At Doctor Who conventions there is an ongoing joke about the sale of souvenirs called Rassilons’s ____ - Rassilon’s Pen, Rassilon’s Bottle Opener, Rassilon’s Toilet Roll holder. It arises, of course from the 1970s episodes in which we were introduced to artefacts such as Rassilon’s Sash and of course, the Seal of Rassilon.
It is very probably possible to buy Rassilon’s Stationary Set, with Rassilon’s Envelopes included. But THIS envelope has nothing much to do with it at all.
The
actual inspiration for the ‘missing’ Earth comes, in fact,
from a very different source altogether. It was a wet Saturday and I couldn’t
find the TV remote control and so ended up watching an old black and white
WWII film, The Cruel Sea. There is one scene in that film where a battle
ship, after a long sea journey, sails up the Mersey Estuary only to find
Liverpool and the Wirral almost unrecognisable after a heavy night’s
bombing by the Luftwaffe. The idea of transferring the shock and grief
so well illustrated in that film to our two travellers arriving back in
the solar system came to me. The reason for the return came later, when
I noticed that the date given in the series for Pete Tyler’s death
was actually a Sunday, when I normally post the stories. So it was that
this story was set up for the Sunday before, with Rose asking to be taken
home for the anniversary.
The Doctor having trouble finding Earth and concluding that there is something wrong was originally a much shorter sequence. After it was posted online the point was made that The Doctor seemed to go to pieces in shock just a bit TOO quick. Nobody doubted that he would be shocked to the core, to say nothing of grief-stricken knowing that the very last remnants of his family, Susan and her children, are on Earth. But it was a simple matter to expand the scene and let the realisation that Earth was gone come upon him much more slowly and dramatically.
Compare these two scenes.
Original. But the co-ordinate didn't lock. He frowned
and keyed it in again. It still wouldn't accept it. He did it a
third time, this time starting to panic. "Come on, he said,
punching buttons more and more frantically. "It's got to be
a glitch. It's GOT to be." He looked up at Rose and the look
on his face told her at once something was wrong. |
Revised But the co-ordinate didn’t
lock. He frowned and keyed it in again. It still wouldn’t
accept it. He did it a third time, this time starting to worry.
“Come on,” he muttered, punching buttons more and more
frantically. “It’s got to be a glitch. It’s GOT
to be.” Rose came in with the coffee.
He took it from her with a dazed, absent expression. He didn’t
even thank her for it. He didn’t even look at her. And he
left it on the side of the life support console. Something he NEVER
did. It was dangerous leaving anything liquid on the console. Rose
picked it up again. |
Of
course, it is a mistake. The shred of hope is offered by the most unlikely
of visitors to the TARDIS – Rassilon, or at least a projection of
him. The only man The Doctor bows down to, the Creator of the Time Lords.
Rassilon has been the shadowy presence over that race since the 1970s
when we first started to learn about Gallifrey. But he has never really
been fully explained. But he is supposed to be immortal and it doesn’t
seem a stretch of the imagination that his spirit should have survived
the fall of Gallifrey.
From that comes the idea that the most powerful of the Time Lords, the strongest-willed, might have maintained themselves in spirit form at least and still be able, on occasion, to exert their will on the living world.
So
for the first time we meet The Doctor’s father. And yes, personality-wise,
Ambassador de Lœngbaerrow strongly resembles Spock’s father,
Ambassador Sarek in the Star Trek series. And there is something in that.
But this was not plagiarism. It was quite unconscious and it was long
after I had created the character that somebody pointed out the similarities.
Vulcan and Gallifrey do have something in common with each other, of course.
Both have very complicated history, full of mysticism and legends. Both
races have an arrogance that needs to be tempered by association with
other races. The father of The Doctor was bound to be a powerful man in
the same mould as Sarek.
The envelope that made Earth invisible to anyone who was not genetically linked to it was an extrapolation of Time Lord technology over the years. As far back as 1969, indeed, in The War Games, the first story in which we meet The Doctor’s people, they placed a slow-time envelope around a planet to punish its inhabitants who had caused deaths of innocents and interfered with time. That they should seek to protect the planet where their future as a race is vested follows logically. So does the attempt to make it possible for Time Lords and Humans to ‘mate’. That The Doctor and Rose are left out of the arrangement means that their quest for domestic bliss goes on, though.
And the question that gets missed because it seems to be in the background of the main issue of whether Rose and The Doctor could ever be married and have a family together.
Is Christopher de Lœngbaerrow alive or dead?
Remember that question. There could be an answer later. Much later.
