The
Female of the Species STARTED by a comment on a forum about the old Doctor
Who episode “The Gunfighters’ that ‘Brits can’t
do Westerns’ as if that was a character flaw for us. Well, obviously
I had to rise to the challenge.
But WHAT exactly IS a ‘Western’? It actually covers a whole range of films from Gone With The Wind to Unforgiven with Blazing Saddles somewhere in the middle.
My first thought was something set around the real life location of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ because I am very familiar with those books. And I had planned something like an alien bothering the peaceful people of a NICE prairie town. But then I was watching UK History one quiet afternoon and there was a drama documentary about the building of the Central Pacific Railway, the western half of the railroad across the USA that united the country in the post-Civil War decade. It was a huge financial and technological gamble. It was mainly built by Chinese immigrant labour that came in by boat to San Francisco. And getting through the Sierra Nevadas was the BIG, difficult bit for them. And I decided THAT was the historical event I could hook a story into.
Exactly
WHAT part of the building of the railroad I would come in on was the next
question. I did a lot of Googling on it. And I found that the work had
only gone 69 miles from Sacramento, to the town of Alta, when the winter
set in on the year 1865. That gave a wonderful, specific time and place
to set the story. Google Earth pinpointed the modern town of Alta and
a few old pictures showed it as a small frontier town in 1865.
Then, of course, I had a ready made reason to put them in California. Grace Holloway had been The Doctor’s doctor while he was ill. Having passed him fit, of course he would want to take her home. He does so, literally. Grace comes from Alta. Obviously that was MY idea. The TV movie never got that close to Grace’s background. So why not.
The idea of the TARDIS being in the way of the locomotive and having to fly over and land on the flatbed was just irresistible as something that mirrored the flying on the motorway scene in Runaway Bride. After that, when they get to Alta, the pure western kicks in. The Doctor brings his two women to the Temperance Hotel because he realises that its not all romance. From his bedroom window he witnesses the raw violence of the frontier.
The
lynch mob mentality and The Doctor holding the fort in the sheriff’s
office owes its origins to the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where the
mob does something every similar. That isn’t technically as Western,
being set in the 20th century, but the feeling was the same.
The burning of the sheriff’s office is taken from a couple of films where that sort of thing happened. I can recall seeing it done twice in recent years, once in a film I can’t remember the title or details of, and in Mel Gibson’s Patriot. It is a horrific thing to do, burning a building that people can’t get out of.
Fortunately Rose and Grace DO, since The Doctor has left them the TARDIS. It means showing space age technology to Sarah and the Bells, but the alternative is a horrible death.
This is another alien that TAKES something from the Human body. In this case, iron. In the second X-Men film, the iron is extracted from the blood of a guard in order to give Magneto enough material to make a bullet and escape from his glass prison. I had something similar in mind. Removing ALL the iron from a body WOULD kill, of course.
But
it has been established long before, that The Doctor’s blood doesn’t
have IRON, so the way to stop the monster in Human form is ready made.
And so we leave them with a happy ending. Sarah and Charlie are going to be happy together in a town that has learnt some valuable lessons from The Doctor’s visit.
I actually got some very nice feedback from Californian readers about this story. Some of them were from Alta, and they seemed very pleased to have their town mentioned.
http://learncalifornia.org/doc.asp?id=112
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Pacific_Railroad
http://www.rdwf.org.uk/doctors/D1/s3/08gunfighters.htm
