Currently rereading

[john_amend_all]

It's a good week for fans of reaction videos and spooky 1980s TV -- Medusa Cascade has just started on Moondial, and Marie-Clare is most of the way through The Box of Delights, with the promise of Sapphire and Steel to follow.

Turning in particular to The Box of Delights, I was inspired to reread the book (taking care to read the unabridged version rather than the cut-down edition that was released to tie in with the series). In the past the obvious crossover idea has been with Season 6B of Doctor Who, with the ending explained by Kay getting the Jamie&Zoë treatment. There's been fic around with that premise since the days of Usenet. But this time around I thought it wouldn't take much for the Box to be something more dangerous -- maybe closer to that other innocuous-looking box in Assignment 6. Even when it's closed and nobody's trying to use it, it seems to be leaking time in some way, given Kay's nocturnal slips back to earlier times, and the pre-Dissolution monks who meet the protagonists at the Cathedral. And it's impeccably canon that you can get trapped in the past using it, either disappearing altogether (like Arnold of Todi) or ending up in a coma while your astral projection roams through a version of history where everything is happening at once.

Another plotbunny free to a good home: Canonically, Arnold of Todi made two Boxes, and considers the one Kay got to be the lesser. It's possible that the other one was destroyed (as Abner suggests, by Inquisitors or Puritans), but it could still be out there somewhere. And as for his plans for the third one — well, WW2 was bad enough in our timeline without the admixture of a mad magician summoning Zombie Alexander the Great to sweep all before him.

Then there's the question of why Cole would choose Kay to look after the Box. I wondered if it might be because, as a child, his desires would be reasonably innocent. Give it to an adult, even a reasonably well-meaning one, and who knows what they might ask of it? Let alone the question of what a competent sorcerer like Abner might be able to get it to do. Even when he's monologuing, he always remains ambiguous on the subject of why he wants the Box, but "find out how it works and use that knowledge for evil" sounds just as plausible as "Use it as-is for my own entertainment". He might well decide to build a Third Box of his own, and have his own try at global domination.

(I see Big Finish released an adaptation in 2021. Haven't heard that, so I don't know how they chose to approach the story).

On an unrelated note: The other night I had a realistic, consistent dream in which the Fourteenth Doctor was being played by none other than Sir Tony Robinson. I didn't think the script was anything special, though.