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Two
Weddings and a Security Alert – Yes, puns on the old Hugh Grant
film Four Weddings and a Funeral abound. The two weddings are for Jackie
and Christopher. Jackie wants an ordinary Earth wedding, in the 21st century,
with her old friends from the estate. It is an echo of her wedding to
Pete, long ago, and represents her final parting from that life. The second
wedding, of course, is her Gallifreyan Alliance of Unity, her REAL wedding
to Christopher. But they find that this wedding takes place under a disturbing
cloud. Jack Harkness, in this universe an officer in a crack intergalactic
military force, the 22nd Space Corps, along with his girlfriend, Hellina.
They have information that there is a threat to one of The Doctor’s
children.
The idea of a navigation slave is actually not new in Doctor
Who. It is VERY similar to the Controller of the Gamestation, of course.
But the idea was also found in the Tom Baker episode, Warrior’s
Gate where telepaths were used as integrated navigators until they died
of the shock. The Correlites take it to a new level.
The Correlites also introduce a nasty weapon nearly as
bad as anything The Master would have come up with. The Temporal Accelerator
that kills by aging people unnaturally. Again, this has happened before
on Doctor Who. Sara Kingdom died just that way in Dalek Masterplan, and
The Doctor himself was temporarily aged in The Leisure Hive.
Originally
this part of the story was a bit different. I wrote the draft idea as
an Unfinished Business story. The victim was going to be Sukie who would
age from four two nine or thereabouts, and the weapon was going to be
the Temporal Accelerator the boys designed used by an enemy. In the end
I dropped that plotline from the Unfinished Business series and reworked
it so that Vicki would be the one aged five years while The Doctor took
the full force of the weapon and absorbed most of it. Suddenly aging a
four year old girl in a swimming costume five years is a disturbing idea,
mostly because her clothes would fall off. The Doctor wrapping his leather
jacket around her immediately covers the awkwardness of that scene.
How exactly they explain to Human friends that their daughter
has aged five years overnight is something I glossed over, but I had decided
that making Vicki and Sukie look the same age, nine, meant that in future
The Doctor had two girls of the same age and intellect as the twins where
when he first started teaching them. He had new apprentices to teach,
girls this time. That was one reason for going for this very dramatic
transformation.
http://www.rdwf.org.uk/doctors/D4/s18/05warriorsgatee.htm

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