Wednesday, July 1, 2009

JS Doctor - Mesomorph

One Hundred And Fiftieth Entry in the YOA Unauthorized Programme Guide Finite Imagination Appendix O' Emohawks


14D - Polymorph -

CD Blurb
---------------

"How do you kill something that can look like anything?"

YEARS AGO, IT CAME TO EARTH.

"It is the ultimate warrior -- a mutant that can change shape to suit its terrain and deceive its enemies. Uh, one problem is, it's criminally insane."

NOW, IT IS AWAKE.

"It feeds off the human psyche, seeks out the deranged, the unbalanced and the emotionally crippled."

ALIVE.

"It's a sort of emotional vampire. It changes shape to provoke a negative emotion - jealousy, envy, anger, sloth - and then drains them out of its prey."

AND EXTREMELY HOSTILE.

"Doctor...what is it?"

"Irrelevant. The real problem is something else. Something called..."

DARA HAMILTON!!




Plot Summary
--------------

"This week's "Doctor Who" contains scenes which are unsuitable for younger viewers and people of a an erotic disposition. You have been warned, you worthless scum..."


At a Riverdance concert in Northern Ireland, Professor Clinton Funt discovers what appears to be the remains of a new type dinosaur in the esky where the tins of beer are kept. While most people would be suspicious of hithertoo unknown sixty-five-million-year-old fossils being found under the booze, Funt is something of a moron and shows no curiosity whatsoever.

The remains are placed into a doggy bag and transported to the local National History Museum just next to KFC for presentation to the press and scientific community by any passing dinosaur experts who happen to be in Ireland and sober enough to attend. Professor Funt then decides to majorly piss off the entire academic community by naming the new sort of dinosaur the Clintosaurofuntus Rex, the most stupidly named-reptile to ever walk the Earth.

As Funt is preparing for his press conference, a familiar-looking teenage mother points out how utterly ridiculous this all is - the Clintosaurofuntus Rex would never have migrated to the climes of Ireland and that such a creature could not possibly have smuggled into O'Rielly's beer esky without anyone noticing.

Realizing that his blind faith in his own genius is crumbling, Funt orders the student thrown out of his office before she threatens his world-view, and she is quickly placed in a dumpster outside and quietly forgotten about.

The TARDIS lands in Dublin so the Doctor can celebrate his new found freedom by visiting the world's biggest Blake's 7 waxwork museum and get plastered on Guinness and be seduced by beautiful Irish barmaids as Clannad music plays in the background. The Time Lord has managed the first when he reads in the local paper, "The Irish Racist" that Professor Funt is unveiling his dinosaur at the history museum. However, the Doctor's keen-if-slightly-dulled-by-alcohol senses realize that the strange armor-plated squidgy, splodgy, squelchy thing is not a dinosaur but the default shape of a polymorph!

For those of you too stupid to extrapolate any meaning from that painfully obvious name, polymorphs evolved from lumps of genetic waste scattered by advanced civilizations who couldn't be bothered cobbling together bits of metal to make rebellious mechanoids or simulants since living tissue could be grown far more cheaply and in a variety of interesting shapes. The cast offs were bunged in pods marked "Do Not Open" and jettisoned out into space. The genetically challenged mutants' incredibly strong survival instinct kicked their DNA into gear and allowed the creatures to develop a number of useful attributes - useful, that is, if you happen to like terrifying innocent people and causing severe amounts of chaos and death.

The Polymorphs are capable of changing their shapes into anything you can dream of and quite a few things you can't - animals, vegetables, minerals, light beams... This impressive shape shifting, coupled with their telepathic skills, allows them to mindlessly pursue sustenance: the negative emotions of anyone it can get close to, the stronger the better. The Polymorphs thus probe the minds of their victims, work out the best form to assume to provoke a given emotion, then drain said emotion out of them. The victims usually go quietly insane and run around being useless and harmless to the Polymorphs who feed on the victims again and again until there's nothing left.

Now you've got this incredibly over-complicated and unnecessarily detailed back story like "Bartholomew's Guide to Alien Planets: Notes From the Field" like that nutter whovortex3000 writes on Outpost Gallifrey to the enjoyment of no one, we can now move on with what shall be hereafter referred to, no matter how inaccurately, 'the plot'.

