Yellow Fever and How to Cure It (unproduced TV story)
Yellow Fever and How to Cure It is an unproduced story for Doctor Who. It was to be the third appearance of the Autons as part of the aborted 1985 season of Colin Baker's Doctor.
It was meant to be scripted by Robert Holmes, and the story was to run for three forty-five minute episodes.
Plot outline[[edit] | [edit source]]
The story was to take place in Singapore and feature the return of the Autons, with suggested appearances by the Tremas Master, the Rani and the Brigadier on holiday. This story was written later than the rest for this season, so its script was only in its proposal form at the time of its cancellation.
A basic outline for the story was to see the Master and Rani operating under the guise of a travelling street theatre and involved in a plot with the Autons. The story would open with Peri seeing the Statue of Liberty on the scanner screen, and she would think she was back in America, only to find they were in a massive cultural garden with many miniature landmarks on display.[1]
Legacy[[edit] | [edit source]]
- This is the first of only two original season 23 scripts which did not receive any kind of an adaptation. There were three main reasons: First, the original author for this story, Robert Holmes, died in 1986 and so was unavailable when Target Books elected to publish novelisations of the first three season 23 stories in 1989 and again when Telos Publishing attempted to publish the scripts in 1990. The script was also in its early infancy when abandoned, with only a single episode and a synopsis written before the season-long The Trial of a Time Lord replaced it.
- The Autons finally returned to the screen in the television story Rose.
- The Brigadier never encountered the Sixth Doctor in the "proper" TV series, his next meeting being with the Doctor's seventh incarnation in Battlefield — though the Brigadier and the Sixth Doctor would meet in the post-cancellation charity TV special Dimensions in Time, as well as the audio drama The Spectre of Lanyon Moor.
- The Auton Infinity was originally conceived as a take on Yellow Fever and How to Cure It, featuring the Sixth Doctor and Peri meeting Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Autons. Writer Tim Foley was asked to "avoid Singapore", hence the setting of Snowdonia. However, the story was developed into an adventure for the Fifth Doctor instead.[2]
