Russell T Davies always intended that the main focus of Series 1 would be the Daleks - assuming that Terry Nation's estate would play ball. If the programme went to a second series then it would be time for the return of the second most popular foes - the Cybermen.
The 2005 series finale had seen the conclusion of the Bad Wolf story arc, revealing what it meant. It also featured an epic battle with massed ranks of Daleks, including a fleet of saucers and hundreds of Daleks sweeping through space.
The 2006 finale had to not only match this, but surpass it. Keen to have the Daleks make an appearance each year, the obvious thing was for there to be story where the two great enemies finally met each other.
This was not a new idea. Not only would generations of children - and fan-fiction writers - have imagined such a thing, but the production team of 1968 (i.e. Peter Bryant, Derrick Sherwin and Terrance Dicks) actually tried to make it happen.
There was a five year gap between The Evil of the Daleks and Day of the Daleks, and everyone tends to assume that this was the length of time Terry Nation withheld his creations from the programme, due to his plans to launch them in their own series (first in the UK and, when that didn't pan out, in the States).
The fact is that Nation was already amenable to the Daleks making a comeback exactly one year after their last monochrome outing. He considered allowing them to be used in the final story of Season 5, so long as he didn't have to write it, but then stipulated that they could not appear in the same story as the Cybermen. The reason is probably the same as for not wanting K9 to feature in Destiny of the Daleks - Nation did not want anything diminishing his creations and making them look weak.
The hoped-for inclusion of the Daleks might well be why it was David Whitaker who was asked to work on Kit Pedler's ideas for The Wheel in Space. It is hard to see why he would have been brought onto a standard issue Cyberman project otherwise.
If you are wondering why the Daleks weren't retained and Cybermen dropped from Wheel, then it's because the BBC didn't have to pay extra for use of Cybermen.
This is another reason why it took five years for them to return - Daleks were more expensive.
Daleks and Cybermen would come close to meeting on one other occasion. The first version of Frontier in Space had the Master allied with Cybermen instead of Ogrons. Apart from raiding spaceships they would not have fulfilled the same role as the Ogrons later did, so the Dalek and Cybermen would not have overlapped in the final episode in the same way.
The only glimpse of a Cyberman in the 2005 series also just happens to be in the episode which reintroduces the Daleks.
Army of Ghosts and Doomsday were therefore designed to bring the top two monsters together, thus raising the stakes for planet Earth. One would be bad enough, but how would we cope against two?
No doubt the Nation estate had a say in which side would win when the two finally squared up to each other.
These high stakes were necessary to give Rose a decent send-off. She couldn't simply leave after a fairly standard adventure, and she'd already coped with both Daleks and Cybermen individually.
As well as Rose's departure and a high stakes finale, the episodes also had to act as a sequel to the earlier Cyberman story - Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel.
As part of Rose's departure it also had to bring some resolution to the story arcs of her mother and her ex-boyfriend, tying them in with the events on the parallel "Pete's World".
Having introduced the alt. Pete and killed off alt. Jackie; shown how our Pete had died in Father's Day; and shown Mickey's gran to be still alive in the parallel world, the various pawns were in place to link everyone up and send them all off to Pete's World to live happily ever after.
Apart from Rose...
There had to be a reason for her to stop travelling with the Doctor, so she either had to be killed off, had her memory wiped, or become trapped in another dimension. RTD never considered killing her as it would be unfair to younger members of the audience.
Companions may have died in the past (especially where Cybermen and Daleks were involved) but the new series was to be more optimistic. Children were to be able to imagine themselves becoming a companion one day, so it had to be an ultimately positive experience.
Another function of the story was to tie up the "Torchwood" arc.
The name was an anagram of "doctor who", used to send production materials between London and Cardiff without anyone knowing what the contents were, and it was going to be used as the title for the new Captain Jack spin-off show starring John Barrowman. It got its first mention in one of the Weakest Link questions in Bad Wolf.
As early as the second episode of Series 2 - Tooth and Claw - its nature had been explained, so the mentions throughout the series were there just for a bit of fun, something for viewers to spot. There was nothing really to work out - not in the same way as the identity of "Bad Wolf" had been.
It was an organisation set up by Queen Victoria to defend Britain against aliens and, by extension, the Doctor.
All Army of Ghosts did was show us what it looked like, and who was in charge of it. They were the means by which the Daleks and the Cybermen could come together in present day London.
The branch at Canary Wharf was Torchwood One, whilst Captain Jack's Cardiff branch was Torchwood Three, thus connecting the parent series with its spin-off beyond just the use of Barrowman.
Back in 1993 the BBC had brought us a Doctor Who / EastEnders crossover for Children in Need. This was Dimensions in Time, co-written and produced by John Nathan Turner. A hoped for multi-Doctor adventure - "The Dark Dimension" - had fallen by the wayside due to budget and casting issues and this would be all fans would get for the 30th anniversary. As a piece for charity, it was agreed that it would never be repeated or merchandised in any way, and is generally regarded as sitting outside canon.
The Doctor had made references to EastEnders as being a soap opera in his universe (such as comments about the Christmas episode disasters in The Impossible Planet). Army of Ghosts confirmed its fictional status, when the Doctor and Rose witnessed Barbara Windsor's character dealing with the ghost of Den Watts on TV.
Doctor Who would continue to feature celebrity cameos like Windsor's in its remaining RTD finales. This time we also get "psychic" Derek Acorah (Most Haunted), TV presenter Alistair Appleton (Cash in the Attic), and talk show host Trisha Goddard (Trisha).
Some specific Cyberman influences include the DWM comic strip "The Flood" - the final McGann one prior to Rose. In this the Cybermen infiltrate London and other parts of the globe from another dimension, appearing as ghostly forms initially. They are exposed by a top secret alien hunting organisation, based at a London tourist destination for cover.
The Big Finish audio Spare Parts, which had lent a small amount to the earlier Cyberman origins story, featured a character named Yvonne Hartley, which is very close to the Torchwood CEO's name.
Torchwood itself is reminiscent of other alien-hunting outfits, such as in Mulder and Scully's X-Files, Buffy's The Initiative, The Men in Black, and Doctor's Who's very own UNIT.
The creation of Torchwood as far back as the Victorian era has thrown up all manner of continuity headaches - not least why they failed to act against the Doctor during all the years he was exiled to Earth, or on any of the many, many visits he's made to the UK since its founding.
There are some parallels with Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials, in that the final book of the trilogy (The Amber Spyglass) features an army of beings coming from another dimension, and one character uses the titular spyglass to see what others can't, just like the Doctor and his 3-D spectacles. The books feature an alternative universe England, similar to Pete's World.
Rose's bald statement to the audience that she is dead reminds us of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's 2002 novel which is told from the perspective of a dead girl.
The episode ends with a throw-forward to the second Christmas Special. Many felt this ruined the sombre mood of the episode, but RTD wanted to show that, even when companions leave, the series carries on and the Doctor is already facing his next adventure...
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