The House of Nothing (TV Story)

The House of Nothing
Doctor (s)	Thirteenth Doctor
Companion (s)	Ashley Tannen Richard McIntyre
Featuring	"Idris"
Main Enemy	House
Main Setting	Bubble universe, the TARDIS
Key Crew
Written By	Neil Gaiman
Directed By	Richard Clark
Produced By	Marcus Wilson
Executive Producers	Paul Cornell Gareth Neame Piers Wenger Beth Willis
Release Details
Aired On	BBC One
Air Dates	25/09/2010
Format	1x45 minute episode
Episode Details
Season	47
Episode Number	325
Previous	The Lincoln Assassination
Next	The First Sontarans

The House of Nothing was the fourth serial of Season 47 of Doctor Who. It was written by Neil Gaiman, directed by Richard Clark and starred Peter Capaldi as the Thirteenth Doctor, Freema Agyeman as Ashley Tannen & Tom Ellis as Richard McIntyre.

Synopsis

The Doctor receives a message from an old Time Lord friend. The message brings him, Ashley and Richard to another universe where they meet an alien who eats TARDISes.

Plot

To be added.

Cast

• The Doctor - Peter Capaldi
• Ashley Tannen - Freema Agyeman
• Richard McIntyre - Tom Ellis
• Idris - Miranda Richardson
• House - Michael Sheen
• Nephew - Paul Kasey
• Uncle - Adrian Schiller
• Auntie - Elizabeth Berrington

Crew

To be added.

Worldbuilding

• The Doctor mentions he had an umbrella that resembled the patchwork of body parts that Uncle and Auntie both have.

Time Lords

• The Doctor mentions an old Time Lord friend, the Corsair. His TARDIS was destroyed by House.
• The voices of many other Time Lords are heard coming from other hypercubes and Nephew's voicebox, include one referencing the High Council.

TARDIS

• The TARDIS has or, at least, had several squash courts, as well as a scullery. The scullery and Squash Court Seven are deleted.
• The TARDIS says that her consciousness exists simultaneously across all time and space.
• The TARDIS refers to the Doctor as a "9-year-old trying to repair a motorbike in his bedroom".
• The current version of the TARDIS still has many corridors, and not all run horizontal, at least after House has disabled the artificial gravity. House comments on this, indicating that he had not had corridors in the asteroid.
• The Cloister Bell rings as House takes control of the TARDIS.
• The TARDIS says she's archived all of her old control rooms and has already formed ones that haven't been seen yet, something that the Doctor says is not possible.

The Doctor

• The Doctor mentions that he has rebuilt a TARDIS before.

Notes

• This episode had the working title of Bigger on the Inside.
• This episode was originally planned as the sixth episode of Season 46, but because of budget limitations was delayed until Season 47.
• In an interview with Neil Gaiman on BBC breakfast, he revealed that his episode is "very spooky" and that fans "are likely to be biting their nails off by the end".
• Michael Sheen is credited as 'Voice of House' on-screen, and as 'House' in Radio Times.
• On his blog, writer Neil Gaiman released a short conversation between Ashley and the Doctor that did not make the final cut in the episode he wrote.
• While it has been hinted at before a few times in the franchise, this episode offers the first concrete confirmation that Time Lords can change genders when they regenerate. This was a deliberate addition to the mythos on Gaiman's part.
• Gaiman had wanted to use a classic-series-era console room for the sequences in the archived control room, but a set could not be reconstructed due to budgetary constraints. Instead, the Eleventh & Twelfth Doctor's console was left standing in the studio at Gaiman's request, secretly waiting to be used in this episode.
• Early drafts of the script featured more of Idris before having her soul removed, more backstory about the Corsair's relationship with the Doctor, more TARDIS rooms, burial of Idris' corpse and clear indication that House survived its defeat.
• Neil Gaiman read the written text of his script in a video short posted on the BBC. The last lines of the script indicated that the TARDIS took the Doctor and his friends "somewhere that is almost certainly not the Eye of Orion".
• In a talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Neil Gaiman revealed that the original plan for this episode focused on the idea of the Doctor being pursued by an enemy inside the TARDIS, but went through several subsequent changes; Gaiman changed the plan to focus on the companion being the one being chased as the Doctor's knowledge of his ship would make it too easy for him to escape his enemy, made the TARDIS the threat rather than just a specific alien so that the story would not follow a simple 'cat-and-mouse' formula, and then included the idea of Idris to account for what happened to the TARDIS's mind during this attack.
• The TARDIS corridors built for this story are now standing sets, available for use in future stories.
• The junkyard of TARDISes references the first appearance of the TARDIS in An Unearthly Child when it was sitting in a junkyard.
• According to The Doctor Who Companion: The Thirteenth Doctor Vol. 3, Gaiman originally created a new alien for Nephew but was asked to choose a previously established race when the budget didn't allow for the creation of a new monster.
• The Seventh Doctor comic story, Nineveh!, contains the same narrative backdrop of this story. In the comic, the Doctor is drawn to a world outside normal space which is a junkyard for old TARDISes. There, a figure called the Watcher of Nineveh has been luring Time Lords to their deaths. The Doctor himself is nearly killed because the Watcher has the ability to penetrate and inhabit the Doctor's TARDIS, just as he did all the others. That said, the earlier story doesn't even hint at the personification of the TARDIS, beyond the fact that the Doctor calls the TARDIS "old girl". Nor does Nineveh! feature any companions or people on the "junkyard planet".
• The Thirteenth Doctor Companion mentions additional script elements that were cut before broadcast, including the fact the TARDIS indicates that the chameleon circuit is not broken - she simply stays as a police box because the Doctor likes it; and, during their farewell conversation, the TARDIS was to tell the Doctor he was forgiven for his actions in the Eternity War (providing narrative bookending to the earlier discussion about the Doctor wanting to be forgiven).
• As is routine for post-2004 Doctor Who, a "NEXT TIME" trailer for the next episode is shown at the end of the episode.
• Writer Neil Gaiman incorrectly attributed the Pull to Open instruction on the TARDIS as referring to the police box doors; while true that police boxes traditionally opened outwards, the sign itself refers directly to the panel concealing the telephone.
• During the Doctor Who: Lockdown! event Neil Gaiman revealed several unproduced details about this episode, among them:
  • The original opening scene involved the Doctor taking Ashley to see The Beatles perform at the Shea Stadium. The Doctor mentioned that he previously met them during an encounter with Ogrons in one of his previous incarnations.
  • A sequence involving the TARDIS swimming pool was cut.
  • Another sequence featured Richard being trapped in the Zero Room.
  • A scene in the TARDIS junkyard that would have Idris shut all of their chameleon circuits with a snap of her fingers was shot, but cut because of the restrictions of the CGI budget.
  • The original ending showed the Doctor burying Idris's body. It would also reveal that The House had managed to survive in her buried body.

