Chapters (20)
She had a look for her name on the net, after I told her what had become of it, and is boggled by the Bernice industry. She was aware of the character so named in Emmerdale, if not the League of Gentlemen one, but didn’t realise the roots of those names led right back to her. Hopefully, a few more children may be named Bernice these days as a result of the expansion of mates of mine into the TV industry!
Chapter Eleven
The Seventh Doctor uses chess as a metaphor in many TV stories. Dr. Smith refers to an old hermit the Doctor knew in his youth, who’s referred to previously in The Time Monster, and appears in Timewyrm: Revelation.
Reference is made in this chapter to the growth of the character of the Seventh Doctor during the New Adventures line. We explored all sides of the master planner, gave him a depth that I don’t think any other Doctor has had. The death of Ace’s lover, Jan, in Love and War, and several other hard decisions the Doctor had to make had been coming back to haunt him for some time.
Chapter Twelve
This is my Marxist chapter! Tim is, of course, mentally paraphrasing what’s written on the sign on the front of the TARDIS. Ahem. I got the wording wrong, much to Steven Moffat’s anger, as he repeated my error in his short story for Decalog, Continuity Errors.
Similarly, Dr. Smith gets the Lord’s Prayer wrong, which is an interesting character point, especially since he repeats the line about our daily bread instead of ‘lead us not into temptation’. Unfortunately, the error was mine, not his. Which might be even more interesting. Neither myself, nor Rebecca Levene, both people with religious interests, caught the error.
Flavia was Time Lord President at the time of Human Nature, following on from the TV series, and not dealing at all with what Gallifrey time is like compared to Earth’s. (This is a vision of the future, after all, and we don’t know when.)
Romana had become part of the High Council following the Missing Adventure Goth Opera. The method of accessing the Matrix is the one seen in The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time. A flutterwing is a species native to Gallifrey, according to the TV series.
Bernice’s archaeological tools come in handy here. They include an ion bonder, a standard tool which Nyssa made good use of in the TV series. The downs in general remind me of the downs above my family home in Wiltshire, which had flint workings and an iron-age hillfort.