(no subject)
i just remembered that back when i had, you know, free time, i wrote a proposal for a doctor who novel. it was bonkers and kind of crap. i only wrote the synopsis and the one chapter, but you can get the drift. ETA: i removed the chapter because i'm gonna cannabalize it for parts, so you can't have it no more.
Synopsis:
The Doctor, Romana (second incarnation), and K-9 materialize in a hockey arena during a championship game. The city is most likely unnamed, but is based on Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the year is recent. The city acts as a character in the work, and as a counterpoint to the type of society the aliens (see below) represent. Much of the city is impoverished and in decline, and it no longer lives up to its social contract with the individuals that make up the city.
A rash of peculiar murders has left the city’s police confused, but the deaths have recently stopped altogether. The Doctor suspects alien involvement, and he and Romana head to a university in the city-several of the dead were students there. They leave K-9 in the TARDIS, reasoning that he would draw too much attention.
The Pretane company, run by the Pretane house of the Jilken, is working with a company from the U.S. to find a way to distribute a product that does not seem addictive, but will change the genetic structure of people who consume it such that their offspring will be addicted. Cultures that use this product gradually wane and are conquered, because the addiction stifles most creativity and interest in life-although it coincidentally virtually ends war and crime.
The Pretane company has been trying out the most dangerous, early forms of the product on prisoners and people in mental health units. At this point, they have found a form that is safe for humans. They are quite careful during the entire process to follow their own rules. The Jilken have little regard or empathy for people’s feelings or health, but they do value property and believe that the ownership of property is sacred. The Jilken are made up entirely of detachable biological units, each of which is a sort of minimally intelligent homunculi that can survive on its own, but is not fully sentient. Because the “individual” Jilken are actually assemblages of detachable biological units, they have no notion of self-it is simply not a viable concept. On the Jilken homeworld, evolution in the houses has worked not by survival of the fittest assemblage (because assemblages change constantly), but by survival of households of Jilken. Households trade homunculi during mating season to enhance the fitness of a household; the homunculi are therefore seen as property. Instead of having moral codes based primarily on empathy for individuals and taboos regarding sex and food, the Jilken have moral codes based primarily around property and the ownership of dwellings (including the entering and exiting of dwellings). On the Jilken homeworld, the gravest offense is entering a dwelling without permission, or taking property without paying for it.
Assemblages of the Jilken are sentient, and have the concept of intellectual property, which they hold to be nearly as sacred as homunculi property. Therefore, whenever they conduct test on a planet, they are sure to get permission from all potential participants to use them for “market research,” which includes taking their intellectual property.
Therefore, after getting people to agree to market research, they then manipulate that person to get him or her into prison or hospital for a short time. They prefer to use prisoners or people who are thought to be psychotic because these people are the least likely to be believed if they remember what has happened to them, but they do not want to use only people who actually belong in the hospital or prisons because such people do not represent the normal range. Heavily concerned about the anti-capitalistic sentiment among the human young, they have also placed operatives in anti-commercialism groups in universities in order to make sure their practices are not targeted-in fact, they have used the operatives to gain a great many “volunteers” from the anti-commercialism groups themselves. Realizing this, the Doctor heads for a rally to ask some questions.
Romana, who has been saying that the overall pattern seems familiar to her, works out what is going on while the Doctor is distracted. They have been arguing about whether the Doctor is too unsystematic and distracted by details, and she is set on solving this problem quickly and efficiently. In trying to apprehend a Jilken agent who approaches her on the street, she is captured and imprisoned for attempting to steal property-the agent is actually a robot. She makes contact with a medical scientist, Mugraz, who is called in to treat a wound she received during the struggle. Mugraz reveals much of the above. Some Jilken assemblages become possessive of their boundaries and refuse to exchange homunculi freely. These assemblages also have empathy and concern about suffering, and most of them go into medicine. They live as nomads until they are arrested by one of the Jilken houses for leading an illegal lifestyle. Mugraz tells Romana about a planned rebellion. There is another Jilken doctor on the ship in orbit, and it is clear to them both that the plans of the house of Pretane are immoral. The rest of the Jilken consider it the concern of any given house to regulate what is eaten by the homunculi; again, the idea of having empathy for the addiction of a “person” is nonsensical to them. Romana asks Mugraz how exactly some Jilken come to be nomads, and he tells of a legend that some Jilken assemblages ate the “vegetable of wisdom” and realized they could act as individuals. In truth, he says, lone homunculi live in the wilds outside the Jilken caves when a house has been displaced from its home, and from time to time an assemblage with the idea of individuality comes about.
