Doctor Who: "The Crusade"

[pmcray]

There are only two missing episodes from Season Two (it is the shortest season of early Who at 39 episodes, but not really that much shorter than the other Hartnell/Troughton seasons), and if there were to be two missing episodes from this season, we would rather they were from "The Space Museum" or "The Chase". "The Crusade" is a very solid

Comments

[daveon]

More likely they could do something in that period but film in Malta or Serbia - the relative settings for Kings Landing and so forth in Game of Thrones.

[pmcray]

Yes, you probably would film it somewhere like that if you were making a story set in that part of the world.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of the Alamut story. The Old Man of the Mountain can also be taken as an allusion to the hermit who lived under the tree by the house that was perched halfway up the top of a mountain when the Doctor was a boy. There is also a reference to the Old Man of the Mountains in "Marco Polo". Of course, many monasteries or monastry-like edifices appear in DW ("The Abominable Snowman", Planet of the Spiders", "The Brain of Morbius", "Logopolis") to say nothing of all kinds of fortresses and bases under siege, so it would be as much a homage to Who itself as to The Name of the Rose and other monkpunk classics (A Canticle for Leibowitz, Anathem). And we can offer a very DW explanation as to why there is no contemporary accounts provide no evidence of the secret garden of paradise at Alamut itself.

Now all we need is the TARDIS to head back to 1997 and pitch Grandfather of Assassins to

[daveon]

A Name of the Rose mystery with aliens would work very very well. Especially with the Doctor finally going into the TARDIS, going into the library and pulling out a scroll of 'lost' works from the Greeks or similar and smiling.

[pmcray]

The library at Alamut was destroyed by the Mongols. The Doctor has previous with them. So it's entirely possible that the Doctor has manuscripts in his library that he has saved from there. In fact, that might be why he goes there in the first place.

I also like the way that the fact the TARDIS as edifice could mirror Alamut as edifice, so the Doctor gets trapped in the fortress pursued by assassins whilst his friend gets trapped in the TARDIS. Also the Secret Garden of Paradise is dimensionally transcendent and one of the objects that appears in it is the TARDIS. But is a real TARDIS, a gateway to the Doctor's TARDIS or something altogether far more sinister...

[ffutures]

The novelisation of The Crusade famously had a scene in which Barbara was threatened with whipping, with a line something like "soon you will feel the caress of my whip" which must have come as a bit of a surprise to any adults reading it. I really can't recall much else about it - I remember it as a reasonably faithful adaptation of the episodes, but I was a LOT closer to the episodes then, I read it in 1965 or so.

[pmcray]

I have a feeling that there were certain things that could be got away with in the mid-60s that couldn't even slightly later (just as there are things today that you couldn't have done 20 much less 40 years ago). It might also be carry over from the idea of DW as a show for all ages rather than as a children's show (that adults adored as the Daily Sketch quote used to have it on the cover of Target novels).