THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS

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The Master of Luxor audio 		Titan Script Books
The Masters of Luxor

Author Anthony Coburn Cover image
ISBN 1 852 86321 8
Published 1992

Synopsis: A dark and silent planet. A magnificent crystal edifice, perched on a mountainside. A legion of dormant robots, waiting for the signal to bring them back to life. The Doctor and his granddaughter Susan, and their reluctant companions, Ian and Barbara, are about to unleash forces which will threaten their very survival.

Reviews

A Review by Charles Daniels 29/3/04

So I finally sat down and read The Masters of Luxor, a story intended to be a second of the series. I wasn't really sure what to expect from the story, other than maybe a little strange as it was written before Doctor Who was established really.

I think the Doctor and Barbara are written perfectly. Susan is pretty accurate. Ian is just bizarre. I'm pretty sure all those hells and damns and Oh Gods he utters every other line wouldn't have made it on TV. Also he goes around calling Susan "kiddo" and has lines like "Let's cut the talk, Buster!" To an alien robot.

There is a religious theme to this story which would also been sort of surreal for Doctor Who. Susan and Barbara sing "Onward Christian Soldier" to ward off robots. Another character central to the plot, Toban, has converted to worshipping god after a lifetime devoted to immoral scientific research involving killing his own people. Susan has a line something like -

"Why is it you earthlings are scared of the word 'God'?"
There are only a few scenes touching directly on this theme, and I imagine most, if not all of these would have been edited out or altered.

The story itself is awesome. It would be easy to describe this story as - "A robot wants to become human." And we could assume all the classic sci-fi cliches from there. But we'd be wrong to do so. This IS NOT like Data from TNG, or 7 of 9 from Voyager, or like many other examples of that whole genre of stories. In this story the robot, The Perfect One, is obviously mentally ill. He's unstable. He's also an egotistical maniac who has been senselessly killing people in a series of fruitless and hopeless attempts to capture the human life force.

The script calls for a lot of action, and at the same time explores some fairly complex themes about the nature of life and, yes, religious belief.

Something that sticks out in my mind, is a line Ian has at the beginning of the story when the TARDIS monitor dies - "The projectionist has gone home!" - which is to illustrate that even though he's just escaped from cavemen, there's still that part of him that wants to deny or make light of his new situation.

Also you get some really cool, neat, freaky little points - The TARDIS can fly around like a helicopter, the TARDIS is solar powered, and the Doctor and Susan are clearly aliens.

I would love to see something happen with this script. Whether this could be adapted for audio, or if it could get a novelization, or maybe a wider publishing in script form. This is not a mere curiousity, interesting only as some Doctor Who story that wasn't good enough to make it to our screens. The Masters of Luxor is a compelling, fun, and highly entertaining story.

I just wish we could all see it for ourselves.

Gods & Robots by Matthew Kresal 8/3/13

In 1963, Doctor Who was just another television show slowly finding an audience. Anthony Coburn, the writer responsible for writing its first story, An Unearthly Child, was initially commissioned to write its second story as well. As fate would have it, Coburn's script, entitled The Masters of Luxor, was abandoned in favor of a script by Terry Nation that was to guarantee the still new show's future: The Daleks. Coburn's script languished in obscurity for nearly thirty years when Titan Books published the script as part of its Doctor Who: The Scripts range in 1992. With that book, we can look at the road Doctor Who could have taken.

Coburn's plot is simple enough. Following on the events of An Unearthly Child, the TARDIS crew (the first Doctor, his granddaughter Susan with her teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright) find themselves exploring then trapped in a mysterious city with a seemingly dead TARDIS. The city's only occupants appear to be various robots and a mysterious man known only as The Perfect One. But is the so-called Perfect One all that his name implies? And what about the world outside the city? Across six episodes, Coburn sets forth a mystery, a battle for survival and finally a desperate race against time.

The characterization of the four lead characters is interesting to note. For the most part, the characterization is dead on to what appeared in the aired stories of the era and one can imagine the actors saying the lines. The first episode in particular features many examples of this such as Ian's "the projectionist has gone home" line, Barabra's ill-feelings about the mysterious city or the Doctor and Susan's curiosity about it. All the while though, there are moments when the characterization goes astray, such as the occasional piece of B-Movie exclamations or Ian's occasional swearing that more than likely would never have made it into a television version of the story. But these seemingly odd moments of characterization shows us just how different Doctor Who could have been in its earliest days.

The other interesting example lies within the script in its religious themes. The religious themes of the story aren't even subtle, they are made explicit at times such as a scene in the final episode where Susan, Ian and Barbara discuss it openly:

Susan: Why are you Earth people afraid of the word 'God'?

Ian: Because he is no longer scientific.

Barbara: He waits for his God, and his God is only a man. I can't bear to watch.

Ian: (to Susan) Does that answer your question?

While it's debatable whether that scene would have survived into a TV version, these themes are at the heart of the story. The Perfect One, his wishes and desires, especially when the involvement of the character Tabon in his past is revealed, illustrates this rather well. In this regard, the script bears some superficial resemblance to the climax of 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a machine seeks its creator (or God as the characters themselves state in the aforementioned quote) and tries to become more like it so it can be something more. As a result, the script, at least in terms of this theme, is perhaps more philosophical than many of the stories of the old series. What results this would have had on the series if it had been aired on television is a compelling "what if" in its own right.

With its plot, characterization and religious themes, The Masters of Luxor makes for a fascinating "what if" from Doctor Who's early days. Considering it was replaced by a story that secured Doctor Who's future by introducing the Daleks, one can't help but wonder what Doctor Who's future would have been if this story had been made. That makes this story, even its script form, an intriguing read in its own right.