Before missing Romana, the Doctor meets a former university psychologist, Grant Lezak, who has figured out that something strange is going on, and that a company in offices nearby has something to do with it. Having realized Romana is missing, the Doctor and Grant visit the company, and manage to meet both the CEO, Chandra, and her assistant, Franklin, who is actually a spy from another company. The Doctor and Grant are rebuffed. Having worked out the overall pattern, the Doctor fakes insanity to get in hospital and is captured along with the rest of a “focus group”. He whistles for K-9 as soon as he is transported to the Jilken HQ.
K-9 has trouble navigating the city streets, but gets help from a young African-American woman, Michelle, who had been contemplating how she was going to survive. Michelle’s mother is addicted to crack cocaine, and her older sister ran away from home after being raped by a serial rapist. She is motivated by a desire to escape her situation, and finds K-9 fascinating because of the possibilities he suggests. K-9 himself is treated as a serious concept. For example, it is assumed that the Doctor could have created a more advanced, less silly-looking robot if he had wanted to, so there must be reasons for him being the way he is. Nevertheless, he is still a source of amusement, so some comic relief naturally ensues.
Chandra, the CEO, is in the concealed audience (along with Jilken agents) when the Doctor takes part in the testing group. Concerned and a bit frightened by the Doctor’s presence, she says she wants to hear the Doctor’s complaints. The Doctor rants, playing for time, trying to figure out what the plan is exactly, and trying to win Chandra over. Romana is brought in to mollify the Doctor, who pretends that Romana is his property in order to get the Jilken to return her. During this encounter, the Doctor demands to know how, precisely, the Jilken lifestyle works; here we learn that homunculi reproduce asexually for about 100 years, and then a planet-wide mating season occurs, during which houses exchange homunculi. The next season is in about 2 Earth years.
Chandra pretends to be satisfied, despite the revelation of the remainder of the above, but after the Doctor and Romana are escorted out, she realizes the ultimate goal of the Jilken plan: to gain control of planetary defenses and sell the planet out to the highest bidder.
At this point K-9 arrives with Michelle; encountering Mugraz first, they overrun the control center with “his” assistance. They stop the apparent aliens, but they are all robots-the real Jilken bosses have been hiding out in orbit, and soon will come down to the office to straighten things out-and most likely kill whoever is there, trespassing on their property. Before they arrive, the Doctor fiddles with the production order for a batch of samples of product, which are to be given away at the next championship hockey game, which will be held the following evening. Chandra bolts, planning to leave the country-the Doctor and Romana note that she doesn’t really seem to have grasped what she’s been involved with. Mugraz stays in order to try to mislead his captors and delay their plans.
The hockey game is not until the next day, so the Doctor, Romana, K-9, and Michelle go to Grant Lezak’s apartment, which is in a downtrodden part of the city, because he makes no money to speak of at present. Michelle, impressed with the Doctor’s abilities, asks him why he cannot stop people like the serial rapist who hurt her sister. The Doctor claims that he has no idea whether the rapist belongs in the timeline or not, but he is certain the Jilken plan does not. Michelle points out that the rapist could be a victim of the Jilken experiments whose program of behavior for getting into jail hasn’t yet worked. Romana is skeptical, but the Doctor agrees to search with Michelle and K-9 for the rapist. K-9 gets the molecular “scent” of the offender from Michelle’s old apartment, and they catch the rapist, who has not been influenced by the Jilken at all. Nevertheless, the Doctor uses a pair of antique handcuffs to latch him onto a tree, pasting a sign above his head that says “Citizen’s arrest: check his fingerprints.”
