The God Complex

Here’s fun (perhaps). Obviously, a blog like this is a wholly self-regarding project.

So, in that spirit, I’m reproducing here a couple of pages of notes I took while reviewing The God Complex. My routine, should you care, when writing about Doctor Who is to watch the episode once (usually in my lunchbreak, via the BBC’s preview site for journalists) without taking notes. Just to give me a chance to enjoy the thing. Then, I’ll watch again the following day – and take an insane amount of notes – in insane handwriting. Which brings us to figure 1…

My first draft of notes for The God Complex

The 'rationalised' notes

Yes, it can get a bit befuddled.

With that in mind, I quite often – but not always – ‘rationalise’ my scribbles. This can help me get a clearer picture of what I want to say… but it’s a process I loathe. It feels, I guess, like having to write a plot outline. However, once done, it’s terribly helpful.

The thing on the left is what that stage looks like. Click it for a larger version.

And that, I guess, is that.

Well, kind of. I do keep a sporadic diary of sorts, and on September 14, I wrote, referring to this review: “I can’t remember the last one of these that took me so long to write. Even now, it isn’t there. I can’t see it through the fog”. The fog, probably, of too many notes.

Anyway, this is from DWM #440.

The Girl Who Waited

From DWM #439. It’s yet another review where the last line calls back to the first. However, when I made a grab for that opening quote I didn’t have much of an idea how I was going to play with it. The notion of using it again came later. Sorry, it’s just too handy a trick.

By the time I’d written about Let’s Kill Hitler and Night Terrors, both for this issue, I was quite squeezed on word count for The Girl Who Waited. Which was a good thing. If I’m given lots of room to write about an emotive episode, my prose can get overwrought.