Jay writes – Now that we have the Factor Fiction website back up and open for business again, and seeing that we’ve not posted since 2019, I should say something about what I’ve been up to since then. Well, for starters, the pandemic had a massive impact on my writing. For a long time, I just couldn’t put fingers to keyboard on anything beyond the odd social media post. Any creative writing became like pulling teeth, and all my usual strategies to get me writing failed. So, not very much to report, I’m afraid. There’s a lot of projects in process, but incomplete, and not in a place I can talk much about at this stage.

Drawn from what was until relatively recently, a single mention in any TV Doctor Who story (1976’s Tom Baker story The Brain of Morbius), the “Morbius Doctors” were a series of eight faces that popped up on screen during a mental battle between Time Lords. When the Doctor is winning, the images are those of Morbius and his past incarnations, but then the tide turns, and Morbius pushes the Doctor back through his past lives. The idea suggests that when you reach the earliest point in their life, they’ll likely die. An interesting conceit, and a good way of reminding viewers of the actors who played the role over the years. All well and good, but Baker becomes Pertwee, Troughton and “the First Doctor”, Hartnell. And keeps going…

Eight more unfamiliar male Caucasian faces, some bearded, all dressed flamboyantly. It would later turn out that the models for these figures were all members of the production team. Directors, producers and writers, let loose to play dress-up in the BBC wardrobe. No onscreen explanation offered, but the logic of the story is pretty clear. The First Doctor was not first at all. Reconciling that with The Three Doctors, where Hartnell meets his future selves and cries “So there are three of me now!” suggests that the Doctors we’re familiar with do not remember their lives before Hartnell.

Whether the producers had any intent to revisit the idea or intended it just as a bit of fun, no TV story touched the idea with a barge pole until relatively recently with Chris Chibnall’s “Timeless Child” storyline, and Russell T Davies has referred to it again in the most recent series.

Designed to be tonally different, each could be a bit Doctorish at times, but capable of acting very differently. I tend to think of it as the story arc of Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. At first, very unlike Bond, but as he goes, we see him becoming more familiar, and the soundtrack reinforces it with little stings of the Bond theme at appropriate moments.

Those of us who were chosen to embody these new incarnations had certain strictures placed upon us. Things that weren’t revealed in the show until later couldn’t be used, so while the Doctor’s homeworld could appear, we couldn’t call it Gallifrey, for example. All we had to go on was one or two still photographs of the “actors” in costume and the order in which the incarnations fell. Knowing who they were (such as Producer Philip Hinchcliffe and Script Editor Robert Holmes), there were interviews and promotional appearances to draw on if we wanted to. The actors cast as the Doctor have always added elements of their own personality to their portrayal, so it made sense to me to add little bits of Robert Holmes’ personality into the mix for my 7^th Morbius Doctor. For starters, he absolutely had to be a pipe smoker. I wanted my Doctor to be a lone wolf. Doctor Who meets John Le Carre, if you will, he’s an intergalactic spy, an agent on behalf of his people (something the Doctor has done at times), but entirely against his wishes. If he was ever an idealist, service has soured him, much as it did to Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. As much as he’s working to fulfil his mission, he’s working towards escape from servitude too. In the promotion we did for Forgotten Lives, I was asked to use three words to describe the Holmes Doctor. I said “Ten. Steps. Ahead.”

Parallel to the writing of our Forgotten Lives stories, artist Paul Hanley was producing portraits of the Morbius Doctors, and I was lucky enough to have his interpretation of the Holmes Doctor and his glorious TARDIS console room design to look at while I was investing life into the character, so I could incorporate elements I particularly liked into my story. It made perfect sense to combine efforts and so Paul’s wonderful likenesses became part of the first volume, both interior and as the cover artwork. I’m especially chuffed that HolmesDoc is front and centre on the cover and the Doctors are all in “my” TARDIS.

Because of BBC copyright, doing anything with these characters has always been the province of fan writers, so the Forgotten Lives books were done as strictly limited editions, with profits going to Alzheimers charities. The book sold well and was warmly received. Those who contributed stories leapt at the chance to tell another, and so Forgotten Lives 2 came about, and then a hardback collection of books 1 and 2. And still, we weren’t quite done. Some time later, editor Phil Purser-Hallard had an overarching story idea for Forgotten Lives 3, and asked if we had one more story to tell that would fit within the frame?

To begin with, I wasn’t at all sure that I did. I’d jumped at the chance to write the regeneration story for my Doctor. I had a very strong vision for how I thought his end would come, and story threads I wanted to pay off, so I didn’t want anyone else to do it. Bad enough if they did it “wrong” (insofar as how I see it), but worse if their idea was better…

Certainly, the Holmes Doctor would have an important place in the Forgotten Lives 3 story, not least because of his position as the penultimate incarnation, but as the Cold Warrior, his incarnation would make sense to be the one in the big third act battle with all the fireworks. The more I thought about it, the more pieces slotted into place. I looked at what I’d done before with the character, which tropes of spy fiction I’d employed and which ones I hadn’t. I drew from John Le Carre for the first story: The Other Side. The second one, as the last Holmes Doctor story, I wanted to go bigger and more cosmic, so Ian Fleming informed the themes of Borrowed Time. For my final (to date) story: Who Needs Enemies, I looked to Len Deighton for inspiration. I’ve made no attempt to pastiche the authors’ writing styles, just imbued some of the concerns that they wrote about into the mix.

Since Forgotten Lives 3 was published, Doctor Who has returned to television again with the second age of Russell T Davies and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors. And again, the Morbius Doctors have made a brief appearance. Another artist, Raine Schramski has been working her way through a series of painted portraits of each incarnation. I’ve seen the (already amazing) “rough sketches” that have been published, and enjoying the unveiling of each finished portrait. I’ve a little while to wait until mine takes his turn in the light. So for an idea that started as a bit of fun in a single episode of 1976 Doctor Who, the Morbius Doctors have walked a long road. Forgotten Lives? Forgotten no more, I guess!

At the time of writing, while the print editions are long gone, you can still buy ebook copies of all three volumes from the Obverse Books site and support a good cause while you’re at it. “Chin-chin!”