Michelle is dissatisfied, but the Doctor reveals that he’s not sure he should have even done what he did. He explains that his timeline is so attached to the Earth’s now that he must be very careful what he does. In fact, he wonders if he even can judge the earth’s timeline anymore-perhaps his judgments are too strongly based on what he knows about his own timeline. He doesn’t support revolutions for the same reason that most humans don’t: He is too attached to the status quo. There are people, he tells Michelle darkly, that would like nothing better than to see him create a temporal paradox. He wistfully recalls days when he was less concerned about such matters.
The next day, the Doctor, Romana, and Michelle make their way into the arena and verify that the free samples have been rendered ineffective-humans hate the taste of them, although Romana rather likes them. They run into Franklin, the CEO’s assistant and discover he is a spy. Chandra had been keeping him from knowing about the entire plan, particularly the role and nature of the “foreign investors”. When they try to convince him to fight the Jilken, he seems more inclined to get his company in on the action. The Doctor pretends he was talking nonsense in order to lose him. Then he and Romana talk about what to do, as well as about hockey, which the Doctor says is probably what happened when “a cricketer was trying to play lacrosse and stumbled onto a frozen pond.” Struck by inspiration, the Doctor decides to contact Grant, the university psychologist.
However, before he can do so, they are intercepted by an assassin sent by the Jilken to finish off the interfering parties. Having already killed Chandra, the Jilken assassin catches up with the Doctor and companions in the arena. They get ahead of the Jilken by stunning it with a heat lamp from a food vendor. When it follows them into an underground station, the Doctor lures it onto the electrified third rail, which does not kill the assassin, but causes its biological units to fall apart, unable to cohere. During the fight, one of the units latches onto the Doctor, and he seems to go into a trance; for a moment it appears that he will be killed. After removing the unit, the Doctor makes cryptic comments about there being a wound behind the Jilken arrow-they are desperately afraid of something. Michelle complains that she lost a bunch of her hair extensions in the struggle.
(Throughout the above, we are given glimpses of the Jilken themselves, who torture Mugraz and the other doctor, eventually forcing them both to disperse and be absorbed into the Pretane house as punishment for their treachery.)
The Doctor, Romana, and K-9 burst in on the Jilken and Franklin, who has discovered the Jilken and is negotiating for his company to take on the position left vacant by Chandra’s. Eventually, the Doctor ushers in a student who introduces herself as descended from the Native American tribe who traded the land they are standing on to European settlers. She declares that the settlers did not uphold their part of the bargain, and therefore the land is hers, by default, and the Jilken are not permitted to do business there. Morally outraged, the Jilken ask Franklin if this information is correct. He concedes that it is correct in a way, but that “this kind of thing goes on all the time on Earth-people are always stealing land from each other.” The Jilken beg forgiveness of the Native American woman, thank the Doctor for bringing this information to their attention, and leave summarily, having decided that their moral system is completely incompatible with the morality of humans.
After questions about whether this will really stop the house of Pretane from selling their product in the long run, the Doctor reveals that the Jilken in the house of Pretane are, themselves, consumers of their own product. They are not actually addicted yet, but will be after the mating season. Soon they will no longer have the will to do business with the Earth or anyone else. Moreover, the addiction is what causes some Jilken houses to lose their ability to create assemblages. The individual addicted homunculi lose their will to cohere, and are banished to the outside wilds when the house is taken over by an invading party. Here, evolution works on the individual homunculi, the survivors of which become the nomads like Mugraz, which eventually become absorbed back into houses, thereby making the houses more well adapted. Essentially, the addiction is a part of the life cycle and evolutionary structure of the Jilken. It is only on other planets that their drug truly wreaks havoc. Usually, this process occurs without being discussed among the Jilken, who are ashamed of this part of their lives; the house of Pretane, desperate to survive, thought that if they gathered enough resources through trade of the product, they could find a way to reverse the addiction. The Doctor sends K-9 off to destroy the equipment for making the product.
