Jamie Mathieson Comments on Flatline, Production Artwork

Jamie Mathieson Speaks on Flatline

Writer Jamie Mathieson has commented on this past week’s Flatline, including the process of writing the episode and some of the inspiration behind it.

Speaking on his own blog, Mathieson said of his inspiration:

“It was one of those ideas that I was surprised Who hadn’t done before. Flat monsters that steal dimension. But no. It was just sitting there, waiting for me. It has antecedents of course. I remember vividly the book Flat Stanley from my childhood. The jolly tale of a small boy who is flattened by a posterboard and then gets into all kinds of scrapes by sliding under doors or being posted back home in an envelope. The doomed cleaner Stan in Flatline is named in his memory. There is also the novella Flatland, (1888) a social satire about a two dimensional world. The Abbott estate, where Flatline takes place is named in memory of the author, Edwin Abbott Abbott. And then of course there is Roadrunner, with Wil E Coyote painting his fake tunnels on rock dead-ends, which the Roadrunner then impossibly runs through. I stopped just short of naming a character Coyote.”

Jamie also reveals that Flatline wasn’t originally conceived as a “Doctor-lite” episode:

“‘It’s going to be have to be a Doctor light episode. But so was Blink. Which some people seemed to like.’ I’m paraphrasing from memory, but that was the gist of the direction from Steven. The implication being, this doesn’t have to be a limitation. If you’re smart, you could make it a strength. I was two drafts into Flatline, which up until this point had been a conventional Doctor Who episode in many ways; the Doctor and Clara running around together and try to figure out exactly how to defeat the Boneless, the flat ‘aliens of the week’. Only the version of the Doctor I’d been writing had been a generic vaguely Matt Smith version. Capaldi had only just been announced and this was supposed to be the meeting where I discovered Steven’s vision for the new Doctor’s character. And now this bombshell.”

The writer also reveals more on the unique TARDIS situation:

“The Doctor needed to be in the same location for most of the episode. This would give Peter less shooting days and free up the schedule. Trapping him in the Tardis was the obvious choice. But how to make it seem a logical organic part of the story? The five foot version of the Tardis was already in the script. ‘Couldn’t we just keep that process going? Shrink it right down, make the doors too small for him to get out?’ There and then in the meeting I pitched the idea. A tiny Tardis, but only on the outside. That could be kind of cool, couldn’t it? We started riffing on the possibilities; the Doctor’s arm reaching out, passing long things out like a Tommy Cooper gag, poking people in the eye. The mad thing was that no-one had done it before. In hindsight it seems obvious. The exterior has always been smaller on the outside. In this episode, we just keep going.”

The rest of Jamie’s in-depth thoughts and comments can be read at: http://jamiemathieson.blogspot.co.uk