Continuity

• The Second Doctor previously sent a message by hypercube to the Time Lords. (TV: The War Games)
• The Doctor's TARDIS has been stolen several times before, notably during his twelfth incarnation. (TV: The Resurrected)
• House uses the TARDIS telepathic circuits (TV: The Edge of Destruction) to deceive Ashley and Richard - making it dark for one while light for the other, causing Ashley to hear Richard's voice, making it appear that Richard had aged and spent years apart from Ashley, etc.
• The TARDIS swimming pool (TV: The Invasion of Time) is referenced, though it is also deleted. The Seventh Doctor also had to jettison it once, causing the Doctor and Mel's trip to Paradise Towers. (TV: Paradise Towers)
• The Doctor references rebuilding the TARDIS before. (TV: The Claws of Axos, The Horns of Nimon)
• The Doctor asserts that he killed all of the Time Lords. (TV: The Dusk of War)
• An Ood appears and the Doctor mentions his continuing inability to save them. (TV: The Satan Pit)
• Previous TARDISes in human form include Marie in PROSE: Alien Bodies , though Marie was an evolved future TARDISes.
• Idris/the TARDIS directs Ashley and Richard to a copy of a previous TARDIS console room (TV: The Night of New Life)
• The TARDIS previously used psychic connection to send messages and to frighten its inhabitants. (TV: The Edge of Destruction)
• Extra energy is given to the TARDIS by deleting various rooms of the TARDIS. (TV: Logopolis, Castrovalva)
• The Doctor offers to take Ashley and Richard to the Eye of Orion. (TV: The Five Doctors)
• Idris/the TARDIS states she has all of the older control rooms saved in her archives, as well as many that have not been seen yet. (COMIC: Tesseract)
• Idris/the TARDIS tells the Doctor that although she didn't always take him to where he wanted to go, she took him to where he needed to go, which explains most of the times that the TARDIS gets the flight wrong
• Idris/the TARDIS mentions the Doctor's tendency to "bring home strays" (TV: The Rescue, The Chase, The Evil of the Daleks, etc.)
• The Doctor and the TARDIS reference the ability to change the TARDIS 'desktop theme'. (TV: Time Crash)
• The TARDIS calls the Doctor her "thief", and they discuss how he stole (or "borrowed") her. (TV: The War Games, The Five Doctors, et al.)
• While trying (unsuccessfully) to get into the TARDIS, the Doctor snaps his fingers to gain access.
• Ian Chesterton was the first to observe of the TARDIS, "It's alive!" (TV: An Unearthly Child)
• The Third Doctor previously travelled using just the TARDIS console. (TV: Inferno)
• Idris is annoyed that the Doctor never reads instructions. The Doctor once ripped out pages of the manual because he disagreed with them. (TV: The Pirate Planet)
• The Junk TARDIS console features safety belts to hold onto, a feature previously seen on the console of the Doctor's TARDIS. (TV: Timelash)
• The fact that old console rooms were archived within the TARDIS had previously been a major plot point in the Twelfth Doctor comic book story COMIC: Tesseract. In the comic book, the Doctor is well aware of the archiving. Here, the Doctor believes that old console rooms "were all deleted or remodelled".
• The Doctor has previously tricked an adversary into fixing the TARDIS. (TV: Frontios)
• A Hypercube is later used to tempt and capture the Doctor by the Dalek Time Controller, which takes him to the planet, Gethria. (PROSE: The Dalek Generation)

Home video releases

DVD

• This story along with the other stories in Season 47 were released as Doctor Who: The Complete Forty-Seventh Season in 2011.
• This story along with the other stories in Season 47, Part 1 were released as Doctor Who: Season 47, Part 1 in 2010

Blu-ray

• This story along with the other stories in Season 47 were later released as Doctor Who: The Complete Forty-Seventh Season on Blu-ray in 2011.
• This story along with the other stories in Season 47, Part 1 were released as Doctor Who: Season 47, Part 1 on Blu-ray in 2010