Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-4138948-20131013141628/@comment-188432-20131014163348

Wow. Even more to the point from page 44: Her skirt? But she never wore skirts...

She looked down at herself and caught her breath. For the silver jumpsuit had gone, and in its place was a long dress of pale blue, with a silk sash at her waist, and a full skirt, puffed out by stiff under-petticoats. She was wearing high-buttoned boots and – when she put her hand to her head she found a band of ribbon tying back her long hair.

Countless millions of children on twentieth-century Earth would have known her at once: but in the City where Zoe was born and brought up, no-one had ever heard of Alice in Wonderland.

This was why when she saw a giant mushroom with a caterpillar on top of it, half-hidden in the shadows, she did not feel any sense of recognition. A moment later, there was a flash of white fur and a flustered rabbit scuttered by.

Zoe blinked. Could the white rabbit really have been consulting a pocket-watch? Nonsense – she must be imagining things. Besides, this half-light was very deceptive: it played tricks with your eyes.

If only she had been familiar with the ways of Wonderland, she might have been better prepared for the trap that lay ahead. Okay, so the book strays massively from the serial. Perhaps we should expect this since the book was written by Peter Ling personally, and we know that there were some heavy rewrites on his work for TV. So, your whole memory is correct.

But Ling didn't know what he was talking about. As demonstrated, Zoe frequently wore skirts. And it contradicts the televised story, so therefore it doesn't count on this wiki.

(My guess is that they couldn't use this on television, because the "Alice in Wonderland skirt" means the Disney version, and they wouldn't have had the money for the rights to that.)