Struggling to his feet, the Doctor stumbles out of the pub in the vague direction of the museum, shouting incoherently to anyone who will listen that he must save the world!

By the time the dissolute Gallifreyan gatecrashes the museum, Funt's conference is well under way and the various journalists are rapidly turning into a lynch mob thanks to the Professor's contemptible "Jurassic Park" jokes which go down so badly it leaves the press conference so utterly silent you can hear a pin drop. You can also hear the sound of the Doctor demanding to know where "the fucking mutant" has got to as he tries to haul a fire extinguisher off the wall to attack the unguarded display case of the dinosaur bones.

The security guards haul the Doctor away, but by now he's so drunk out of his skull he's still calling for more cold to keep the creature frozen. His story he is actually an immortal time traveler come to Earth to save it from chameleonic life forms doesn't go down well, either and soon his magician's garb leads to him being mistaken for Paul Daniels and being sent to rehab.

Meanwhile, three of the journalists are too busy lighting up hand-rolled herbal cigarettes to notice the sibilant telepathic whisper chanting "hAtch... fEEd... grOW... thEre! thE shAPEs! thE cOloUrs! sO PieRcing! sO ShRill! sO sUcCULent! sUch rIch fOod..." and then there is a loud commotion of breaking glass. The three journalists look to see the cute ickle dinosaur chirping and running away.

Being your typical Irish, they shrug this off, as well as the "wArmth... chAnGe... grOw..." that echoes in their minds. Instead, they wander off to get a Plough Man's lunch, and if the Plough Man objects, they'll punch his lights out.

The Doctor is able to convince the security squads to let him investigate by promising to buy them all a drink some time, and he discovers that the dinosaur has disappeared - but the bones were not stolen as the window was smashed from the INSIDE, not from the outside! The security guards shrug and say that's a mighty fine piece of deduction, since he could have just watched the security videos and seen the dinosaur escape.

With a polymorph now set loose on the Earth, the Doctor wonders exactly what the hell he should do now - and the dimmest and most stupid of the Guarda (Chip Jamison) suggests they call in Colonel Crichton of UNIT. For once, the Doctor can't honestly say Crichton will make things worse and thus allows the troops to be called in for the hell of it.

The Doctor pops out into the alleyway to quietly throw up into a dumpster and hears a strange scream from within. The familiar pregnant teenage girl clambers out and the Doctor scrambles away in terror as he is confronted by... DARA HAMILTON!!

The Time Lord sprays Dara with his fire extinguisher, certain that the polymorph has assumed this horrific shape so it will be able to drain the Doctor's fear. Dara coughs and splutters and points out that she's not an alien in disguise. The Doctor points out that for an ordinary human her body is not freezing up like it should, but Dara reminds him of her mutant alien lovechild which has rewritten her biology.

Dara explains she was thrown out of Saint Canterbury's School for Girls and thus blackmailed her way to Ireland to start a new life as Jessica "Jessie" Holbock, intending to go on chat shows with her hideous half-human offspring and make a fortune.

The Doctor shakes his head in disgust, knowing that Dara is the real thing - the polymorph could only base its shape on the Doctor's nightmares, and Dara was always much worse than that. Thus, he agrees to allow Dara to help him fight aliens one last time... in the vitally important tactical role of 'live bait'.

Ducking into a Virgin Megastore, Dara is instantly attracted to the latest boy band album on display - but it turns out the display itself is the Polymorph, which quickly transforms into a huge, fleshy, slimy-appendaged creature with a set of sharp teeth on extendable jaws. From between the jaws, a thin, slimy sucker comes out and attaches to Dara's forehead, with a quiet, squishy "splat", and Dara glows red as fears and neuroses of being unfashionable are sucked into the Polymorph, which shifts into the form of a store detective and runs away.

The Doctor meets up with Dara, who is now able to complete whole sentences without dropping stupid pop culture references to Blade Runner, Total Recall, Dire Straits and The X-Files, making her far easier to deal with than before. Curiously, the strange effect has caused her appearance to change, making her look cuter and actually young enough to look like a sixteen year old girl.

