The Madness of Amy Pond runs parallel with the Marion and Kristoph two-part story, The Facsimile/The Gallifrey Delusion. Both stories came out of a suggestion by an RDWF forum regular about one of the companions being confined to a lunatic asylum because of their connection to Time Lords and Gallifrey. I had done a story set in an asylum in my Tenth Doctor series, Prisoner of Brockley Hall. In that story, The Doctor is one of several extra terrestrials being used by the director of the institute to acquire superhuman powers. The Doctor ends up being rescued by one of his own earlier incarnations, the Third Doctor, along with Jo along with U.N.I.T.

I had also done Marion captured by Torchwood and questioned about Gallifrey and the Time Lords in the three part story ‘Alien in Liverpool’. I obviously needed something different. I wondered, in fact, whether it should be a Marion and Kristoph story. It could easily have been an Eleventh Doctor story, with Amy Pond, a girl who has already seen psychiatrists because of her Raggedy Doctor obsession, trapped in an institute where nobody believes her story.

I also considered the idea that Marion and Amy were both in the SAME asylum being questioned by the same ‘doctor’ who simply wanted the secret of the Matrix from them. They would be rescued at the same time by Kristoph and The Doctor, possibly with Kristoph rescuing Amy and The Doctor rescuing Marion, who would be/was his mother.

I dropped that idea because it seemed too complicated and the stories weren’t due to be posted in the same week. I also dropped the idea of making the Eleventh Doctor story a two parter in order to make them run parallel. This means that readers of The Madness of Amy Pond on the weekend that was posted would have an idea how The Gallifrey Delusion was going to go when it was posted on Good Friday. Well, with spoilers for the new Doctor Who season flying around the internet, it wasn’t the worst secret of the year.

The differences are obvious. The Marion and Kristoph story starts with Kristoph finding out that there is a facsimile of Marion in his home and tackling it. In The Madness of Amy Pond, The Doctor and Rory only talk about discovering the fake after they get the real Amy back. Marion is a patient of Doctor Woods at the Ravenmoor Mental Institute. Amy sees Doctor Oakley in the Rookmoor Mental Institute. Amy was made to think that her parents institutionalised her because of her Doctor obsession and that Rory left to work in Gloucester. Marion is led to believe that she failed her exams, never became a teacher and was in several low grade jobs before being sectioned because of her strange obsessions. Amy has a longer sequence about the Famous Five books and the books and films she is denied access to because they might feed her obsession. Amy is particularly banned from anything to do with pirates after telling her psychiatrist about an adventure on a pirate ship. This, of course, hasn’t happened yet on TV.

The ways in which Marion and Amy realise the truth are different. Amy notices the blue ink still on her hands from the plants at the Asinege banquet. Marion realises that she still has ring marks on her hands even though she has supposedly been in the institute for a year. Amy remembers having her memories manipulated by the Dreamlord. Marion remembers Kristoph altering her memory temporarily in order to hide Li’s hiding place from the Truthtaker.

The dénouements of the two stories are different, too. In the Marion and Kristoph story, Marion stays in the TARDIS while Kristoph and the Presidential Guards go to destroy the Nestene and blow up the ship disguised as an asylum. In Madness of Amy Pond, Amy is having none of that and goes with The Doctor and Rory to see for herself what it was that captured her and caused her all this trouble. It says something about the two women that one was ready to fight and the other glad to stay in safety inside the TARDIS.

Nestene and Autons need no explanation, of course, they have been around a long time, first seen in Doctor Who in 1970, in Jon Peretwee’s first story, Spearhead from Space before coming back a year later in Jo Grant’s first Adventure, Terror of The Autons. They come back once more in the re-booted 2005 debut, Rose, and then again in The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang when Rory’s consciousness is transferred to a Roman Auton. I’ve also featured the Nestene and lots of animated plastic in a New Lords of Time story, Anti-Plastic. They’re pretty much established as Doctor Who villains by now.

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Auton
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Nestene_Consciousness

http://www.pearsecom.co.uk/Marion/200/210facsimile.htm