The House of Dvore is a misspelling of House Dvora. In some of the non-cannon Doctor Who fiction Dvora is the family that Morbius, the Renegade Time Lord from ‘Brain of Morbius comes from. This is not about Morbius, but one of his ancestors. The reason for the different spelling, is the same reason that in my stories The Doctor’s surname is de Lœngbærrow and not Lungbarrow or Lungburrow. I’m writing my own mythology, thank you. But it’s a nicely dramatic name, and good enough.

Cult of Dvore wasn’t going to be a two parter originally. But it seemed to naturally fall into two sections. First there was the arrival of Chris and Davie on Gallifrey, ten generations before their own time. This was the calm before the storm as Chrístõ de Lœngbærrow the First explained why they were needed and Davie’s concerns about the Hand of Omega were raised vociferously. As a self contained story, it doesn’t get very far except to prove that Davie is very much a chip off the old block by squaring up to his ancestor, the general. Clearly part one is just building up to part two.

Part Two, however, doesn’t immediately follow on from where Part One left off. It would have seriously dragged the story down to spend too long on how Chris and Davie infiltrated Dvore’s compound. I made it easy. They got into a deliberately orchestrated fight and ran with Dvore’s people at the right time. I’m fairly sure this happened in some film I saw once, but I can’t think which one right now.

I wanted to portray Dvore as having something of a charismatic personality that would draw people in. His political views, on the surface at least, appeal to the disenfranchised of Gallifrey. This is rather like the way Hitler appealed to disenfranchised Germans in the 1930s, but I wasn’t really drawing any obvious parallels. If anything, Dvore is slightly nicer than Hitler.

I intended for Davie to be sucked into his inner circle, and one idea was that he would go over to Dvore’s side completely for a while. But I really couldn’t see how Davie would do that. Instead, he had to be taken over by the false persona that he had been given to prevent Dvore finding out that he was a spy. Draveen Goth is allegedly from the House that, eventually, will give birth to Chancellor Goth who joined forces with The Master in The Deadly Assassin. That’s just a neat little bit of back-referencing to remind everyone reading that this is vaguely connected to the television programme called Doctor Who.

The liquidation of the ‘deadwoods’, including Chris, was something I gave some thought to. At first I had in mind the whole group being brought into some kind of square and machine guns pouring bullets into them. Something like the execution of the Italian soldiers in the film Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, or the captured escapees in The Great Escape. But the more I thought about it, I realised I didn’t really want a massacre, even one in which Chris Campbell survived in much the same way that Correlli did in the first film mentioned there. What I needed was the whole group of ‘Deadwood’ escaping at the last moment, with it just close enough for Davie to wonder if they had escaped after all. That uncertainty would haunt him for a little while. Meanwhile, Chris and the Deadwoods could save the day by stopping the Hand of Omega.

The Heart of Omega, was originally going to be the Great Key, the one that was the vital component of the De-Mat gun in Invasion of Time. But I decided to invent a new artefact since that would have been just a bit too similar. It meant a bit of a rewrite of some of the discussion about where the Heart was kept, but I think it’s better that way.

Some readers commented that Davie’s assassination of Dvore was a bit quick and simple in the end, and that he didn’t fight any of the ‘true’ followers after killing their leader. But I don’t think that was needed. He led a more or less bloodless coup and those who still professed loyalty to Dvore went to Shada. Good enough for them. Davie has fought enough battles. Let him have this one easy and a nice happy ending for him and his brother.

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Morbius
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/House_Dvora

http://www.rdwf.org.uk/doctors/D4/s13/05brainofmorbius.htm
http://www.rdwf.org.uk/doctors/D4/s14/03thedeadlyassasin.htm