Inspirations: The Next Doctor

The 2008 Christmas Special started life as a plan to get JK Rowling to write for the series. When she proved too busy to contribute, Russell T Davies then envisaged a story about her - in the same way earlier episodes had featured historical writers Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. Rowling would have been dragged back through time to Victorian Edinburgh where she encountered real-life magical figures similar to those from her Harry Potter books. It was hoped she might play herself.

It was David Tennant who poured cold water on this idea, as he felt that the series was in danger of spoofing itself.

The traditional Christmas, as we tend to think if it, was supposedly invented by the Victorians. The origins of the festive celebrations go back to pre-Christian times, but a lot of the trappings we are familiar with were certainly popularised by the Victorians thanks to their adoption by the Royal Family, and for the first time ever the public were getting a glimpse into their household.

Christmas has also become synonymous with Victorian author Dickens thanks to his evergreen novella A Christmas Carol. When the revived series opted to include a story involving him in 2005 - The Unquiet Dead - it set the tale during the festive period (albeit New Year rather than Christmas itself), and featured ghostly aliens due to his writing on supernatural subjects.

RTD had concentrated on threats to present day Earth with his Christmas Specials up to this point, but now decided to set one in Victorian times. By now, he knew that he was leaving the series to hand over to Steven Moffat, and would only have one further Special to come - which had to be contemporary Earth again due to the inclusion of the Master, Donna and Wilf, rounding off the tenth Doctor's incarnation. 

He would only get this one chance to write a proper Victorian / Dickensian Christmas story.

The Specials had also tended to feature stand-alone threats rather than bring back popular monsters - mainly because not everyone who watched the episode on Christmas night had been following the series during its normal run. Daleks at Christmas would be an obvious choice as far as fans were concerned, and no doubt the BBC would have liked to see this, but RTD recognised that festive episodes drew a different audience (another reason for the contemporary Earth settings, even if part of an episode was set on a spaceship. It was a spaceship threatening to destroy contemporary London).

With the Daleks having just featured in the Series 4 finale, RTD opted to bring back the Cybermen, who hadn't been seen since Doomsday at the end of Series 2.

Not only were they a popular monster, not seen for a while (and well enough known that even the casual viewer might be familiar with them), they also tied in with the whole dark Victoriana / cyberpunk aesthetic. The new Cybermen might have had their origins in Art Deco as far as design was concerned, but they also epitomised runaway unregulated industrialisation. Lumic's Cyber-conversion factory, at Battersea Power Station, had been given a "dark satanic mill" vibe by the production team in The Age of Steel.

One problem was how to include them, when they had all been sucked into the Void at the conclusion of their last appearance. All of the Cybermen in the revived series were of the alternate Earth / Cybus variety. Reference had been made to Cybermen in our universe, after the Doctor and Rose spotted a disembodied head in Van Statten's museum, but so far we hadn't seen any of them.

A deleted scene at the end of Journey's End had seen the Doctor confronted momentarily by a pair of Cybermen in the TARDIS.- suggesting that they are moving through the Vortex.

The Cybermen of The Next Doctor are therefore also Cybus versions, who have managed to escape the Void using captured Dalek technology (again taking us back to their meeting in Doomsday).

We have seen Cyberman spaceships before - initially saucer-like ones in their first couple of appearances but then longer, cylindrical ones in the later ones. Here we are introduced to the "Dreadnought" class Cyber-King, which is actually Cyberman-shaped. Presumably they exist in more stream-lined form elsewhere, but here the Cybermen have to make use of whatever technology is available, and so we get a cyberpunk version - all cogs and pistons and belching chimneys.

Dreadnoughts - meaning "fearing nothing" - were WWI era battleships, named after the first of their number - HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906.

Mickey Smith had previously supposed that the Void Ship might contain a "Cyber-King" in Army of Ghosts - simply meaning their ultimate leader.

Cybershades are a development on the Cybermats, which had yet to make a re-appearance in the series. They are said to derive from converted animals - possibly cats and dogs, despite their bipedal appearance. The origins of the Cybermats was never made clear - converted animals or, as the Doctor himself suggests, an actual metallic lifeform.

The look of the Cybershade costumes was inspired by the Dementors from Harry Potter.

We see a new Cyber-Leader, with a black face plate and a clear skull panel. The latter is plainly due to a reuse of the Lumic Cyber-Controller helmet, whilst the face plate is reminiscent of Kroton, the Cyberman with emotions from early Doctor Weekly comic strips.

To help them build their Cyber-King, the Cybermen make use of child labour - which brings in the Dickensian aspects of the story. Oliver Twist is an obvious influence, with the workhouse setting of the earlier chapters, but children are used and abused in a number of his stories. He himself had been forced into working in a blacking factory at Charing Cross as a boy due to his father's debts, and it was an experience he never forgot. 

A street urchin, escaped from a workhouse, was originally going to be this Special's one-off companion.

Requiring a strong female character to counter the twin male "Doctors", he devised Miss Hartigan and made her the Matron of one of the London workhouses.

It is true that women were not encouraged to appear at the graveside when a funeral took place. This only took place for a short period of the Victorian era, and was mainly confined to the upper classes. (The idea was that members of the fairer sex were too fragile to participate). Photographs do exist of women attending funerals in the Victorian period.

At one point Oliver Twist is apprenticed to a funeral director.

The red of Hartigan's costume hints at her background as having been a "scarlet woman", which is also alluded to in the dialogue.

The image of Cybermen in the snow was the very first idea RTD had for the story - inspired by their very first appearance in Episode One of The Tenth Planet. A graveyard setting suited the notion of them being like living dead people - and it is notable that Steven Moffat also placed them in that setting in Death in Heaven. The cemetery attack was originally going to be the pre-credit sequence before the script was fully developed.

The deceased Rev. Aubrey Fairchild gets his name from that which RTD was going to use for the Prime Minister in Aliens of London.

The idea of the Doctor encountering an incarnation which he (and we) didn't know about wasn't a new one, though it had only been done in other media. RTD was the first to introduce a hitherto unknown Doctor on TV, and it has since been copied by each of his successors. They elected to go for real Doctors from his / her past, whilst RTD pulls the trick of them only thinking they are the Doctor, when they are in fact an ordinary human being who has had his memories downloaded into them. The notion of "The Next Doctor" played on the fact that the audience knew that David Tennant was leaving, and his replacement had yet to be announced. RTD had already played a similar trick by having that fake regeneration scene at the end of The Stolen Earth. The general public may have been taken in, but fans were already aware of filming for the 2009 specials, with Tennant still playing the Doctor.

The Jackson Lake Doctor has a companion named Rosita - mirroring his original (for the revived series) companion Rose.

The urchin companion was turned into Lake's abducted son.

The Doctor is talked into participating in a Christmas dinner. He had resisted this in the last couple of specials - due to it reminding him of that first (for this incarnation) Christmas meal with Rose after the Sycorax attack. He has seen her again just recently so has finally gotten over her.

We also get real snow this year, it always having been "fake" snow in the past - debris from the Sycorax ship, artificial snow courtesy of the TARDIS, or ballast from the Titanic salvage vessels.

Next time: the series' first Easter Special - meaning a chocolate egg appears. And that's it...