Scrooge MacDuck/How The Monk Got His Habit (short story)
Peter Harness claimed that a novelisation of Scrooge MacDuck/How The Monk Got His Habit, an unproduced Twelfth Doctor TV story, was begun by him at the same time as he wrote the episode itself, only for both to originally be scrapped.
However, in 2020, after Harness unveiled the original synopsis as part of the Doctor Who: Lockdown! watchalong of his story The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion, he was convinced by the positive fan reaction to release the "opening scene of the novelisation that never was", in the form of a short story, similar to Russell T Davies's earlier release of the long-forgotten Doctor Who and the Time War as part of the same Lockdown! event.
It was somewhat unclear whether this was merely a fun framing device, or if it was actually a snippet of a larger and cancelled novelisation, but at any rate, the released story featured none of the original TV synopsis's Grigori Rasputin plotline, instead being a single farcical scene set before the putative Rasputin shenanigans, with the Monk still in his TARDIS and not yet going by the name of the Meddling Monk. Either way, due to being presented as "discarded," the events of the short story are not considered valid on this Wiki.
Summary
Listening to some Earth music in his TARDIS's console room, a Renegade Time Lord currently operating under the alias of "Roger" is put off by the increasingly tinny nature of the sound of the sophisticated TARDIS hi-fi system. The course of action upon which he decides to rectify this and not ruin his evening baffles even the TARDIS herself.
Characters
References
- The Renegade Time Lord not yet known as the Monk is in his fifth incarnation.
- The Monk can order his TARDIS to perform various functions by typing instructions into the command program.
- The Monk has spent a sizeable amount of time in Earth's 1970s, where he picked up a smoking habit, specifically favouring Tufty Shag pipe tobacco.
- "Woofer" is defined by the TARDIS as "a loudspeaker designed to reproduce low frequencies".
Notes
- In a callback to early Doctor Who novelisations, "TARDIS" is rendered as "Tardis", instead.
- In the original TV story outline, this scene was supposed to be a setup for the Monk listening to an old record of the song "Ra-Ra-Rasputin" and being inspired to go and make the real Grigori Rasputin listen to it. This would have been his first act of time-meddling as a Renegade and also kicked off the plot of the TV story.
- In the 2022 story The Power of the Doctor a different Time Lord, the Master was held to have been Rasputin and features the Boney M. song "Rasputin" diagetically as well.
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