Yellow Fever and How to Cure It

Yellow Fever and How to Cure It is an unproduced three-part Doctor Who adventure serial written by Robert Holmes in 1985 for the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown.^[1]

Synopsis[]

The Doctor shows Peri an image of the Statue of Liberty on the TARDIS scanner. Venturing outside, they find out that they are not in the United States of America, but in a collection of miniature landmarks from around the world situated in Singapore. When walking around, they then noticed that statues begin to move and the Doctor realizes that they’re Autons. The travelers investigate and discover that the evil Rani has allied with the Nestene Consciousness when the Doctor previously encountered them before. She plans on creating new Autons with bullets that can bounce off corners and hands that can melt the nose and face of the adversary. However, her villainous commitments are not the only thing that are confined; the Master is also in Singapore and is jealous of the Rani’s actions of working with the Nestene as he himself had previously done and wants to take down her plans. The Doctor and Peri call for back-up from UNIT, led by the somewhat retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, but the fighting task has just begun in a difficult manner.^[2][1]

Production[]

Producer John Nathan-Turner planned on having to film the story on location footage in Singapore while the BBC were featuring the series Tenko.^[3] He and production manager Gary Downie went there on October 19, 1984, whereas Holmes started to commission the writing of the first episode for Yellow Fever and how to cure it (also referred as Yellow Fever) seven days later.^[3]

Shortly thereafter, Turner asked Holmes to feature the Autons, the Rani, and the Master to make the story interesting, despite the rights and rewrites of the story given, such as The Two Doctors.^[3] All three episodes were commissioned on February 6, 1985,^[3] and was intended as the third serial of Season 23,^[3][4] and was to be directed by Graeme Harper.^[3] However, on February 27, that year, the BBC announced that the production of Doctor Who was to be suspended on a 18-month hiatus until the Spring of 1986.^[3] The story then was re-written without the Master, but ultimately abandoned due to budget-cost effectiveness and during the series' suspension.^[3] The story was then planned to be a semi-serial of the sub-season The Trial of a Time Lord, but ultimately the budget would be too expensive to film in Singapore.^[5]

Afterword[]

On February 4, 1986, Holmes started work on Time Inc., a story for concluding the season replacement, The Trial of a Time Lord, but was unable to create the story idea due to Holmes suffering Hepatitis B; his story was abandoned when Holmes died of a short illness on May 24, 1986, and thus replaced by The Ultimate Foe, written by Pip and Jane Baker.^[6]

Yellow Fever and How to Cure It remains abandoned without any book or audio adaptations. The story's information can be mostly seen in Doctor Who: The Lost Season, a documentary that appeared on the DVD release of Terror of the Vervoids in 2008.^[4]

Notes[]

• Nicholas Courtney, who portrayed Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, would not return in Doctor Who until 1989, within the Seventh Doctor serial, Battlefield, followed in 2007 by The Sarah Jane Adventures episode Enemy of the Bane.

• The Autons would not return to Doctor Who until Rose, the episode that opened the series' revival in 2005; they would make their final appearance in the 2010 episode The Pandorica Opens.

References[]