Brigadier and Liz Shaw Stories
OK, last time I collect a bunch of my stories together. I'm only doing this as I can't stop them being divided between the TTR archive and Teaspoon.
I was watching Doctor Who in order (no, I haven't finished) and got to Season 7 and couldn't stop myself writing a lot of Brig/Liz stories. There was only going to be one, but it was addictive. Great potential for snappy dialogue - sarky Liz, unflappable Brig and underlying flirting. I should add that my romantic stories are never actually very romantic. Sorry.
So here goes:
(All Third Doctor, Brigadier, Liz Shaw, All Ages)
UNIT: Haunting (Brigadier, Liz, Haunted House)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=18443
UNIT: Invisible Man (The Brigadier gets turned invisible and it's up to Liz to come up with a solution. Post Silurians)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=19743
UNIT: Undercover (Shameless cliches; Part One is a sort of comic prologue to the Brigadier and Liz going on a disastrous date in Part Two)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=20428
UNIT:Framed (The Brigadier gets suspended; Liz and the Doctor investigate)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=21928
UNIT: How to Say Goodbye (There are some things the Doctor can't understand)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=22224
***
A lot of my TTR stories have hints of Brig/Liz (What a shock. I'm not the only one - I'll rec some Brig/Liz stories another day, including a couple TTR), but the main one (, is a Then Do That Over story. Brief explanation - all the Who characters are at HG Wells High School, which allows for some crazy stories.
Redefinition (Alistair wants to ask Elizabeth Shaw out, but a fluffy high school story is never going to work in H G Wells).
http://www.ttrarchive.com/redef.html
Why?
UNIT: Haunting
Spearhead from Space looks as if it's going to be the X Files 20 years early and then the Doctor turns up and it decides to revert to being Doctor Who after all. But that could have been fun... That was my starting point for the first two stories. It's plain in both Silurians and Ambassadors that Liz has seen the Brigadier more recently / more often than the Doctor and presumably had some shorter investigations without the aid of a Time Lord. So I wrote them.
After that, I tried playing around with structure in UNIT: Undercover. I had to alter it, as my first review suggested that it hadn't paid off after all, but I'm still pleased with it. (Wouldn't you know?) I deliberately tried to get away with as little plot as possible (although it is there!) to focus on Liz and the Brig having a date which veers from comedy to near tragedy. Liz ends up indebted to the Brig, but he's discouraged by her horror at the idea of the two of them having a date... (Yeah, by this time I knew it was a series!)
UNIT: Framed was largely because I wanted a full post-Inferno serial before I finished this and as I seemed to have spent all of the stories exploring cliches (I find that Brigadier + Liz + cliche = fun story), the frame-up/new headteacher type cliche is one that it's amazing that 70s Who never did. (I suppose they got close with all those times the poor Brig got arrested by the regular army). It might well be my favourite out of these. And please feel free to imagine that the Brigadier wanted to kiss Liz in the cell towards the end. I really should try and write that in, but by that time I was trapped in 'understated' mode.
How to Say Goodbye. Well, obviously. Happiest possible ending in the circumstances was all I tried for.
Only Visiting This Planet was in part a reaction to that. I do tend to go for fun and humour wherever possible. Can't seem to help it, but this was something a little bit different. Liz and the Brigadier are both practical, busy people, but sometimes that's a problem in itself. You can move on so fast you don't quite count the cost of what you left behind. And mid-way through writing it and looking for a song to help me get the mood right, I found that influential Christian singer Larry Norman had died. So I took 'I've Got to Learn to Live Without You' as my mood-setter and used Norman quotes throughout. I felt he deserved a tribute and a melancholy story felt about right. It did what I hoped it would do, but hopefully other people will think so too. My one regret is that I didn't really get a Brigadier view-point in there (I decided I ought to be nice to Three this time) and his loss of the one person he could talk to properly should have been clearer.
Redefinition was simply that I wanted to give them a happy ending and where else can that happen but in some teen love story? And of course H G Wells is no place for fluff and convention. Next thing everyone knows, there are amorphous blobs everywhere. But the characters at H G Wells are stuck in one year forever, so it was the best I could offer them. I'm itching to tweak it, but can't really now it's in the archive.