As the Time Lord runs around searching for the store detective, Dara wanders off by herself since she no longer has the overwhelming desire to draw attention to herself and be the centre of attention. But as she leaves the store, she can hear a strange muttering whisper "WaNt WaNt WaNt! NeED! acHe! fEed! eNgorGE!"

Dara comes across an homeless old man whom she tries to convince to go inside for shelter. The old man refuses, preferring instead the comfort of his cardboard box. Dara angrily demands he get off his alcoholic dole-bludging arse and get to safety, but the hobo points out that Dara is too rich and pampered to make sense to a penniless, senile tramp like him.

Dara nods, not realizing that the old man is the polymorph nurturing her egotism, vanity and snobbery, but she works it out when the box closes in around the old man and then, it's shape changing back to its large slimy form, its jaws extend, and the thin, slimy sucker come out and plops onto Dara's forehead. Again.

The Doctor arrives as the polymorph changes into a space hopper and bounces off, leaving the dazed Dara now realizing that all people are truly equal, and her background and privilege do not make her automatically superior. This sudden humility makes her look even more attractive and also increases her bra size to the DD range.

By the time UNIT finally arrives, the Doctor finds himself actually starting to like the friendly, helpful and passionate Dara who has literally had half her brain sucked out. Returning to the TARDIS, the Doctor collects his lucky four-leaf clover. OK, it's not as useful as a device that can scan for alien physiology and detect the polymorph's life signs... but it looks nice on his lapel.

The duo get on a bus driven by a violent alcoholic buss driver who has recently stabbed several customers and they engage his services to hunt down a salivating psi-parasite and decide to pointlessly chase after a teddy bear, which turns into: a bucket and spade, a bowl of petunias, a Tonka dump truck, a doll wearing a long hoop dress, a white rotary-dial telephone, a toy elephant, a two-tone hat, a baseball mitt with ball, a toy boxer, a toy drum, a yellow police box lamp, a red toy Volkswagen beetle, a roller-skate, a traffic cone, a lampshade, a toy penguin with a sign on its belly saying FROBISHER GROUPIE, a piggy bank, a Ken doll, a blue potty, an alarm clock, a tennis ball, a tennis shoe, a large pot, a yellow Koosh Ball, a floor-scrub brush, a bucket on its side, a tiny blue toy whale, a gold Logie, an incandescent light bulb, a red old-style horn, a Tibetan yak bell, a yellow ball, a red sock, and a fluffy white rabbit.

When it was in the shape of a potty it managed to ravage the UNIT troops, completely draining all their incompetence and stupidity but tragically that has left the squad a ruthless band of highly intelligent trained commandos, so by the time the third episode has started they have already armed themselves with liquid nitrogen.

The polymorph attacks the bus, sending it out of control and crashing, before feasting on the last of Dara's ego, as she fears she might break a nail in the ensuing disaster. Thus, the Dara that staggers out of the wreckage is gobsmackingly beautiful to reflect the state of her purified soul: full, soft lips beneath a small, pert little nose, large, dark, expressive, long lashed eyes, all set in a heart shaped face of smooth, creamy skin; long, lustrous, straight hair of the richest red you could ever imagine, not a flaming red, but a deep, rich, some might say sultry, red that framed her angelically lovely face beautifully; her trim, sexy body only a young girl of 16 could possess, and as for her...

Sorry, drifted off there.

However, the polymorph assumes the form of the Doctor, leaving two identical magicians protesting that they are the real Time Lords. The UNIT troops turn to Colonel Crichton for guidance, but even his newly found intelligence cannot work out a way to tell which is which.

Dara brilliantly suggests they shoot both of the Doctors to make sure the polymorph is stopped - and while the real Doctor is struck dumb at such noble and rational thought from Dara, the polymorph transforms into a roadrunner and tries to scarper, but the UNIT troops freeze it in one form, trapping it for good. Triumphant, the UNIT troops light up cigars and enter the nearest pub to party with the cute Irish lasses.

