18
In Which We Revisit One of the Doctor’s Most Legendary Lost Adventures—and This One Aasn’t Even Wiped!
If we are to follow certain logics and pursue certain parallels, Charles Dickens’s final novel would have been a ghost story. A science-fiction ghost story.
He says as much as he bids farewell to the Ninth Doctor and Rose at the conclusion of The Unquiet Dead (2005), an unlikely partnership that was nevertheless forged in Cardiff, Wales, at Christmas 1869, to defeat a proposed invasion by the Gelth. And Dickens, who was then hard at work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, left his new friends with head ablaze with fanciful notions, theories, and wild ideas.
The great man’s death on June 9, 1870, ensured the story would never be completed, and the years since then have seen a plethora of scholars and fans seeking to finish it for him. Not one of whom has ever mentioned gaseous aliens from the far side of the universe, reanimating corpses in tiny Welsh funeral parlors.
Which is their loss.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood is named for one of its characters, but the completed portion of the book is more concerned with the life of his choirmaster uncle John Jasper, who has fallen in love with Drood’s fiancée, Rosa Bud. At the end of the extant text, Drood is missing and presumed murdered. But what if there had been no murder? What if the Gelth then took center stage in a war of attrition against an unnamed Doctor who speaks constantly and blindingly of the most phantasmagorical circumstance, and his assistant, a Cockney rose in the full bloom of beauty, who join Drood in discovering the truth behind the invasion?
What indeed.
Dickens, however, is not alone in leaving us with a mysterious Edwin Drood. Doctor Who, too, has a legendary incomplete story and, no less than with the Dickens prolusion, scholars and fans have spent decades attempting to finish it off.
Shada was written by Douglas Adams, at that time a twenty-eight-year-old who had just come to fame as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, broadcast on BBC radio the year before he was appointed script editor for Doctor Who. He had, in fact, initially submitted a pilot script for Hitchhiker to Doctor Who itself, together with a proposed movie script, Doctor Who and the Krikketmen. Neither was picked up (the latter became the foundation to the third installment of the Hitch-Hiker series Life, The Universe and Everything), but he was commissioned to write a new story, The Pirate Planet.
Aired within the 1978 season’s The Key to Time story arc, The Pirate Planet is not necessarily “classic” Adams, if we take that term to mean the fast-punning, tail-chasing wisecrackery of the Hitch-Hikers series. Neither, although it was destined to become the most-watched story in the original series’ entire run, was The City of Death, cowritten by Adams (under the pseudonym David Agnew) with producer Graham Williams for a berth in the following, seventeenth, season.
Shada, on the other hand, is Douglas Adams at his literary zenith.
Or not.
This Tangled Skein
Douglas Adams’s writing is an acquired taste at the best of times. For some, it is at its finest when you’re drunk with a bunch of teenage contemporaries, growing more and more grating as you grow older and begin to realize that humor does not necessarily revolve around laboring a point to the point of extinction.
For others, the sensation is akin to suspecting that you already know the story and are now just on the hunt for fresh jokes. It has even been said that the reason Adams resisted having any of his Doctor Who scripts transformed into Target novelizations (see Chapter 21) is because he didn’t want anyone to realize just how thin their story lines are.
That is not the case with Shada.
Shada itself is a prison planet to which the Time Lords used to consign their most dangerous prisoners, for the most part megalomaniacal Napoleons who, for one reason or another, failed in their stated goal of conquering the universe.
The only problem is, nobody actually remembers where Shada is. Nobody, that is, aside from one old, old Time Lord who took a leaf out of the Doctor’s book and made his way to Earth, and then took another leaf out of the Gallifreyan library . . . literally. A whole sheath of leaves, in fact, bound into a single book within whose pages can be found the whereabouts of Shada.
Now he lives and works as Professor Chronotis at St. Cedd’s College, Cambridge, quiet and content until he receives a visit from Skagra, another would-be master of the universe, but one who has no intention of being incarcerated. Rather, he needs to spring one of the planet’s other prisoners. But that’s not easy when you can’t find the planet.
The filming of this epic romp was already underway for what was intended to be season seventeen’s final story when disaster hit, a BBC technicians strike that shut down production with no more than half of the six episode adventure in the can. Location filming in Cambridge was complete; so was the first of three scheduled studio shoots. And that was it. Although the strike was quickly resolved, too much time had been lost to reschedule. Shada was scrapped, and the legend began to bloom.
The first attempt to finish making Shada, by incoming producer John Nathan Turner in 1980, simply didn’t get off the ground. He would ultimately complete it for a 1992 VHS release, but in a disappointingly piecemeal fashion, trimming the six episodes by up to ten minutes each; inserting a few new effects shots; but otherwise glossing over the absent scenes by recalling the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, to record some linking material. (This is the version that leads off the 2013 DVD release.)
It was Shada, then, but it wasn’t Shada, and when Douglas Adams was asked what he thought about it, he admitted he had never particularly liked the story to begin with. Certainly he lost no sleep when it was canned in the first place, and he never knowingly agreed to its resurrection either. He was signing a bunch of other papers, he said, and the BBC contract was one of the pile. He didn’t even know it was there. It might also be pointed out that he had already recycled the elements of the story that he did like into his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The rest, he seemed to believe, should be forgotten, and when Adams passed away in 2001, most people assumed that the saga of Shada had reached its conclusion.
Most people were wrong. All that had really come to an end was Adams’s ability to continue blocking it.
Just two years after Adams’s death, the BBC announced plans to team with Big Finish to produce both an audio play and an accompanying illustrated webcast. This time, Tom Baker turned his back on the revival, but unperturbed, the producers simply contacted another former Doctor, the Eighth (Paul McGann), paired him with original assistant Romana II, and then set writer Gary Russell to work to weave the story into the new cast’s continuity.
Again, it was Shada. But it wasn’t Shada.
A fresh attempt to complete Shada got underway in 2010, as songwriter and Doctor Who fan Ian Levine announced plans to complete the original filming utilizing animation, voice actors, and a Tom Baker impersonator.
He made a good job of it, too, from all accounts. Certainly the completed effort was well received by Starburst sci-fi magazine. But it appears that the rest of us are not likely to find out for ourselves.
But do not despair, for what we trust will be the final twist in the saga also emerged in 2012, as author Gareth Roberts sat down with what were described as Adams’s final version and brought it together as an utterly brilliant and absolutely engrossing novel, subtitled The Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams.
It took thirty-three years, but finally, we get to find out what the fuss was all about.