Tamar Tephi originated out of a comment made about the last part of the Unfinished Business story “Christopher” when The Doctor is taken by Rassilon and shown Earth ten thousand years into the future when his new Time Lord race have triumphed over all adversity and rule wisely and kindly for the benefit of all people on Earth. A reader wrote to ask me if I realised that what I had written was an anaology of Jacob’s Dream from the bible. I hadn’t. I’m more of a New Testament reader. But to summarise, Jacob slept on a pillow of stone and in a dream he was taken up to the Heavens by God and shown the land below and was promised that he would be the father of a great people, the Israelites, who would be numerous and prosperous. And yes, that did SEEM very much like what Rassilon told The Doctor.
Now, Jacob had popped up once before in Vampyres of Tara. The pillow he slept upon is allegedly one of the treasures that the Babylon princess, Tamar Tephi brought to Tara, along with King David’s Harp and the Ark of the Covenant. So when The Doctor and his son talked about the future of their family, the new Gallifreyan race, it is no surprise that their thoughts turned to that prophecy. And from that, to the need for a law to guide their people in the future. Which brings us to the Ark of the Covenant, the resting place of the stones upon which the law of the Israelites was written. In my Doctor Who mythology the treasure at Tara doesn’t in fact contain the pieces of the Ten Commandments, but a piece of the Eye of Harmony, and that, as well as being the goal of the runaway twins, is a clue to a possible future story in which the equivalent of the Ten Commandments for the Gallifreyan people is written.
Davie fighting The Doctor was an idea that just came to me. Now they are older and ambitious they are both bound to want to stretch themselves and Davie proves the more ambitious of the two in many ways. He needs to prove himself. At the same time he IS a teenager and has got it into his head that The Doctor wants to hold him back. It is the sort of hormone pressure cooker always guaranteed to blow.
And meanwhile back home, Rose is giving birth and The Doctor isn’t there. The race to get home to her is the endgame of the story. Childbirth scenes without too much ickiness aren’t easy. I hope I managed to get it about right. And of course what else could the name be, but Peter, after Rose’s long dead but never forgotten dad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob's_Ladder_(Bible)
http://www.mythicalireland.com/ancientsites/tara/
http://www.megalithicireland.com/Hill%20of%20Tara.htm
http://www.irishclans.com/articles/tara1.html
http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=7370
http://www.geocities.com/bpstratton/tara.html
http://www.biblemysteries.com/library/coronation.htm