The Doctor, barely controlling his own drool, offers to take his incredibly wonderful and beautiful companion with him in the TARDIS to see the universe. But Dara turns him down, insisting she now has intelligence and compassion to make a change on Earth and provide a proper life for the three-hearted, cold-blooded, red-eyed, purple-skinned brood gestating in her womb. She kisses the Doctor tenderly on the cheek and hurries off to start a new life as "Jessie".

The shattered Doctor watches her go, speechless at the irony of it all.

With UNIT now commanded by competent professionals and all his companions gone for good, the Doctor realizes he no longer has any ties to 20th century Earth, so he glumly returns to the TARDIS to find some new friends and an ongoing regular cast to pester the life out of...

Truly, this is the end of an error. And, no, I spelt that correctly.


Books/Other Related Material-
Doctor Who & The Dispensable Irish Stereotypes
Doctor Who - After The Shadow Time
Mesomorphic Maiesiophilia Monthly: Dara Hamilton Fold Out Issue!!


Links and References -
The last time the Doctor visited the Blake's 7 Waxwork Museum, the Nestle Consciousness animated the dummies and lead them on a bloodbath rampage while trading witty quips all the while ("The Donut Horror" Serial 48C).


Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor and Dara once visited Ireland before and discovered her name translates as "thick as two short planks from an oak tree", while in Hebrew it means "a pearl of stupidity".


Dialogue Train Wrecks
---------------------

Doctor: Dara, you're nine months pregnant. Why on Earth do you want to go to "Virgin Store"?

-------

Dara: You know how, like, all your books say that some dinosaurs go to places they look good in?

Funt: You mean my many works postulating theories as to why certain species
equipped to handle certain climates migrated to different locations?

Dara: Yeah, that. Anyway, the Clintofuntasaurus or whatever kinda makes sense with that.

Funt: Of course. My discoveries always validate my claims.

Dara: Whatever. The thing is, there's no chance in hell that lizard should be found in an Irish cool box. I mean, it's from a jungle for the love of Split Endz! What the hell is a jungle dinosaur doing in Northern Ireland?

Funt: It liked potatoes.

Dara: Oh. That makes total sense! I mean, otherwise, they'd have to be like the SO dumbest creatures ever to walk the Earth.

Funt: Nonsense, my dear. You're hardly likely to relinquish that title.

Dara: Aw, you're so sweet!

-------

Doctor: I'm known as... Smith. Doctor John Smith.

Funt: An obvious alias.

Doctor: Use them often, do you? When you're down on Hamstead Heath 'looking for badgers' with all your loser pervert mates, before the lights go out and you start your filthy evil practices of homo-hetero-deviant-LUST?!?

Funt: Yes, actually.

Doctor: Thought so!

-------

Dara: What were you looking for?

Doctor: My lucky deck of cards. I know this great trick where I can guess the
card YOU picked, plus the next three cards that lie under it and if you lose, you have to take off all your clothes.

Dara: How is this going to help up take out the Polymorph?

Doctor: Who said anything about the Polymorph?!!


Dialogue Gems
-------------

Doctor: Professor Clinton Funt, I am sorry that your little discovery has managed to get up and walk away without you being the wiser for it, and I am sorry that your name will not be etched on the winds of time with Darwin and Leekey and such. But most of all, I am TRULY sorry to see that despite ALL the years of education you've obtained, you can still manage to be a fat, sweaty, has-been WANKER!!! So make yourself scarce, you horse-assed fairy, I'm more than a match for you and Dublin isn't BIG enough for BOTH of us! GET YOUR OWN PARAMILITARY ORGANIZATION TO FIGHT ALIEN MONSTERS, YOU UGLY BUG-EYED GIT!!

-------

(The Polymorph shape shifts into a high school athletics coach and blows a whistle, distracting Colonel Charles Crichton of UNIT Britain.)

Polymorph: Charlie! You slacker! You miserable excuse for a human! Call yourself an athlete? You good for nothing worthless retch!

Crichton: No, it's not true, Coach!

Polymorph: The only reason you've got athlete's foot is that no one else will be friends with you!

Crichton: Just give me one more chance...

