than philia.
ReplyDeleteI spent eight hours transcribing video yesterday. English feels like a second language at the moment.
Damn Pete: I was going to say the Lewis idea was starting to grue on me.
ReplyDelete