Franklin, however, has not given up on getting the product for his company, grabs Michelle and holds her at gunpoint. He states that the Doctor knows how to manufacture the product and will tell him how. They argue about the morality of doing so, with Franklin complaining that the city is in decline, and only by attracting such a profitable industry will it be resurrected. The Doctor argues that the end does not justify the means, because the end is inseparable from the means. A city based only on destruction will eventually be destroyed. Nevertheless, he calls K-9 back using his whistle. Michelle adds that her family and others like her would be the first to be addicted, and the last to see any benefit, so Franklin’s plan would just be more of the same. He warns her to be quiet, and she asks why she should, exactly. If Franklin wins, her life will be miserable anyway, and she doesn’t believe he has the guts to shoot her. Rising to her bait, Franklin grabs her hair to turn her around to face him, just as K-9 is entering the room. The Doctor and Romana distract Franklin; Michelle rips away, losing more of her hair extensions; and K-9 stuns Franklin.
Having destroyed the machines for making the product and allowed the police to find Franklin (who did not have a permit for the gun), the Doctor, Romana, and K-9 get ready to board the TARDIS, saying goodbye to Michelle. It is the night of the final game in the championships series, which is tied 3-3. Michelle wonders if it matters whether the team wins, and whether the city will ever become great again. K-9 points out that the city fell into decline partly because many of its original inhabitants, and therefore the owners of many of its businesses, were pacifists who originally left their European homes due to religious separatism, and therefore did not buy into wartime industries. So perhaps being in decline is not so bad after all. The Doctor states that whether the city becomes great depends on the actions of the individuals, like Michelle. If she starts with herself, perhaps the city will follow. Once in the TARDIS, he wonders if he had perhaps met the older Michelle before-he seems to recall meeting an older woman who had been the creator of a successful drug treatment clinic in an American city. Romana worries about a time paradox, but the Doctor shrugs it off calling it “minor”, and apparently somewhat pleased.
of course, it was rejected, and rightly so. some of the best parts, i found out later, had already been used in other novels. still, it's not such a bad thing to have accidentally almost come up with nearly the same idea as kate and jon or "mad larry."
anyway. i still think it's a little fun.
Synopsis:
The Doctor, Romana (second incarnation), and K-9 materialize in a hockey arena during a championship game. The city is most likely unnamed, but is based on Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the year is recent. The city acts as a character in the work, and as a counterpoint to the type of society the aliens (see below) represent. Much of the city is impoverished and in decline, and it no longer lives up to its social contract with the individuals that make up the city.
A rash of peculiar murders has left the city’s police confused, but the deaths have recently stopped altogether. The Doctor suspects alien involvement, and he and Romana head to a university in the city-several of the dead were students there. They leave K-9 in the TARDIS, reasoning that he would draw too much attention.
The Pretane company, run by the Pretane house of the Jilken, is working with a company from the U.S. to find a way to distribute a product that does not seem addictive, but will change the genetic structure of people who consume it such that their offspring will be addicted. Cultures that use this product gradually wane and are conquered, because the addiction stifles most creativity and interest in life-although it coincidentally virtually ends war and crime.
The Pretane company has been trying out the most dangerous, early forms of the product on prisoners and people in mental health units. At this point, they have found a form that is safe for humans. They are quite careful during the entire process to follow their own rules. The Jilken have little regard or empathy for people’s feelings or health, but they do value property and believe that the ownership of property is sacred. The Jilken are made up entirely of detachable biological units, each of which is a sort of minimally intelligent homunculi that can survive on its own, but is not fully sentient. Because the “individual” Jilken are actually assemblages of detachable biological units, they have no notion of self-it is simply not a viable concept. On the Jilken homeworld, evolution in the houses has worked not by survival of the fittest assemblage (because assemblages change constantly), but by survival of households of Jilken. Households trade homunculi during mating season to enhance the fitness of a household; the homunculi are therefore seen as property. Instead of having moral codes based primarily on empathy for individuals and taboos regarding sex and food, the Jilken have moral codes based primarily around property and the ownership of dwellings (including the entering and exiting of dwellings). On the Jilken homeworld, the gravest offense is entering a dwelling without permission, or taking property without paying for it.