Polymorph: That's the problem with you nancy boys, you're one big personality flaw, not worth the genetic material you're encoded on...

Crichton: Yes! Mamma always said I was a mistake!

(The Coach's face starts stretching...)

Crichton: No! Please! Don't! eeep!

(The Polymorph gorges itself on Crichton's brain.)

Polymorph: sELf-Pity! dEsPerAtion! fEAr! sO swEet... tHIs gUy'S a LOseR aNd nO miSTaKe!

--------

Crichton: ...and you can take back your Space Telephone thingamajig.

Doctor: It's called "the Super Outer Space Telephone Thingie Spiff-a-rinno"!! Why can you people never use the right terminology. Wait a minute, why are you handing this back to me? You need it to contact me to help you save the Earth! The twenty-first century is when it all changes, Colonel, and you've got to be ready... so, you're well and truly screwed without me.

Crichton: Nonsense, old fruit. That blighter stole all my bitterness and made me the man I am today. It's my job to protect the Earth from alien threats and safeguard the future of humanity, and I'm more than capable of that. No need to throw your Gallifreyan love-spuds on the barbecue, is there? You'd just get in the way. You can see yourself out.

Doctor: Oh. Right. Does that mean I'm fired as your unpaid scientific advisor?

Crichton: Doctor, old bean, legally you were never hired in the first place. Close the door behind you.

Doctor: Well, it was nice working with you again, Colonel. Perhaps we can do so again?

Crichton: Unless we're working on jigsaw puzzles, Doctor, I hope you'll understand when I say I hope we'll never work together again. No offense, old love.

Doctor: None taken... You're total shit compared to Lethbridge-Stewart, you do know that right?

(Colonel Crichton stares at him.)

Crichton: Are you STILL here? Get out before I set my UNIT aide on you!

-------

Doctor: Come with me, Dara.

Dara: With you?

Doctor: You and me in the TARDIS like the good old days!

Dara: Why the hell would I want to do that? It wouldn't exactly be a smart move, would it? We should both move on. Where you go, you go alone.

Doctor: No, seriously, plenty of room aboard.

Dara: Doctor, there's still so much of Earth I haven't seen yet. So much of our past that needs to be studied. If I go off with you, it could upset that need and alter the future. There are adventures and discoveries out there waiting ONLY for Jessie Holbock and her curious, ammonia-breathing children to find it? No, I can't.

Doctor: Aw, go on. Be your best friend!

Dara: We might meet again one day, when the time is right.

(The Doctor does his Bambi Eyes expression and flutters his eyelashes.)

Doctor: Puh-leeeeeeeeeeeeease?

Dara: Goodbye, Doctor. Again, I say goodbye.

(She turns and waddles off.)

Doctor: Fair enough. Oh, and Dara?

(Dara looks back.)

Dara: Yeah?

Doctor: You are, like, SO totally hot at the moment.

(Dara smiles slightly.)

Dara: Yeah. Thanks. You too.

(She leaves. The Doctor stares lonely into the middle distance and softly says:)

Doctor: I lose the girl on the same day she actually starts looking sexy and has a personality to match. I started out with absolutely nothing companion-worthy... and I couldn't hold onto it!

(He enters the TARDIS, slams the door and the police box slowly dematerializes.)

Doctor: (VO) Great... JUST FUCKING GREAT!



Listener Reviews
-----------------

"Watching us with fascination
Time to end it's hibernation
A polymorph, for it is he,
Holds so fast so none can flee
Attacking prey with some commotion
Sucking out our strong emotion
Feeding off what we're feeling
It sends innocents like us reeling!"
- Dr. Seuss & The Terrifying Organism of Death (1998)


"Dara? Pfft! Now Charley, THERE was a companion worth being knocked up!"
- Nigel J Verkoff (2000)


"Remaking old sci-fi horror films as Doctor Who stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't... guess which one this falls into? Is that your knife? May I use to hack my fingers off one by one to distract myself from this inanity? No, thank YOU..."
- Ewen Campion-Clarke (2006)


