#any excuse to see dt in a tux

Behind the scenes of The Lazarus Experiment (Part Seven)

Excerpts from The Fact or Fiction article in DWM 519

The starting-point for the sixth episode of the third season of the 21st century series was a two-word phrase given by showrunner Russell T. Davies to first-time Doctor Who writer Stephen Greenhorn: Mad Scientist.  Over the course of several drafts, in which Greenhorn’s ‘Professor Anger’ became a ‘Professor Lazarus’, it mutated into a Marvel Comics-style ‘supervillain origin’ story: “This is unashamedly Dr Octopus,” Davies told those who gathered for the episode’s tone meeting in August 2006, “a mad scientist’s experiment gone wrong.”

Fittingly, then, the story went under the working title The Madness of Professor Lazarus - but the eventual title appears to acknowledge a debt to the original BBC sci-fi thriller, The Quatermass Experiment (1953), remounted in 2005 as a live BBC Four broadcast featuring both David Tennant and Lazarus actor Mark Gatiss among its cast. That original Experiment, of course, ended with its scientist hero confronting the hideously mutating remains of a once-proud man within the Gothic environs of a magnificent London church…

Link to [ part one ] of this post, or click the #whoBtsLaz tag, or the [ full episode list]