Inspirations - The Long Game

The Long Game sits at the mid-point of Series 1, where it has several roles to play. 

It acts as a prequel / set-up for the series finale and is designed to invite a good companion / bad companion comparison. This latter was Russell T Davies' starting point for the episode.

New companion Adam Mitchell, introduced only one episode earlier, has been brought on board purely to mess up. He does this by lying to the Doctor and Rose, but mainly by wanting to abuse the opportunity to travel through time. He intends to send information from the future (the development of the micro-processor) back to his own time. His motive for doing so isn't made explicit - is it for financial gain, or is he just such a tech nerd that he wants to develop things himself first?

Rose, on the other hand, only travels for the adventure, and for the experience. She doesn't do it to get something out of it for herself - at least not this week...

Once the Doctor knows what Adam has been trying to do, he takes him home and leaves him there. Adam now has future technology implanted into him. The Doctor uses this as a way of forcing him to keep his (augmented) head down and not do anything to be noticed. However, the Doctor runs a huge risk by not having the medical procedure undone, as Adam could easily suffer an accident or illness where discovery might be unavoidable. We'll talk about the lack of consistency on the Doctor's part when Rose does an Adam next time.

The planned finale for this series was a return to the space station and the Doctor discovering that his actions have inadvertently lead to a future disaster for Earth. By stopping the Jagrafess and its manipulation of the news to undermine galactic freedoms, the Doctor has caused Earth's history in this period to go awry. Having this story share the same setting as the final two episodes also acts a real money-saver, as the sets can simply be redressed.

This long-term planning by the as yet unknown aliens behind the Jagrafess gives this story its title.

A "long game" is a form of confidence trick, usually for much higher stakes than a simpler con. It is necessary to build up a complex backstory, perhaps involving multiple players - and multiple layers - which all takes a while to set up. The longer a situation appears to be normal, accepted by many people, the more likely it is that the victim will trust the con artists and be cheated out of their property.

The last inspiration of note is the way mass media is regarded. In the UK at least, the main newspapers and TV channels were all the property of a very small handful of men. In particular we had Robert Maxwell and the Mirror Group, and Rupert Murdoch and the Times Group, as well as his ownership of the satellite broadcaster Sky. The fear has always been that these individuals would use their newspapers and TV channels to influence politics and thus manipulate society. Maxwell died in 1991 when he went overboard off his yacht. It may have been suicide, as his company was involved in a pensions scandal, and he was not as rich as he liked to make out, or he may even have been murdered (there's a Mossad assassination theory). To the public, he was a corpulent man - the embodiment of the City Fat Cat - and this was probably the inspiration for the Jagrafess being a massive slab of fat.

Murdoch and Maxwell were nothing new in British society - newspaper proprietors were trying to influence the public since Victorian times, and even the earlier broadsheets were designed to manipulate people.

Kronkburgers, by the way, were originally to be found in the pages of the Doctor Who Weekly comic strip - namely the very first story: "The Iron Legion".

Next time: when Time - and Rose - go wrong...