"Polymorph is the weakest story of the thirtieth season, but only because it lacks characters and victims we care about, a realistic backdrop and a genuine threat. With a solo Doctor in a Dublin written clearly by someone that's heard it's in Ireland but isn't a hundred per cent sure, Polymorph owes a lot to the classic 50s B-movies it plagiarizes when not ripping off episodes of Red Dwarf. If you're into that sort of stuff, you may be in for a let down - there are plenty of pale imitations of paranoid slaughter fest with an ever-changing monster flicks, but none more lacking interest and potential than this. It'd probably make a decent 45 minute episode for the new show. Oh, wait, that's not canon! The new series is BLASPHEMY! DO NOT BLASPHEME! DO NOT BLASPHEME!" - The Jeffrey Coburn Handbook (2000)



Jeffrey Coburn Speaks!
----------------------

"We did both Devil Gate Drive and Polymorph during the same production block. By the time Polymorph rolled around, we had almost four days of no sleep. The only thing I truly remember about this story was the music store scene with this annoying gorilla... or was it just Dara?

Oh, and the bus chase that we had to take over and over and over because the poor guy at the wheel had no idea how to drive a bus in the first place, and kept running over pedestrians.

This was the story where we finally got rid of Dara for good. And poor Sheri as well. It was really rather cruel, in a way. She and I got along famously, she'd been my babysitter when I was younger and she had both her real hips at the time. So, we'd known each other for years before working together on Doctor Who. It really did help me, having her there during those first few frightening episodes, since we both started our roles in the same story, we were both new kids on the set. It helped forge a good, strong bond between us especially as she was so senile and knocking things over all the time, really took the heat off me when I screwed things up. I don't miss her, though.

It was an interesting ending, finally making Dara sexy and likeable. Of course, I have always been in complete agreement with the idea that certain shenanigans should absolutely not be allowed in the TARDIS. The problems there would be if the Doctor and his companion got into a romantic relationship are almost unimaginable - too much soapy 'share our feelings' rubbish, which stops Dara or Nyssa or whomever from being the audience viewpoint.

A quick shag, however, would have been nice."


Sheri Devine Speaks!
--------------------

"When Dara left, I was very sad, because it meant I had to go away and not come back as Dara any more. Which happens to a lot of companions, I suppose. I would have want to have continued, especially as she stopped being such an annoying fucking bitch at the end. I don't know if Devil Gate Drive would be a good story to go out on, but I'm not sure if any story would have been good to go out on. At least there weren't any fucking Trods in this one.

Originally, Jessie wasn't just some new identity for Dara but a completely different person for some other actress, but some crap happened and I ended up playing her. Of course I just finished Dara and it would be hard for anyone to believe me playing someone else, so thank god we decided to just have this story a sequel with Dara coming back one last time.

My final, ending scene was a very tough one to do. I shed real tears. For the first time, I enjoyed playing her. Would I come back to the series to play Dara? Probably not, but if it was New Improved Non-Irritant Dara (or NINI-Dara), I'd do it in a heart beat."



Rumours, Slander, and Libel
---------------------------

The wake of Joseph Medina's stint as script editor was not dissimilar to the effect Genghis Khan had on western civilization. In fact, it was much closer to Vlad the Impaler.

Medina had heavily rewritten the scripts throughout Jeff Coburn's third season as the Doctor, in order to have the storylines completely screw up just about everything producer Doug Phillips had achieved in the position - the Bastard was once more a complete joke, the Dustbins not only a complete joke but complete erased from existence and unable to return ever, the previous Doctors were made canonical, as was Coburn's replacement Jym de Natale. The only part of the Doctor Who formula the SCADs had left was UNIT/WANK and Dara Hamilton.

So Medina planned to take those away from Phillips as well and completely rewrote a script entitled "Doctor Who Versus The Thing From Another World That Looks Like A Blob Every Now And Then". Simply using this script was, in itself, an insult to Phillips who had wiped his arse with the original synopsis and swore by ever breath in his body that he would never allow this story to be produced while he was in charge.

"Doctor Who Versus The Thing From Another World That Looks Like A Blob Every Now And Then" was by extraterrestrial part time writer, John S. Drew the homicidal Gargan Lobster-Man from Outer Space who had penned the season finale to Coburn's first season, "The Have-A-Good-Time Brokers" and "The Doomsday Single".

