SUPER-SIX LIST: AUTHORS THE DOCTOR SHOULD MEET

The year-long literary edition of the "ASOTV" Showcase may be over, but that doesn't mean I'm quite ready to abandon the topic.....

'Doctor Who' has had a tendency to treat other great fictional characters as being just that - fictional. (At least as far as the TV show is concerned, which is our primary focus at Inner Toob. But there's a great crossover with Holmes & Watson in a Cthulhu styled tale over in BookWorld - "All Consuming Fire".)

• Dracula and Frankenstein's Creature were just mechanical exhibits in a sideshow in "The Chase".
• The Doctor and his companions Zoe & Jamie met D'Artagnan, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Rapunzel when they were trapped in the World of Fiction in "The Mind Robber".
• Charles Dickens recited a selection from "A Christmas Carol" about Scrooge in "The Unquiet Dead". And he was planning to incorporate the Gelth into "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" but he died before he could finish it.
• When the Doctor and Donna teamed up with young Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were discussed as though Christie created them. Since we've seen them with as much vitality in the TV Universe as the Doctor has, the truth of the matter is that Mrs. Christie only chronicled their investigations.
• And he met H.G. Wells (but I'm not familiar with the details.)

But most of those "fictional characters" have Toobworld counterparts and so these episodes just cause a Zonk! for me.

Still, there are great authors whom I would like to see eventually encounter the Doctor on the series.

So here's my Super Six List:

1] J.R.R. TOLKIEN - I'm always bringing this one up! By meeting representatives from the Forest of Cheem, the Professor could find inspiration for the Ents.

2] P.L. TRAVERS - Mary Poppins as a Time Lord is a popular meme on Facebook. So where did Ms. Travers get the idea in the first place? (In Toobworld, though, Mary Poppins looks like Mary Wickes.)  And along the same lines, I think an adventure with the Doctor when she was a young girl might have been the inspiration for Mary Norris to write "The Borrowers".  After all, it is possible for the TARDIS and its occupants to be shrunk if the doors are opened during "flight".  Oh, but this is a list of six, isn't it?  (Evil grin......)

3] MICKEY SPILLANE - Bring River Song along for a noirish trip back to the fifties. After all, she looks great in a fedora and a trenchcoat! What type of story could have been influenced by the Doctor's involvement? Have you ever seen the movie "Kiss Me Deadly" with that briefcase full of radioactive material?

4] EDGAR ALLAN POE - Their collaboration would make for a great Halloween episode! And why not bring John Cusack over from the Cineverse to reprise his performance as Poe? (I hope that if there's somebody out there with better artistic skills than me who's willing to put the actual TARDIS in place of that architectural curiousity in the background, that they send me a copy of the end result!)

5] G.K. CHESTERTON - It would have to be an adventure that sorely tests the faith of Mr. Chesterton. Could he be shaken in his resolve upon facing abject Evil in the form of the Master?  (And the Doctor might even talk the creator of Father Brown into giving him that hat and the cape.....)

6] SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE - No, I don't want this to be an adventure which has anything to do with Sherlock Holmes! I'd much rather see the Doctor take Conan Doyle to visit those "Dinosaurs On A Spaceship", giving him the inspiration to write "The Lost World". ("Don't worry, Doctor.... I'll make sure there's nothing about my protagonist which will make people think of you. I'll make him a ginger!") Doug Henshall has played Conan Doyle in the past, so why not give him another go at it?

By the way, I think there's a deliberate effort to keep the stories from 'Torchwood' separate from those of 'Doctor Who'. Otherwise I might have suggested that the "Two Doctors" confront the winged sprites from "Small World" since Conan Doyle was so willing to believe......

BCnU!