The Chinese TARDIS was scheduled to be posted online on November 23rd, 2006, the 43rd anniversary of the original series. THAT in itself was a motive that drove the plot. I wanted to link that original series with the new series characters, The Doctor and Rose, and with my own stories which take them into a new set of adventures.

The story opens with a visit to Liverpool which references the Theta Sigma stories and admittedly doesn’t make a lot of sense without reading those. The Chinese Garden is in the former home of Mai Li Tuo, the Earth name of a renegade Time Lord who had been a good friend to the young Chrístõ in those adventures. His death and funeral was a double episode of those stories. Bo, the Chinese lady who greets The Doctor so enthusiastically, is a key figure in those stories, too, and very much an old flame of The Doctor’s. The kiss that so delights the twins was a long time coming.

The twins are seventeen now. We last saw them five years before, aged twelve, at The Doctor’s wedding. Now they are close to becoming Time Lords in their own right at the age of eighteen. They are developing as individual characters. As children, they were not especially individual. But now they are growing to be more rounded characters. Davie is a born engineer, Chris a dreamer. More of that in other stories. But what counts now is that they have their own TARDIS at last.

Or they will when it’s fixed. For now it has to be towed home. And that’s when the trouble starts.

The TARDIS being able to tow another object is an idea that has been thrown around in the series from time to time. The Doctor slaved the Chula ambulance to the TARDIS and followed it through time and space in Empty Child. He towed the space ship in Satan Pit out of the gravity field. Even without a ‘tractor beam’ the TARDIS is capable of such things. In my stories I have had two TARDISes – Nine and Ten’s, slaved to each other, moving in tandem through the vortex, both with working engines.

But the Chinese TARDIS is so much dead weight and it causes problems. Exciting problems, it has to be said, that bring The Doctor on a nostalgia trip, and us with it. The first answers a question I asked many years ago. WHAT HAPPENED TO IAN’S CAR WHEN HE AND BARBARA WENT OFF TO THE STARS WITH THE DOCTOR! The second location answers another question that puzzled me. What about Susan’s TARDIS key that she so casually dropped under the bridge in 2164. And so on until they made it home, causing a certain amount of chaos as they did so.

At home, Rose is remarkably forgiving of The Doctor’s infidelity. Many people have said so. There is a reason for this. When I was writing this story I took a couple of hours off to go see the second Antonio Banderas Zorro film and was extremely BORED by the plotline that involved him ROWING with his wife because she wanted him to give up being Zorro and settle down. I made a firm vow that The Doctor and Rose would NOT have rows about him giving up being The Doctor. He would retire when he was ready, and if, even then, he got itchy feet, she would not object to him going out and fighting a despot or two and home in time for tea.