Drew was used to his scripts being completely changed beyond recognition and was happy to allow Medina to rewrite his story into one long rant against the producer for being a provocative bastard with no talent whatsoever. By adding the idea of Polymorph to the story, Medina was able to transform UNIT and Dara into the amazing set pieces they should have been all along. He then made sure the ending had the Doctor be told to piss off as they could cope without him.

Director for the story was Chip Jamison, simply because everyone else was simply too drunk and stoned to actually do the job. Chip decided that the script was good enough as is and changing it to any real degree would be a waste of time, even though the previous story, Devil Gate Drive had already had Dara depart the show for ever, no returns.

Tom Himinez the new script editor decided to change the character of Dara in the script to a character of his own devising - Jessica Holbock, the alcoholic archaeologist and not a rip off of Benny Summerfield, no chance, no siree. Jessica, or Jessie, would be played by Terese Lagana professional mud-wrestler and turf accountant. Tragically, however, her agent was a moron and scheduled her to play Jessie in the middle of the North Sea two years ago, and desperately a new actress had to be found.

Even more tragically, the only actress available was Sheri Devine, still hungover from her farewell party the night before.

The idea of Devine playing a companion already horrifically similar to Dara minutes after Dara's departure was complete insane, and thus Himinez scrapped the 'improved' version of the script and simply had Jessica turn out to be Dara in a cunning disguise, and thus the original ending of the story where Dara left could be used - even though frustratingly the character was suddenly likable.

The rest of the script with its unsubtle tirades against the rest of the production team (or "Thunderbird Geek Bastards" as they were oft referred to) was unchanged bar the decision that Colonel Crichton not rename himself Crichton the Fahey Pooftah of Death following the Polymorph altering his mind.

Recording was completed without major incident bar that time Phillips finally snapped and scream "HOW DARE YOU MOCK ME, JOSEPH, YOU UTTER, UTTER BASTARD!" pulled out a double-barreled shot gun and opened fire on the recording studio, smashing all the windows and hurling shards of glass everywhere. Fortunately, Chip Jamison suffered severe injuries and was left comatose for days.

Polymorph would be the final appearance of Dara Hamilton, bar her infesting the 25th anniversary special "The Vids of Time"...

Dara Hamilton, the spoiled fifteen-year-old college student who is best described as someone who rushes in where anyone with any kind of intelligence would fear to tread. An attendee the Canterbury School for Girls until she skipped school to torment the Doctor with her trendy vegetarianism and even more trendy lesbianism.

Always in search of improving her own hotness, Dara would always big her herself up when it would be obvious to a backward three-year-old with an IQ of minus ten she's the most unattractive, unintelligent and unlikable slut outside of Paris Hilton. A coward with a pathological inability to learn any kind of life lessons whatsoever, her flute lessons later formed the backbone of the "American Pie" film trilogy.

Never once heeding the Doctor's sage advice and with a chronic inability to make sane decisions, Dara Hamilton was a companion for eight years, longer than Tom Baker was the Doctor. And it was only in the final scenes did she actually shine as a companion, with passion and intelligence and no longer being so irritating and pushy. Dara also expresses great sorrow and sympathy for the Doctor, genuinely sad when she elects to stay behind in present-day Earth.

For those final fifteen minutes, Dara became the most interesting companion of the audio dramas thanks to the Doctor's attitude towards her. Not since the Jon Pertwee-Katy Manning era was the Doctor ever seen to become so close to a companion without actually shagging her right away.

What would become of Dara after her time with the Doctor we can only guess, but selling her story of her inhuman brood of amoral alien parasites to The Irish Racist and getting guest spots on the Jerry Springer seems a logical course of action to take.

For her journeys with the Doctor needed only a brain-altering alien psychic vampire to give her the wisdom and irreverence to make her actually nice. Of course, it will probably lead to her becoming mentally unbalanced and running amuck with an Uzi sub machine gun at local hamburger chains, but that may actually be for the best in the long run.

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