Life on Mars. The BBC detective series by that name was several weeks into its first season and it seemed to be the buzzword going around. For myself, I didn’t NEED another leather jacket wearing time traveller with a Manchester accent. I already HAD one I was perfectly happy with in our Doctor #9. But I decided we needed a story that re-used that title already stolen from David Bowie.

The answer to ‘is there life on Mars?’ was, of course, answered in the Doctor Who universe in the 1960s with the Ice Warrior stories. Mars was home to a militant, warlike race who hated Earth and humanity, and The Doctor had to fight them more than once. They were last seen in the two Peladon stories when their apparently peaceful and diplomatic missions turned into treachery.

I didn’t want another Ice Warrior story. So they are here in this story only in token. The idea of one preserved in a glass case comes from the fact that many of the pictures I found on a Google search were of an Ice Warrior costume on display at one of the exhibitions. It served as a focus for The Doctor to explain about the past history of the Ice Warriors, and the fact that Mars IS a dead planet by the time the scientists of Wyn and Rose’s generation are starting to send probes to it. But in the century the story is set, Mars is an Earth colony, run rather like a large CentreParcs and as bland and uninspiring as such a place would be to anyone who prefers to make their own holiday plans.

I do think it a great pity, though, that so early in the Doctor Who mythology Martians were identified as the baddies of the universe. It seems a regular thing in science fiction to portray them that way. From War of The Worlds to Mars Attack it has been that way. The only notable exceptions are Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy in which the Martians were a pure-minded people who had never fallen from grace and knew no concept of sin – until mankind arrived. It would have been interesting if the possibility had been left open in Doctor Who for it to go either way.

Bringing in a crossover with The Doctor’s younger incarnation had several purposes. First, to address that issue of The Doctor’s continuing love for his first wife, even though he is on the verge of marrying Rose. It occurred to me later that I might have made Julia a bit older, possibly 17 or 18 or even older, and actually engaged to Chrístõ at that point, rather than the teenage girl that she is in the Theta Sigma stories to date. But her vulnerability when he is taken from her is more acute this way, and also there is no danger of any real jealousy between her and Rose about The Doctor’s affections as there might be if she was an adult.

The blu tac people as they were immediately christened really did start as blu tac. I was experimenting with modelling with the stuff, and I actually created a figure very much like I described in proportion to the figures in my Doctor Who action figure collction, and determined to use it in a story if possible. There has always been a leaning towards humanoid aliens in Doctor Who, and indeed in most science fiction stories. The simple necessity of fitting an actor into the costume dictated that a head, two arms, two legs was the standard through the universe. But I wanted to experiment with the possibility of a non-Human type. Especially since this was Wyn’s first taste of non-humanoids. Malvoria and Rimos II both had Human inhabitants. Or humanoid, at least. The rule of thumb as far as those two words are concerned seems to be that any being who was born on, or whose ancestors came from, Earth, is Human and those who came from elsewhere are humanoid. But there are, in the Doctor Who universe, a great many humanoid species. The Doctor’s people are among them, of course.

Having both The Doctor and Chrístõ framed for the murder through the DNA match meant that The Doctor COULD make that noble gesture of putting his hands up to the crime and allowing Chrístõ to go free. It made for some very dramatic dialogue and a race to get to the prison before it was too late. As for The Doctor actually dying of the lethal injection, I actually looked up those ingredients on Google. There are a lot of websites that tell you in exact detail how that method of execution works and a great many that deal with the morality of it. It made for a quite gruelling bit of research, but my conclusion was that it would not work on a Time Lord. The anaesthetic, Sodium thiopental, was probably the most dangerous part of the cocktail, since we know from the TV movie that anaesthetic is not good for Time Lords. I glossed over that slightly. Pancuronium bromide is a nasty drug and as Chrístõ said, it does them no good, but the effects were only short term. Then, of course, the killer. Potassium chloride stops the heart. But with two hearts, things are less certain. It was not easy. He didn’t shrug it off just like that. But it takes a lot to kill a Time Lord. Just as well.

The final chase showed the old and young Time Lord working together, and, of course, remember that Ice Warrior! It had to happen. The gruesome display case couldn’t just be there for decoration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Chronicles
http://www.christian-fandom.org/sf/lewis4.html