COMING SOON From DANBURY Productions
DOCTOR WHO : THE AUDIO ADVENTURES - SERIES 2
SPECTRE OF THE ZYGONS - Written By Daniel Bury & Jessica Charlton
OUT IN FEBRUARY
SYNOPSIS:
THE RETURN OF THE ZYGONS : The Zygons came back in "Zygon Gambit" last year, and during production of that I kind of wanted to bring the Zygons back for the following series. But this time put them in a new environment of story telling which allowed them to show off a more sinister and scary potential. Zygon Gambit was set on another planet, I wanted to bring the Zygons back to earth and do a sort of Mission Impossible type story. The Zygons are an immensely popular monster in the whoniverse. They are certainly one of my favourite monsters and when you have something which you love on screen and is successful in the public eye, and of course it helps if they make you a bit of money on the side there is a desire to see more of it. (Not that I profited from Series 1) I'm merely saying that as a means of on a production side of things to do with movie sequels or remakes in general. Things coming back for more because we know these things were popular and we love them and the production team, and the production team have the same mode of thinking where they say "This thing was popular with people and we know it was popular with people because they made us a lot of money, lets bring it back and make even more money from it a second time around". Monsters coming back are a means of recycling. It's always good to play it safe and bring back a few old favourites in a series - maybe two or three? You can bring the same monsters back but in a different mode of storytelling... it works? wouldn't you agree?
NOTES: This story was a means of me saying 'I'm bored of doing stories set on planets and spaceships, stories with heavy and over complicated Sci Fi concepts" and so to break away from that I thought I'd try something a little different. This is the only attempt in this series not to do a base under siege or space story. I thought for the hell of it why not do a spy thriller sort of Mission Impossible/ James Bond type of story and have The Doctor work for the British government on behalf of her majesty's secret. He's worked for UNIT, He's worked alongside Counter Measures so why not have him work with the BSS (British Secret Service) Have the doctor play the spy! He and Pip have to work together to take back some classified plans for a nuclear weapon in order to save the world from complete destruction. There isn't that much sci fi elements to it which is refreshing given the last five stories that have been released up until this point. It's an experimental idea, I always strive to try new things. And I feel that that has been done with this particular story. I'm really happy with it.
The idea came about when I was writing "Dangers of the Deep" and I was over looking a number of story ideas and concepts which I had written down on post it notes and stuck on a board for the next series. I was reviewing these ideas and a lot of them just seemed the same to me, and things were getting repetitive - spaceship after spaceship after spaceship and alien invasions from mars, it all got quite dull the mode of ideas that were being generated around. I had emails coming in from people pitching stories which I didn't really want to do, not that the ideas weren't good enough we had some interesting ones which I hope one day will still make good stories but for me and my tastes in what I wanted to do with Series 2, it just didn't mix well with me. I do like spy thriller as a genre and so to incorporate that into a doctor who was challenging. But doable. Me and Jessica Charlton only had six weeks to write the script because I was working on "Dangers of the Deep" at the same time, I was writing that as well as this. Jess came up with the storyline and we just ran with it. I don't remember who's idea it was to add in Zygons? could have been Jess's I don't remember. But they worked into the story some how, there were some bits that needed to be re-written in order for parts of the Zygon plot to make sense. It was a challenge but we did it and I'm very happy with it. Hope you will be too. - Daniel Bury (12th of February 2016)
