Talk:How The Monk Got His Habit (short story)

"Discarded"

uh, i understand why theres two separate pages for this story - as harness said that he planned a novelisation of the story too. BUT i dont get why the short sotry is being treated as valid when, like the television episode, it was "discarded" in harness' own words. the article says its similar to RTD's discarded time war story but its different in the fact that RTD's story was signed off on and planned for the lockdown event. this story had nothing to do with locdown, harness took it upon himself to find the unfinished scrift after mentioning it and being asked to by fans. DiSoRiEnTeD1 ☎

Just for the rcord, Davies's story wasn't planned for the Lockdown! event at all — it was written for the anthology The Doctor: His Lives and Times way back in 2013.

Either way, though, the thing is that Doctor Who and the Time War and Robert Shearman's Dalek alternative script extract were both written as complete products that looked (and were cheekily presented as) like extracts from deleted stuff. I think it more likely than not that Peter Harness was riding the same trend, and wrote this short story in 2020 for the Lockdown event.

I mean, let's look at the facts — one day all he has to offer of How The Monk… is a loose outline from an email, and the next, he springs on us that he'd already started writing a Target novelisation, of all things? Even though the BBC Wales series has never, at any point in its history, been known to be amenable to writers submitting novelisations of their stories, out of nowhere, before said stories are even aired? There have been a handful of Target novelisations of NuWho stories, but always "big ones" like The Day of the Doctor or Rose, and never developed right alongside the TV story.

Even in the fairly likely event that the novelisation project was real, though, Harness still decided to release a standalone scene from it, which ostensibly can function as its own short narrative about the pre-meddling Monk. Such a thing — taking a fragment of something-that-never-was and releasing it as its own shorter story — isn't unheard of: see for example Rain Gods, even if it's not a 1:1 analogy.

If we could credibly take Harness's word that the novelisation was planned for back in 2014 or so, we could have an {{unproduced}} page about How The Monk Got His Habit (novelisation), the unfinished and unreleased novelisation. This is distinct from the short prose story about "Roger" in his TARDIS that was in fact released in 2020 as part of Doctor Who: Lockdown!. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 12:21, May 17, 2020 (UTC)