A Deadly Interlude is another story written for completely mundane reasons. Firstly, because I had miscounted and found there was a week spare in the calendar if the last episode was going to go online the weekend before November 23rd, my deadline for launching the follow up series, New Lords of Time.

So at fairly short notice I had to write a story. And I decided that a Cyberman story would prove easy enough. A stock enemy, with defined rules about what they do. Cybermen had, of course, made their comeback in the 2006 series at this point, so there wasn’t even much work to do in the way of explanation. So it should have been easy enough!

Well, it was, fairly easy, in fact. A potential invasion of Earth thwarted by The Doctor. The details of how he did it are neither here nor there.

The other objective of this story, is probably missed on first read, and probably only makes sense after reading the first few New Lords of Time stories. Notice the interest Jackie is staring to take in this story to Christopher de Lœngbærrow. This is a seed planted in retrospect, in fact, since I had already written several of the new series stories at that point. But if you haven’t read any of the new series yet, I won’t say any more as it will spoil the surprise.