Feminine
Factor started from a story my partner, Simon, started to write, based
on the characters in New Lords of Time. It remained unfinished due to
lack of time and other factors until I got around to reworking it. Originally,
there was going to be an invasion of the party by assorted space criminals,
including a couple of raxacoricofallipatorians, but I decided that continuing
the theme of ‘Feminine Factor’ would be more original.
I kept the original descriptions of the palace, though I changed a few details about the Princess Thrydis, making her the last of a long line of queens who had lived beyond their means to maintain their opulence. I also introduced the idea that here, women were the dominant gender. This tied in with the row that Hellina and Jack have in the opening scene and makes it all the more ironic when the women decide to go get their men who have been kidnapped by the Queen and taken to her seraglio. “I’m going to get my man,” says Hellina, and Jackie and Brenda, and young Eilis, Chris’s ‘plus one’ agree.
Hellina is the only combatant, of course. But it IS true that Jackie once punched The Doctor, as we all know. Brenda, in the Unfinished Business story “Blind Man’s Buff” showed that she can be clever, and Eilis, as a student at the Sanctuary, was bound to know some martial arts. So they weren’t as hopeless a case as they might seem at first.
The men being chained up in the seraglio made an opportunity for Chris and Christopher to practice their telekinesis. Melting metal by reminding it of when it was molten, is an idea inspired by Terry Pratchett. In one of his stories, the young witch, Magrat, reminds a door of when it was a tree and is told that a more advanced form of the magic would be to remind the stones of when they were ‘hot and runny’. This is obviously the same principle.
Simon’s version of events was going to culminate in one of the twins bringing his TARDIS by remote telepathy. I kept that idea, but it is Davie’s TARDIS that is available, not Chris’s. Chris, of course, is much more used to piloting his TARDIS telepathically. Davie struggles, but succeeds in the end.
Thinking of a good, amusing and topical disguise
for his TARDIS took a while, before I hit on the idea of Britannia, but
it was definitely appropriate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd_Sisters
http://www.rdwf.org.uk/doctors/D9/04aliensoflondon.htm