Assemblages of the Jilken are sentient, and have the concept of intellectual property, which they hold to be nearly as sacred as homunculi property. Therefore, whenever they conduct test on a planet, they are sure to get permission from all potential participants to use them for “market research,” which includes taking their intellectual property.
Therefore, after getting people to agree to market research, they then manipulate that person to get him or her into prison or hospital for a short time. They prefer to use prisoners or people who are thought to be psychotic because these people are the least likely to be believed if they remember what has happened to them, but they do not want to use only people who actually belong in the hospital or prisons because such people do not represent the normal range. Heavily concerned about the anti-capitalistic sentiment among the human young, they have also placed operatives in anti-commercialism groups in universities in order to make sure their practices are not targeted-in fact, they have used the operatives to gain a great many “volunteers” from the anti-commercialism groups themselves. Realizing this, the Doctor heads for a rally to ask some questions.
Romana, who has been saying that the overall pattern seems familiar to her, works out what is going on while the Doctor is distracted. They have been arguing about whether the Doctor is too unsystematic and distracted by details, and she is set on solving this problem quickly and efficiently. In trying to apprehend a Jilken agent who approaches her on the street, she is captured and imprisoned for attempting to steal property-the agent is actually a robot. She makes contact with a medical scientist, Mugraz, who is called in to treat a wound she received during the struggle. Mugraz reveals much of the above. Some Jilken assemblages become possessive of their boundaries and refuse to exchange homunculi freely. These assemblages also have empathy and concern about suffering, and most of them go into medicine. They live as nomads until they are arrested by one of the Jilken houses for leading an illegal lifestyle. Mugraz tells Romana about a planned rebellion. There is another Jilken doctor on the ship in orbit, and it is clear to them both that the plans of the house of Pretane are immoral. The rest of the Jilken consider it the concern of any given house to regulate what is eaten by the homunculi; again, the idea of having empathy for the addiction of a “person” is nonsensical to them. Romana asks Mugraz how exactly some Jilken come to be nomads, and he tells of a legend that some Jilken assemblages ate the “vegetable of wisdom” and realized they could act as individuals. In truth, he says, lone homunculi live in the wilds outside the Jilken caves when a house has been displaced from its home, and from time to time an assemblage with the idea of individuality comes about.
Before missing Romana, the Doctor meets a former university psychologist, Grant Lezak, who has figured out that something strange is going on, and that a company in offices nearby has something to do with it. Having realized Romana is missing, the Doctor and Grant visit the company, and manage to meet both the CEO, Chandra, and her assistant, Franklin, who is actually a spy from another company. The Doctor and Grant are rebuffed. Having worked out the overall pattern, the Doctor fakes insanity to get in hospital and is captured along with the rest of a “focus group”. He whistles for K-9 as soon as he is transported to the Jilken HQ.
K-9 has trouble navigating the city streets, but gets help from a young African-American woman, Michelle, who had been contemplating how she was going to survive. Michelle’s mother is addicted to crack cocaine, and her older sister ran away from home after being raped by a serial rapist. She is motivated by a desire to escape her situation, and finds K-9 fascinating because of the possibilities he suggests. K-9 himself is treated as a serious concept. For example, it is assumed that the Doctor could have created a more advanced, less silly-looking robot if he had wanted to, so there must be reasons for him being the way he is. Nevertheless, he is still a source of amusement, so some comic relief naturally ensues.
Chandra, the CEO, is in the concealed audience (along with Jilken agents) when the Doctor takes part in the testing group. Concerned and a bit frightened by the Doctor’s presence, she says she wants to hear the Doctor’s complaints. The Doctor rants, playing for time, trying to figure out what the plan is exactly, and trying to win Chandra over. Romana is brought in to mollify the Doctor, who pretends that Romana is his property in order to get the Jilken to return her. During this encounter, the Doctor demands to know how, precisely, the Jilken lifestyle works; here we learn that homunculi reproduce asexually for about 100 years, and then a planet-wide mating season occurs, during which houses exchange homunculi. The next season is in about 2 Earth years.
