Brief Encounter
Brief Encounters was the umbrella title for an occasional series of new prose fiction stories that appeared in the Doctor Who Magazine family of publications in the early-to-mid 1990s. The series tried to investigate characterisation and mood more than plot. Towards this end, it combined characters who had not been paired on television. While many of the stories featured the Doctor, a number did not, preferring to examine the lives of companions or villains at a time other than known adventures with the Doctor.
Overview
Brief Encounters' mandate was to ask "what if?" questions.
- What if this companion met that companion?
- What if this incarnation of the Doctor met another incarnation's assistant?
- What if this villain met that monster?
- What if we explored a tiny emotional beat in the life of a known character?
Examples of stories resulting from asking these sorts of questions included: a pedestrian collision between Sarah Jane Smith and Dodo Chaplet, a chess match between the Celestial Toymaker and Fenric and a wedding anniversary between the Brigadier and Doris Lethbridge-Stewart.
A largely forgotten corner of the DWU
Brief Encounters' "what if?" format meant that it was always going to challenge some established stories. Moreover, its presence in the pages of a physical magazine posed problems of access; as time has gone by, it has been increasingly difficult for later writers to even read these vignettes — much less incorporate their content into later works. Further complicating the possibility that these stories might have had a long-term impact on DWU fiction is the fact that many of them are simply whimsical. Amongst the more imaginative ideas covered in the series are:
- the implication that the Third Doctor watched Peter Cushing in Dr. Who and the Daleks
- the fact that Liz Shaw's first trip in the TARDIS was with the Fourth Doctor
- the clear inference that writer John Lucarotti is himself a character in the DWU
Beyond anomalies of content are questions of style. It's not unusual to find Brief Encounters stories which are written in the first person. Though not completely unknown in other prose work, it's still generally rare to find stories in the DWU which give such a personal perspective. Even the Doctor occasionally narrates proceedings — as in An Unfulfilled Dream — which is almost never the case in longer-form prose material.
Writers
The stories were quite often written by professional writers, and notably included the final work of television writer John Lucarotti. On at least one occasion in 1991, however, the series was the focus of a DWM competition, in which amateur writers were encouraged to submit their own "brief encounter" for possible publication. Andrew Cartmel, the Seventh Doctor's then-recently-disemployed script editor judged the competition, and pronounced a Seventh Doctor/K9 story the winner of the under-15 category, and a poignant meeting between the Doctor and a 6-year-old Katarina, the winner of the all-age group.
History of the format
The series began in DWM 167 with a very deliberate nod to the anniversary of Doctor Who. Since issue 167 was the November 1990 edition, Brief Encounters launched with a story by John Lucarotti, someone who had written during the First Doctor's era. The one-page, illustrated story became the norm for the series as seen in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine, clearly distinguishing it from other, longer short stories that the magazine occasionally published. Most future installments would stick to this format, or perhaps add a second page.
In 1994, the regular magazine abandoned the feature, shunting it off to sister publications. Its final home was the 1995 Doctor Who Yearbook, effectively an annual special edition of Doctor Who Magazine. By this point, the feature had changed complexion somewhat, and was now more "proper", multi-page short story than one-page vignette. These later, longer stories still maintained the theme of unusual pairings of characters, but they grew in size to have somewhat meatier plots.
