There was a practical reason for Interlude in Time as well as a creative one. I wanted to push the next story, South Atlantic, forward to coincide with Remembrance Sunday on the 25^th anniversary year of the Falklands War. It also gave me the opportunity to revisit some past issues. Rose’s fear of being taken from the TARDIS by a transmat such as happened in the Bad Wolf episode was something I wanted to explore. It struck me at the time of that episode that it must be a terrible thing to be suddenly dragged from home and family and plunged into a life and death horror. And that was happening to everyone on Earth because of the Dalek menace. It was also an opportunity to show that their love life had not been affected by The Doctor’s recent illness and to portray him as a virile man once again.

Stopping time is not something Time Lords do lightly. In the Key to Time series of the Tom Baker era it took a lot of trouble to do that. The Doctor manages it a little more easily here, and for a reason his Time Lord elders would consider trivial.

I could have left it purely as a romance, of course. But I also wanted to explore some of The Doctor’s more distant issues. Letting him take a journey back into his memories, with the power of the new Matrix that he has command of, was a last word on the events of the Time War and a reconciliation of a sort between The Doctor and his half brother with whom he had always had an ambivalent relationship.

Bringing together those elements perhaps makes it a less cohesive story, but it IS an interlude rather than an adventure.