Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka (Wilson Milam, 2003)

During the long dark of Doctor Who's off-screen hiatus that we know as the Wilderness Years multifarious tendrils branched off from the main trunk of the show; meanwhiles and never-weres that gave us fleeting glimpses of alternative versions of the show's future.  I'm not talking here about Doctor Who Unbound, Big Finish's series of audio Elsewords-style stories that were conscious attempts at "What If...?" scenarios and thus explicitly never intended to be a part of the official 'canon' (in as much as any Big Finish audio stories are canon... Ooh, there's a can of vermiforms opened), I mean the honest attempts to revive the show -in various formats - that proved to be false starts until Russell T. Davies' televisual revival was announced in the show's 40th anniversary year of 2003 and finally made it to the screen starting in 2005.

These flashing glances of chances of bliss - another kiss from a Rose of another colour - included Dan Freedman's ambitious webcast 'Death Comes to Time', which from 2001 to 2002 offered us via audio and flash animation an epic Star Wars-flavoured vision of the show in which Sylvester McCoy returned as the Doctor only to be ultimately killed off at the conclusion and his mantle taken up by Stephen Fry's fellow renegade Time Lord the Minister of Chance; the story would be continued by Freedman (as Dan Freeman) in both audio and novel form as The Minister of Chance furthering this poetic and lyrical iteration of the Whoniverse which I'll probably cover in more depth in a separate review.  

But in 2003, the very year that it was announced that BBC Wales would be returning the live action series to television, there was another.

This particular Skywalker took the form of an attempted animated version of the show (not for the first time: there was also an approach by Canadian animation outfit Nelvana in the early '90s [damn it, that's another one I should definitely write about...]), the first - and given the return of the actual live action show only, though follow ups were indeed planned - story being penned by established Wilderness Years scribe Paul Cornell.  Cornell made his name in the New Adventures novels of the 1990s with such acclaimed tomes as 'Timewyrm: Revelation', 'Love and War' (the debut of beloved companion of disputed canonicity Bernice Summerfield, whose alcohol-fueled archaeological adventures bothered the trousers of many a pubescent sci-fi spod  of the era - including yours truly), 'No Future' and 'Human Nature' - the latter of which would be adapted into a two-part TV story with David Tennant's Tenth Doctor - and was obviously thought a capable pair of hands to steer a new beginning for the franchise in a new medium.

Starring Withnail himself Richard E. Grant, whose Withnail & I co-star Paul McGann he was ostensibly taking over the mantle of the titular Time Lord from and who infamously seemed not all that into it in the contemporaneous issue of Doctor Who Magazine's interview (although he may just have been put off bellendish fandom by interviewer Ben Cook, which would be completely understandable) to the extent that future showrunner RTD would denounce him as "taking the money and running"*, the story begins one dark night with the TARDIS' arrival in the small Lancastrian town of Lannet.  The somewhat vampiric-visaged Doctor (Grant), who seems a little bit pissed off with his current situation of being manoeuvred into a mission by the Time Lords, locks the TARDIS ("like a car", as his Tennanth incarnation puts it in 'The End of Time') and enters the distinctly tense atmosphere of the Slaughtered Lamb-esque local pub where he meets his destined companion Alison Cheney (Sophie Okonedo, future recurring monarch Liz X) who works as the frustrated barmaid of this juke joint that doesn't have any Pachelbel selections on its jukebox (maybe because it's... heh... not 'Canon'?) much to the Doctor's frustration.

This ghostal town that they forgot to close down has been invaded by the alien Shalka, a subterranean serpentine species (sibilantssss!) decried as "one penny jelly snakes" by our dour antihero.  Their cobra-like hoods amplify the sound of their sonic shriek - a Black Bolt style special move that controls the wills of these puny humans.  The TARDIS has been taken by these reprobate reptiles, sinking into the hungry earth (which of course is sour) Tractator-style ad so the Doctor has little choice but to acknowledge the Gravis of the situation and call in the army - not UNIT, the alien fighting military wing of the United Nations as might be expected in such circumstances - just regular squaddies led by Major Thomas Kennet (Jim Norton, Bishop Brennan of Father Ted or Ombuds Wellington from Babylon 5 depending in your frame of reference) to help with the resistance represented by Alison and her boyfriend Joe (Craig Kelly from RTD's Queer as Folk, of "McGann doesn't count" infamy).

Descending into the bowels of the Earth to retrieve his police box property, he encounters the Shalka Prime (Diana Quick, Julia Flyte from the original television miniseries version of Brideshead Revisited) who is a more highly evolved - and now I have the Vines stuck in my head, great - representative of these conqueror worms capable of reasoning a speech (Cornell really was influenced by 'Frontios', wasn't he?), opening a quantum link to their home world as a bridge for a full invasion.  Where would a worm colony be without wormholes, after all?  Inside the TARDIS we find the Master (Derek Jacobi, who would return in the mainline continuity to [re-]essay the same role in 'Utopia' and countless Big Finish audios), or at least an android simulacrum of same, lurking around the spacious Heath Robinson console room; sort of a cross between McGann's TV Movie control chamber and the concept paintings for what ultimately became said film, the Leekley Bible ones complete with mysterious 'Infinity Chamber'.  I'd love to see that set in live action Doctor Who someday.

Working out that the town is built on a plug of volcanic rock and that the magma-dwelling Shalka plan to strip away the ozone layer from the atmosphere (I love a party with a happy atmosphere) in order to make the planet uninhabitable to humans but ideal for them, the titular time traveler along with barmaid Alison and the mecha-Master, must oppose the ophidian oppressors and save Earth from ecological disaster (like the Gatchaman science ninja team - more on whom soon - or Captain Planet's Planeteers) before the ultimate victory and an ending that seems like a combination of 'Robot' (with Major Kennet arriving just as the Doctor departs) and, more presciently, future episodes 'Rose' and 'World War Three' with Alison having to choose between bidding farewell to her beau Joe and traveling on into time and space with the Doctor or returning to her humdrum everyday existence.  Being a canny lass, she obviously chooses the life less ordinary.  Sadly, we would not be privy to their continuing adventures due to the return of yer actual show (though a follow-up was pitched and drafted titled 'Blood of the Robots'), but there was Cavan Scott and Mark Wright's text story 'The Feast of the Stone' in which the Shalka Doctor, Alison and the Master confronted an alien vampire - an encounter during which the Doctor would sacrifice his frenemy's AI (after)life.  There was also Telos Publishing's novella The Cabinet of Light, written by Daniel O'Mahoney, which featured an indeterminate and unspecified incarnation that I among others headcanoned as the Richard E. Grant Doctor (this book also served as a springboard for Telos' Time Hunter series, which I never explored further but sound decent. I just like the idea of  book series having a pilot episode, you know?).

*Russell T. Davies would eventually have a Damascene conversion and relent on his previous opinion and canonise Grant - maybe - by including a specially shot in character picture of him in a holographic montage of past Doctor faces in the 2024 Ncuti Gatwa episode 'Rogue'.  Personally, I'd have included Peter Cushing too, just for the LOLs.

Whittaker, Hartnell, Philippa, Sue... I forget the names

Or maybe it was the snowman-controlling Great Intelligence, also played by Grant, inveigling his/its way into the Doctor's timestream (see 'The Name of the Doctor')?  

Who knows, eh?  Who nose.