The idea of a story set in a library was an old one for Steven Moffat - one of those he proposed as a follow-up to his 2005 story. Like The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, it was always intended as a two-parter.
First drafts included the idea of "time windows" which linked every library throughout history - but this idea got used instead in The Girl in the Fireplace for the windows into Reinette's life. His other idea for the library story - creepy angel statues - was also shifted to another story.
Blink had been a Doctor-lite story, and one of the episodes of this Series 4 story would also be Doctor-lite. However, they were getting much better at these "lite" stories, to the extent that the casual audience didn't even notice that there was less of a role for either the Doctor or the companion.
For the 2008 series, the Doctor would take a step back and allow Donna to dominate Forest of the Dead and Turn Left, whilst she would take a back seat for Midnight.
By careful plotting and film scheduling, the Doctor could still play a significant role in the second half of the story, however - unlike his more noticeable absence from Love & Monsters or Blink.
A later version of the story was known as "Space Library" and now included living shadows. Instead of the girl, Cal, there was a little boy watching events on his TV. The library had a robot librarian.
Moffat liked to use childhood fears for his stories, and shadows fitted the bill. Every child could be scared of the shadows in their bedroom at night. In an interview at the time he also mentioned how cracks in walls and lumps under carpets could be scary - both things which he used in later stories, though the carpet was swapped for a bedspread.
The idea of deadly shadows was also a very cheap option for a story that would need a lot of other VFX work.
Moffat's original title for the second episode was "The Doctor Runs", which Russell T Davies hated. It then went under the title "Forest of the Night" for a time.
It was during the scripting period for this story that Moffat was offered the opportunity of taking over from RTD. By creating a figure from the Doctor's future - someone he hasn't met yet - Moffat could set things up for his own tenure if he wanted to develop this relationship further. Some of River Song's story was already in his head. By killing her off in her very first story, he knew he could simply have future stories set in her past - but his future. The crash of the Byzantium is mentioned, as is Darillium, and River knows the Doctor's name - all things which Moffat will return to later.
Moffat wanted to have the Doctor and Donna spending some time exploring the library on their own before anyone else turned up - inspired by the opening episode of The Ark in Space. They needed someone to interact with, however, and so the Nodes were devised. Once he had created them, Moffat then realised he had to have the companion turned into one as the cliff-hanger.
The Nodes were described as having nothing solid behind their faces - "like spoons". Moffat would return to this image for the "Spoonheads" in The Bells of Saint John.
Books mentioned include the works of disgraced Tory peer Jeffrey Archer and the Bridget Jones books.
Monty Python's Big Red Book is also talked about, as is Dan Jones' The Da Vinci Code. In one scene we can see a Clive Barker book on a shelf.
Moffat changed the names of Donna's children to that of his own son and one of his friends. Cal finding hidden buttons on the TV remote was inspired by his son discovering extra buttons under a flap on a similar remote.
There wasn't much of the story arc present, though River is clearly upset when she learns who Donna is - hinting at something terrible in her future.
Forest of the Dead was supposed to be followed immediately by Turn Left, but the producer pointed out that both episodes saw Donna living in an alternate reality. It was therefore decided to place Midnight in between.
The image of a spaceman with a skull face in their helmet is lifted directly from an instalment of the classic cartoon series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! which launched in 1969. The episode in question was "Spooky Space Kook", which was first broadcast on 20th December 1969. This phantom astronaut haunted an air base and left glowing hand and foot prints - which proved to be phosphorescent paint as he was really a local farmer who was trying to scare his neighbour and the Air Force away in order to buy their land cheaply - and he would have gotten away with too, it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids...
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