Chandra pretends to be satisfied, despite the revelation of the remainder of the above, but after the Doctor and Romana are escorted out, she realizes the ultimate goal of the Jilken plan: to gain control of planetary defenses and sell the planet out to the highest bidder.
At this point K-9 arrives with Michelle; encountering Mugraz first, they overrun the control center with “his” assistance. They stop the apparent aliens, but they are all robots-the real Jilken bosses have been hiding out in orbit, and soon will come down to the office to straighten things out-and most likely kill whoever is there, trespassing on their property. Before they arrive, the Doctor fiddles with the production order for a batch of samples of product, which are to be given away at the next championship hockey game, which will be held the following evening. Chandra bolts, planning to leave the country-the Doctor and Romana note that she doesn’t really seem to have grasped what she’s been involved with. Mugraz stays in order to try to mislead his captors and delay their plans.
The hockey game is not until the next day, so the Doctor, Romana, K-9, and Michelle go to Grant Lezak’s apartment, which is in a downtrodden part of the city, because he makes no money to speak of at present. Michelle, impressed with the Doctor’s abilities, asks him why he cannot stop people like the serial rapist who hurt her sister. The Doctor claims that he has no idea whether the rapist belongs in the timeline or not, but he is certain the Jilken plan does not. Michelle points out that the rapist could be a victim of the Jilken experiments whose program of behavior for getting into jail hasn’t yet worked. Romana is skeptical, but the Doctor agrees to search with Michelle and K-9 for the rapist. K-9 gets the molecular “scent” of the offender from Michelle’s old apartment, and they catch the rapist, who has not been influenced by the Jilken at all. Nevertheless, the Doctor uses a pair of antique handcuffs to latch him onto a tree, pasting a sign above his head that says “Citizen’s arrest: check his fingerprints.”
Michelle is dissatisfied, but the Doctor reveals that he’s not sure he should have even done what he did. He explains that his timeline is so attached to the Earth’s now that he must be very careful what he does. In fact, he wonders if he even can judge the earth’s timeline anymore-perhaps his judgments are too strongly based on what he knows about his own timeline. He doesn’t support revolutions for the same reason that most humans don’t: He is too attached to the status quo. There are people, he tells Michelle darkly, that would like nothing better than to see him create a temporal paradox. He wistfully recalls days when he was less concerned about such matters.
The next day, the Doctor, Romana, and Michelle make their way into the arena and verify that the free samples have been rendered ineffective-humans hate the taste of them, although Romana rather likes them. They run into Franklin, the CEO’s assistant and discover he is a spy. Chandra had been keeping him from knowing about the entire plan, particularly the role and nature of the “foreign investors”. When they try to convince him to fight the Jilken, he seems more inclined to get his company in on the action. The Doctor pretends he was talking nonsense in order to lose him. Then he and Romana talk about what to do, as well as about hockey, which the Doctor says is probably what happened when “a cricketer was trying to play lacrosse and stumbled onto a frozen pond.” Struck by inspiration, the Doctor decides to contact Grant, the university psychologist.
However, before he can do so, they are intercepted by an assassin sent by the Jilken to finish off the interfering parties. Having already killed Chandra, the Jilken assassin catches up with the Doctor and companions in the arena. They get ahead of the Jilken by stunning it with a heat lamp from a food vendor. When it follows them into an underground station, the Doctor lures it onto the electrified third rail, which does not kill the assassin, but causes its biological units to fall apart, unable to cohere. During the fight, one of the units latches onto the Doctor, and he seems to go into a trance; for a moment it appears that he will be killed. After removing the unit, the Doctor makes cryptic comments about there being a wound behind the Jilken arrow-they are desperately afraid of something. Michelle complains that she lost a bunch of her hair extensions in the struggle.
(Throughout the above, we are given glimpses of the Jilken themselves, who torture Mugraz and the other doctor, eventually forcing them both to disperse and be absorbed into the Pretane house as punishment for their treachery.)
