The original idea behind Unfinished
Business was to write a one off story to generate interest in writing fiction
among the members of my Doctor Who discussion forum. This didn’t work, because
everyone was so enthusiastic about it that they just wanted more from me
and nobody else got around to writing anything. My original intention was
a story that would slot into the existing canon of the Ninth Doctor TV series,
possibly between The Doctor Dances and Boomtown. There are indications in
Boomtown of at least six months of adventures not seen on TV involving Rose,
The Doctor and Jack, so it was possible to slot in a few stories. Having
continued to write, however, I decided to abandon that idea and have the
Unfinished Business series as an “alternative universe” in which Doctor
#9 did not regenerate and the adventures continued after Parting of the
Ways. We learn in subsequent stories that about two years have passed. Rose
is nearly twenty-one and has been in the Doctor’s company continuously,
while Jack has gone off to do his own thing, returning when needed.
Jack’s recall button, is one of the inventions I put into the story that doesn’t appear anywhere in the TV show. It works, of course, on the same principle as the time rings that made a brief appearance in the 1970s series, allowing transportation from one place to another without need of a TARDIS.
The ability to summon the TARDIS remotely, saving a lot of walking back to where it was parked, builds on what happened in the episode Father’s Day. The TARDIS key, properly charged, was able to bring the TARDIS back from outside of time. In normal circumstances, the idea of the TARDIS being able to be summoned by pressing the key seemed to me a useful device. Like the sonic screwdriver, though, it needed to be used sparingly. Russell T. Davies commented that the sonic screwdriver was a good tool but should never be the means of resolving the whole plot as it was far too Deus ex Machina. That was why the TARDIS had to fail to respond when The Doctor needed it on board the Titanic.
Can The TARDIS float? Is it airtight? Presumably yes to the second since it is primarily a spaceship. Can it float? It did in the 1960s. A Patrick Troughton episode, Fury from the Deep had the TARDIS landing initially in the North Sea.
Of course, the genesis of the Titanic story goes back to the picture Clive the conspiracy theorist showed Rose in the first #9 episode, “Rose.” There is, I am sure, not a single Doctor Who fan who hasn’t wondered what the story was there. WHY did The Doctor break the cardinal rule of non-interference with causality and save the Daniels family. This story offers one theory. Because a descendent of the Daniels family would be instrumental in preventing a pandemic a century later that would strike down Rose’s mum among millions of other people.
And of course, if there is going to be a Titanic story with a girl called Rose in it, there had to be more than a few James Cameron references in it! I didn’t set out to in any way rival that or any other Titanic film. The time between the impact with the iceberg and the ship going down is very much contracted in this short story. In reality it was an even colder and far more terrifying experience than depicted here. And I fully acknowledge that.
The rest was easy. The trickiest part was finding out an accurate figure for the casualties of the Titanic disaster. I’m not even sure I got it right in the end. I looked at several sources and there seems to be a small discrepancy in the final death toll. But I settled on one figure.
These are some of the websites I used to find background to the story, including the final death toll.
http://www.titanic-online.com/
http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/
