Followers of The Master is, of course, the follow up to Son of the Master. It started with the idea of The Doctor, as a Human, feeling alone and vulnerable on a sea front somewhere. I had a perfect image in my mind of the Ninth Doctor, wrapped in a big overcoat instead of his familiar leather jacket, actually feeling what it is to be Human and fifty, with aches and pains, tired and sad. I also had the vision of Marton, fully believing that he is The Doctor’s real son, running to him after being on the beach, and them sharing an intimate father-son moment. I toyed with them both having their memory wiped and The Doctor believing he was Marton’s father, which might actually have been more dramatic, but it didn’t come off that way.

The breakfast scene with the landlady of the hotel was also clear in my mind. She is loosely based on the landlady of the b&b in Remembrance of the Daleks who didn’t like coloured people. Essentially, I wanted a likeable, clean-living, God-fearing woman who had a deep prejudice against aliens. Her prejudice is possibly not unfounded given that the Earth had just been invaded by aliens. I expect people felt much the same about Germans in 1945. But The Doctor recognised that such feelings were likely to mean trouble in the future. I had already drafted the following story at that point and Mrs Golightly is an obvious seed for that.

Her name, of course, was taken from Reverend Golightly in the episode of the 2008 series of Doctor Who, The Unicorn and the Wasp. No special reason. It just seemed a good name for a landlady.

I originally had in mind The Doctor collapsing on the seafront. The sequence was much the same but transferred to the front of the hotel. I’m not sure if Weymouth has hotels with steps leading up to their doors. The ones I remember from summers in Blackpool and Rhyl always did.

Inbetween, Chris and Davie have their jobs to do. I always had in mind that this story would switch between them. Marton’s flashes of telepathy links into them.

First, SangC’lune, where the Followers of The Master were first encountered in the Unfinished Business story, Return to SangC’lune. Chris and Davie were children, then. Now they are men. Chris has established himself very much as the patriarch of this planet, revered by the local people as much as The Doctor was.

Curiously, although many stories have been set on SangC’lune, very few of the people there have names. Firinne and her sisters, who Chris met in a previous adventure are about the only ones. This time, some of them were named. Cor Fornaio, one of the victims of the Followers, gets his name from the Italian for ‘baker’. Maggiore, literally means elder. Simple names, for a simple-living people.

The cavern under the ancient ruined temple was also introduced in an Unfinished Business story, Mind Flip. This is the first time it has been used, since, though.

The trick with the sonic screwdriver and the stasis field rather flies in the face of Russell T. Davies’ rule that the sonic can be used to open doors and help the hero get to the dénouement, but shouldn’t actually be the solution to the problem. Sorry, but I couldn’t think of any other way to do it when faced with so many armed nasties, and Chris has to remain the pacifist even if he is called upon to do action scenes now and again.

Meanwhile on Tibora, a planet that resembles Oregan or Washington State quite a lot, Davie, Brenda and Spenser witness Tibora’s answer to Waco with a lot of death and destruction happening ‘off screen’. I didn’t want to actually have to describe all that in graphic detail.

The incident when Spenser gets hurt was completely unnecessary, and served no particular purpose in the story until I added in a short dialogue about him having a defective regeneration gene that prevented him from repairing his body like Gallifreyans should be able to do. This still serves no particular purpose in the story, but it does set up for a later one when Spenser is more badly injured.

The Doctor in hospital, is in a bad state, but of course, when he is allowed to become a Time Lord again the medical problems he has would disappear. Everything is right again. Except The Doctor and Rose need to make up for lost time, and he needs one last chat with Marton about their brief close relationship before bringing closure on that story arc.