I was watching Doctor Who in order (no, I haven't finished) and got to Season 7 and couldn't stop myself writing a lot of Brig/Liz stories. There was only going to be one, but it was addictive. Great potential for snappy dialogue - sarky Liz, unflappable Brig and underlying flirting. I should add that my romantic stories are never actually very romantic. Sorry.
So here goes:
(All Third Doctor, Brigadier, Liz Shaw, All Ages)
UNIT: Haunting (Brigadier, Liz, Haunted House)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=18443
UNIT: Invisible Man (The Brigadier gets turned invisible and it's up to Liz to come up with a solution. Post Silurians)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=19743
UNIT: Undercover (Shameless cliches; Part One is a sort of comic prologue to the Brigadier and Liz going on a disastrous date in Part Two)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=20428
UNIT:Framed (The Brigadier gets suspended; Liz and the Doctor investigate)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=21928
UNIT: How to Say Goodbye (There are some things the Doctor can't understand)
http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=22224
***
A lot of my TTR stories have hints of Brig/Liz (What a shock. I'm not the only one - I'll rec some Brig/Liz stories another day, including a couple TTR), but the main one (, is a Then Do That Over story. Brief explanation - all the Who characters are at HG Wells High School, which allows for some crazy stories.
Redefinition (Alistair wants to ask Elizabeth Shaw out, but a fluffy high school story is never going to work in H G Wells).
http://www.ttrarchive.com/redef.html
Why?
UNIT: Haunting
Spearhead from Space looks as if it's going to be the X Files 20 years early and then the Doctor turns up and it decides to revert to being Doctor Who after all. But that could have been fun... That was my starting point for the first two stories. It's plain in both Silurians and Ambassadors that Liz has seen the Brigadier more recently / more often than the Doctor and presumably had some shorter investigations without the aid of a Time Lord. So I wrote them.
After that, I tried playing around with structure in UNIT: Undercover. I had to alter it, as my first review suggested that it hadn't paid off after all, but I'm still pleased with it. (Wouldn't you know?) I deliberately tried to get away with as little plot as possible (although it is there!) to focus on Liz and the Brig having a date which veers from comedy to near tragedy. Liz ends up indebted to the Brig, but he's discouraged by her horror at the idea of the two of them having a date... (Yeah, by this time I knew it was a series!)
UNIT: Framed was largely because I wanted a full post-Inferno serial before I finished this and as I seemed to have spent all of the stories exploring cliches (I find that Brigadier + Liz + cliche = fun story), the frame-up/new headteacher type cliche is one that it's amazing that 70s Who never did. (I suppose they got close with all those times the poor Brig got arrested by the regular army). It might well be my favourite out of these. And please feel free to imagine that the Brigadier wanted to kiss Liz in the cell towards the end. I really should try and write that in, but by that time I was trapped in 'understated' mode.
How to Say Goodbye. Well, obviously. Happiest possible ending in the circumstances was all I tried for.
Only Visiting This Planet was in part a reaction to that. I do tend to go for fun and humour wherever possible. Can't seem to help it, but this was something a little bit different. Liz and the Brigadier are both practical, busy people, but sometimes that's a problem in itself. You can move on so fast you don't quite count the cost of what you left behind. And mid-way through writing it and looking for a song to help me get the mood right, I found that influential Christian singer Larry Norman had died. So I took 'I've Got to Learn to Live Without You' as my mood-setter and used Norman quotes throughout. I felt he deserved a tribute and a melancholy story felt about right. It did what I hoped it would do, but hopefully other people will think so too. My one regret is that I didn't really get a Brigadier view-point in there (I decided I ought to be nice to Three this time) and his loss of the one person he could talk to properly should have been clearer.
Redefinition was simply that I wanted to give them a happy ending and where else can that happen but in some teen love story? And of course H G Wells is no place for fluff and convention. Next thing everyone knows, there are amorphous blobs everywhere. But the characters at H G Wells are stuck in one year forever, so it was the best I could offer them. I'm itching to tweak it, but can't really now it's in the archive.