L.J. Scott: Retirement 13 had been scripted as one long installment. This was in part, to avoid having another seemingly Susan and Master only installment which might leave our readers thinking that the good guys don't get out of this one. But also, it was to catch-up previously cut bits that needed to be explained before the final installment was penned.
Though written as one continuous, long installment, studio robb felt it worked best as a two-parter, allowing Susan to have another bit on her own, before bringing in others...
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1: The openning clips of Susan's face were just what I was looking for and was perfectly realized.
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2: The Master's comments about the Doctor changing, and openly thwarting other people's affairs, is my own opinion of the Sylvester McCoy years. While there had been the occasional 'Doctor stirring the pot' show such as 'The Invasion Of Time', McCoy's last two seasons were almost back-to-back 'the Doctor shows up to set things to right before he fully understands what's going on'. For me, part of a good Doctor Who story is following along with the Doctor as he discovers the mystery of what's going on, then debating if he should get involved and how. But the creative staff for seasons 25-26 wanted to distinguish McCoy's period from the rest by making him 'The Human Bomb', as they termed it.
In "Retirement?" I started writing the serial as a typical Doctor Who adventure, not having seen a Sylvester McCoy show to that point. After seeing several Sylvester McCoy episodes, while I tried to polish the dialog to sound more like him, I decided not to change to story to fit his more confrontational style.
If I had, it would have ended up more along the lines of: The Doctor knew all along that some one was setting up a scavenger hunt to collect the segments of the key-to-time and faked his retirement to play along until he found the culprit. Once discovering it was the Master, he would have thrown the segments at him, and taunted the Master to go ahead and assemble it. The Master would then discover that one of the segments is booby-trapped and the Master has lost because the Doctor knew all along what was going to happen and had worked with the White Guardian ahead of time to replace one of the segments with the fake.
But for me, this sort of controlling, trying to be in charge all the time, character is the sign of an insecure person B.S.ing for himself. Not as they were selling it as a knowledgeable, experienced person of strength. Whether others agree with me on this or not, I still find that the Sylvester McCoy shows are the ones I watch out of a sense of completeness, and not a sense of anticipation...
Anyhow, off of my soap box. The rest of the examples the Master gives to Susan on this page are factually true, but given a false spin. It's these kind of lies that always get us to do things that we regret later after we learn the facts.
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3: When people convince themselves of who someone is and who someone should be, when that person takes an unexpected turn in their life and pursues a different life, some will characterize this as the death of the person they knew and the beginning of a person they don't know. This is what the Master is playing on the most, try to separate Susan from the Doctor by selling that, on the day the Doctor became a Time Lord, her grandfather was gone even if the body of the person she called grandfather still walked around. And here we see it starting to work!
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4: And with once again pounding on the fact that the Doctor is gone for good we go straight to... But that scene was pushed off to become the opener for part two. As a hint, let's just say that it's only when we're absolutely sure of what the truth is, that it turns out we are wrong...
studio robb: I’m not fully certain as to why this is
a two-part chapter...though I’m pretty sure part of the reason had to do with Jay
Ritchie informing us that DWIS was going to publish two more issues and then
call it quits so we had better wrap things up.
That, and a
pretty good clue is that this issue of DWIS was dated "Year 1992". (>.<)
"Doctor Who" had
ostensibly ended its run in 1989 (1990 in the
A good portion of Susan’s dialogue in this story came from
the original "Sundial" script I had submitted at the beginning of the series as
part of my "two item obligation". At the time I questioned L. J. why so much of
Susan’s dialogue had been dropped from chapters 2 and 3, and she told me not to
worry....for good character development, you don’t want to dump everything all at
once, and that what I had written would show up later in the series...and here it
is, Chapter 13, and L. J. was, as always, correct... incorporating my original
"Susan dialogue" with The Master was *so* much better.
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1: "Nosey Mrs.
Whitehall." Believe it or not, she did show up earlier. She was in Chapter 4
during the scene when Susan was trying on The Fourth Doctor’s scarf.
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2: Ian and Barbara were, as mentioned,
Susan’s "high school teachers" and companions with the First Doctor.
L.
J. like the way I rendered their images for their cameo.
If
this page reads a little confusing, it’s intentional. The idea was to have the
reader’s thoughts be as jumbled as Susan’s.
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3: In past episodes
that have shown the interior of The Master’s TARDIS, it has been dark.
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