‘Doctor Who’ thing of the day: excerpts from Neil Gaiman’s script

You know that Neil Gaiman has written a script for next year’s Doctor Who-age, don’t you?

By Rassilon’s fungal foot, I cannot wait.

Gaiman writes at his blog that the script is up to revision ten and is about to go for a table reading with the cast, which is literally wherein the cast sits around a table in a boring old conference room — presumably somewhere in Cardiff — with probably coffee and stuff and simply reads the script out loud.

What got cut between the first draft and now? Gaiman reveals:

Anything that wasn’t moving the plot forward has gone. Lots of interesting chatty background conversations in the TARDIS, gone. Lines of dialogue that were fun in themselves but weren’t really needed? Gone. And the food scene? Very gone indeed. It’s been gone since draft six. Given that it’s not there any longer, and that that tells you absolutely nothing about the story except that it now doesn’t have a scene with a bowl of food in it, I thought I’d borrow it back from Lucien’s library.

The Doctor has just been given a bowl of something to eat. Something…possibly… alien…

And then Gaiman gives us a snippet from the scene that is, um, not exactly delicious. Go read it at Gaiman’s blog, and then come back here and fannishly speculate away.

I won’t spoil. I will say: How does the Doctor know that?

(Thanks to reader Les for the link. If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)