Intergalactic Salvage introduced a nasty thought – WHAT could be strong enough to kill Daleks, Sontarans and Rutans all at the same time?

Intergalactic Salvage is much the same as any other kind of salvage. The Doctor would have the right to anything of value on the wreck as long as there was nobody left alive on board. As it happens, there were survivors. Just the two. A boy and his dog.

Now, one of my dogs got to star in a story already, as Bootle the over-enthusiastic pooch in Shadows of the Past. This time, it was the turn of Judy to model for Hildo, the pet dog of young Andries, only survivor on board the Human freight ship, MSV Eindhoven. The name, came from PSV Eindhoven,m the Dutch football team, which gave me the idea of making it a freighter heading for a Dutch space colony, and a quick Google came up with the word Vrijheid, meaning Freedom, which seemed a perfectly good name for a colony planet populated by Dutch people. A further Google came up with Andries Brengerhof as an authentic and not too obvious Dutch name. Rotbeest, duivel, vader and dodelijk were all different words meaning ‘monster’. Vader is an interesting one. Is that where Star Wars got the name from? Who knows.

K9’s jealousy of the live dog is the light relief in a story which gets quite dark once The Doctor investigates what HAS happened to so many ships. The answer to that question is a shape shifting creature that disguises itself as an attractive woman in leather and eats people’s brains. Two popular film references would jump to mind, of course. The dominatrix woman looks a lot like the villain in Men In Black Two. The brain eating is Starship Troopers. The difference between rip-off and homage is to reference them in the story. So there is a brief discussion about the two films before they get down to the serious matter of the shape-shifting killer.

The ‘diamond’ in the middle of her hand that was used as a laser beam to cut through a Dalek casing came from a VERY unlikely source. One of the entrants in the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest had a flashing light stuck onto her palm which she used in her act. I don’t remember which one it was. But I made a note to use that.

The Doctor doesn’t like dominating women. His opinion of Margaret Thatcher was made clear in thw 2006 episode Tooth and Claw. “uggh”. I added a few new ones. Madame Chárr, the Ethics teacher at the Prydonian Academy, is a made up one, of course. “A woman who would have made the Valkyries stay behind after class!” Boadicea is a woman he MUST have come across in his travels. Emily Pankhurst was mentioned in Smith and Jones as having stolen his laser spanner. Barbara Woodhouse, probably not. The Rani is the dominatrix of them all.

The creatures in Starship Troopers, ate brains in order to gain information. This creature does the same thing. That much WAS taken from that film. That is, of course, how she knows who and what The Doctor is. She got the information from the Daleks whose brains she absorbed.

The way The Doctor defeated her, by tricking her into the TARDIS and then materialising it in empty space, took a bit of thinking through. The reason for the crashed ships was that she could only move between ships with an atmosphere, not the vacuum of space. The way to get rid of her was to expel her from the TARDIS, into space. But that meant losing K9, too. Except The Doctor had another trick up his sleeve.

His space walk, was mainly to get him into a space suit again. Twice, in 2006 and 2007 he has done so. In 42, he did a short space walk outside the ship. I really wanted a scene where he would do that, again. Of course, given the choice between K9 and Wyn’s laptop, he grabbed K9.