The Doctor, Romana, and K-9 burst in on the Jilken and Franklin, who has discovered the Jilken and is negotiating for his company to take on the position left vacant by Chandra’s. Eventually, the Doctor ushers in a student who introduces herself as descended from the Native American tribe who traded the land they are standing on to European settlers. She declares that the settlers did not uphold their part of the bargain, and therefore the land is hers, by default, and the Jilken are not permitted to do business there. Morally outraged, the Jilken ask Franklin if this information is correct. He concedes that it is correct in a way, but that “this kind of thing goes on all the time on Earth-people are always stealing land from each other.” The Jilken beg forgiveness of the Native American woman, thank the Doctor for bringing this information to their attention, and leave summarily, having decided that their moral system is completely incompatible with the morality of humans.
After questions about whether this will really stop the house of Pretane from selling their product in the long run, the Doctor reveals that the Jilken in the house of Pretane are, themselves, consumers of their own product. They are not actually addicted yet, but will be after the mating season. Soon they will no longer have the will to do business with the Earth or anyone else. Moreover, the addiction is what causes some Jilken houses to lose their ability to create assemblages. The individual addicted homunculi lose their will to cohere, and are banished to the outside wilds when the house is taken over by an invading party. Here, evolution works on the individual homunculi, the survivors of which become the nomads like Mugraz, which eventually become absorbed back into houses, thereby making the houses more well adapted. Essentially, the addiction is a part of the life cycle and evolutionary structure of the Jilken. It is only on other planets that their drug truly wreaks havoc. Usually, this process occurs without being discussed among the Jilken, who are ashamed of this part of their lives; the house of Pretane, desperate to survive, thought that if they gathered enough resources through trade of the product, they could find a way to reverse the addiction. The Doctor sends K-9 off to destroy the equipment for making the product.
Franklin, however, has not given up on getting the product for his company, grabs Michelle and holds her at gunpoint. He states that the Doctor knows how to manufacture the product and will tell him how. They argue about the morality of doing so, with Franklin complaining that the city is in decline, and only by attracting such a profitable industry will it be resurrected. The Doctor argues that the end does not justify the means, because the end is inseparable from the means. A city based only on destruction will eventually be destroyed. Nevertheless, he calls K-9 back using his whistle. Michelle adds that her family and others like her would be the first to be addicted, and the last to see any benefit, so Franklin’s plan would just be more of the same. He warns her to be quiet, and she asks why she should, exactly. If Franklin wins, her life will be miserable anyway, and she doesn’t believe he has the guts to shoot her. Rising to her bait, Franklin grabs her hair to turn her around to face him, just as K-9 is entering the room. The Doctor and Romana distract Franklin; Michelle rips away, losing more of her hair extensions; and K-9 stuns Franklin.
Having destroyed the machines for making the product and allowed the police to find Franklin (who did not have a permit for the gun), the Doctor, Romana, and K-9 get ready to board the TARDIS, saying goodbye to Michelle. It is the night of the final game in the championships series, which is tied 3-3. Michelle wonders if it matters whether the team wins, and whether the city will ever become great again. K-9 points out that the city fell into decline partly because many of its original inhabitants, and therefore the owners of many of its businesses, were pacifists who originally left their European homes due to religious separatism, and therefore did not buy into wartime industries. So perhaps being in decline is not so bad after all. The Doctor states that whether the city becomes great depends on the actions of the individuals, like Michelle. If she starts with herself, perhaps the city will follow. Once in the TARDIS, he wonders if he had perhaps met the older Michelle before-he seems to recall meeting an older woman who had been the creator of a successful drug treatment clinic in an American city. Romana worries about a time paradox, but the Doctor shrugs it off calling it “minor”, and apparently somewhat pleased.
of course, it was rejected, and rightly so. some of the best parts, i found out later, had already been used in other novels. still, it's not such a bad thing to have accidentally almost come up with nearly the same idea as kate and jon or "mad larry."
anyway. i still think it's a little fun.