Inspirations - Father's Day

Before we proceed, it's time to mention the Virgin New Adventures novels. Billed as stories too big to tell on TV, they were a continuation of the Seventh Doctor's travels. Ace was with him initially, but later replaced with some new companions created just for the books. One of these was an archaeologist named Bernice Summerfield, and her creator was writer Paul Cornell.

Russell T Davies had written one of these books, and he looked to some of the other authors when putting together his first season of Doctor Who. Mark Gatiss, for instance, had been another NA author. (Steven Moffat had been invited to a meeting at Virgin Publishing about the books, but walked out when he discovered that they weren't interested in past Doctor stories).

As well as introducing Summerfield, Cornell had written a novel which RTD particularly liked - a story which he would see turned into a TV story for Series 3. This book was Human Nature. This and other Cornell books won him a place on the new series writing team.

Another of his books - his first for the range - was Timewyrm: Revelation. This features a wound in time relating to the companion's past, and people seeking refuge in a church.

Just before Doctor Who returned to the screens there had been a false dawn with the on-line animated "The Scream of the Shalka", written by Cornell. Was a job on the TV series a sort of apology for that series being scrapped?

Father's Day is an annual event in the UK and the USA, although on different dates. It always falls on a Sunday, and it's no coincidence that Mother's Day follows 9 months later.

Cornell adopted the title to tell a story about Rose Tyler's father - Pete - who gets an extra day of life thanks to his daughter's meddling with history.

It had already been established that Rose lived only with her mother, Jackie. Her father had not been mentioned up to now.

In the pre-title sequence of Father's Day we discover that Pete was killed when hit by a car when Rose was just a baby, so she never knew him. Jackie has painted an unrealistic picture of him to her daughter as the perfect father and husband. Apparently aspects of Pete's personality - his always trying get rich quick schemes - came from Cornell's own father.

At its heart, this episode's main inspiration is that it's a character piece - designed to deliberately tug the heartstrings and manipulate the emotions by having Rose get to meet and spend some time with the dear old dad she never got to know. He isn't the ideal father-husband, but by sacrificing himself to put history back on track he redeems himself. The Reapers and the timey-wimey stuff is all just window dressing, and there's a policy for this series that there has to be an alien / monster in every episode.

Christopher Eccleston had 'flu during the making of this episode, so getting removed from Time for a bit was probably great for him.

The idea of someone changing history, and things turning out to be a disaster in consequence, is hardly original. We all know the story of the person standing on the butterfly in prehistoric times, then returning to the 20th Century to find the Nazis won World War II, or something similar.

The idea of someone being saved from being run over by a car, who must die to maintain known history, immediately brings the Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever" to mind. Car accidents have tended to resolve potential time paradoxes on many occasions.

Rose touching her younger self and causing a sort of temporal short circuit is reminiscent of the two Brigadiers meeting in Mawdryn Undead. It's the Blinovith Limitation Effect.

This week's Bad Wolf reference is graffiti on some music posters, seen in the background as the Doctor and Rose watch the scene of Pete's accident.