Auld Mortality

What if the Doctor had never left his home planet? What if he had never stolen a TARDIS in the first place? If he had stayed, what would become of him? Would the Doctor still be a rebellious voice against his society's default setting of dullness or would he, say, become a celebrated author and immerse himself in a probability generator and experience other worlds through a safe computer generated environment? And what of the family he left behind? And the family he would have taken with him? What would have happened to Susan?

Big Finish created the Unbound series for just this purpose: to explore the what-if's about the Doctor, to see how things could have happened differently for him and how changes in his circumstances would impact the universe he so often saves (although in the early days of the show the stakes were not made to be so high as the whole universe on a weekly basis). Author Marc Platt got the first shot at this with Auld Mortality, and as he is fascinated with the Doctor's home and the conditions there it would only be right for him to start there. His version of the stay-home Doctor is grouchy as ever but lacking the drive to really want to leave home and explore. Indeed the notion has occurred to this Doctor once but he changed his mind and stayed put, and grumbles to himself about the state of the planet. Now he is saddled with his family in their ancestral home, more particularly with his uncle, Quences, and a robotic beast manservant named Badger. Quences has big plans for his nephew; he sees him ascending to the presidency that governs their world to bring honour and title to the family. The Doctor isn't interested. But there are other members of the family, that girl named Susan who keeps calling the Doctor "grandfather", she might do in his place.

As far as series continuity goes, the name of the Doctor's home planet hadn't been mentioned yet on screen and would not be for several years, nor had the name of his species for that matter, but as Auld Mortality is written from the perspective at the far ends of the series both do get mentioned, as do all the inner political working of the home planet and it's people. Marc Platt did not come up with those details himself; they were carefully built up by the series producers over the years and culminated in the revelations of the recent series', but the Doctor's family is very much his own creation (aside from Susan) from his seventh Doctor novel, Lungbarrow, which is still a long way off from here. When I listen to these sorts of things I always try to put them in a context of other episodes but have to remind myself that they are outside the realm of the series and are not meant to be subject to continuity. It's a fun notion to see what could have happened, and there are still several others out there from the range which I am going to drop in at turning points in the series just to see how things compare.

Despite the Unbound range not being a series as such with regular characters, Auld Mortality does have a sequel which will be next, with Geoffrey Bayldon as the Doctor once more and Carole Ann Ford as a gutsier version of Susan. Further episodes see some other regular series characters pop up as alternatives to their established selves, but there are several other actors lined up to play alternative Doctors alongside them. The range stopped at 8 episodes in 2008 but has recently been revived with some new direction to it later this year, so there will be even more "what if..?" moments to come.

NEXT EPISODE: UNBOUND - A STORM OF ANGELS