Given that, what interested me about reading Gaiman’s ep as akin to a “media tie-in” is that this tends to be a (sub)culturally devalued form. Rather than celebrating Gaiman’s genius, or elevating this as a “special” episode, I wanted to restore the context of industrial control, i.e. focus more on Gaiman’s situated agency. And I wanted to play with the notion that televised Doctor Who, even at its most “special”, may not be as distinct from the tie-in novel in terms of working practices and narrative limits as tends to be commonly supposed — at least in the case of a non-showrunner TV writer who’s been brought in as a hired hand.

Gaiman’s storyline inverts the show’s mythology, and I guess my response likewise inverts what I’d see as the standard relationship between ‘quality’ TV drama and the ‘literary’. Hence my pondering what would happen if TV scholarship were to draw self-consciously on *devalued* forms of the novel in its sense-making, rather than seeking to discursively and culturally valorise beloved TV texts.

I think “short story” was where my mind first went with this episode: of course, the series’ episodic nature means that this term has always been floating around the series, but something about the rehappening of it all made it feel poetic and symbolic in ways I would not normally associate with “episode” as a term. I realize that this is silly, and I usually hate to bring in literary terms to describe television storytelling (especially if it’s subconsciously driven by the author’s previous work), but “short story” just sounded better in my head.

What struck me is the fact that, despite being far from a superfan, I didn’t feel as though the poetry of this story was necessarily dependent on intense fandom. Although the episode was certainly embracing the series’ history, and although little details (like the old control room, which is one thing I caught) called directly to particular elements of that history, the *sense* of history was palpable even without knowledge of it.

Perhaps proof of the value of anthropomorphization, or simply proof of the shrewd fan/producer balance Gaiman is able to strike.