I hadn’t done a multiple Doctor story for a while. Split Personality was a way of doing that. The complicated idea of The Doctor’s memories, personality and consciousness being split among his previous incarnations as a preservation against brain injury is rewriting the mythology big time. But then again, in my defence I would like to point out the Chameleon Arch, the Untempered Schism and various other inventions that came along in recent years. It doesn’t in any way contradict past Time Lord mythology.

Yes, by the way, there’s another ship named after a science fiction writer in trouble. The Brian W. Aldiss nearly bites the dust this time.

The Ninth Doctor gets the exposition out of the way. They know what they have to do – find eight more versions of The Doctor in his personal history and get the pieces of his mind back. So the journey begins…

I tried to avoid them becoming involved in actual classic Doctor Who stories, but rather going into events that could have happened between those stories. Having said that, the Eighth Doctor did have a Big Finish Audio story – Storm Warning - set on the R-101 airship. I changed that to the LZ 129 Hindenburg because I am more familiar with the history of that disaster.

The meeting with the second Doctor in the Dover catacombs was mainly because I really fancied the idea of setting a story in the catacombs, but really couldn’t work out a whole story for it. The catacombs are absolutely amazing, a fascinating part of the history of Dover Castle. This was just a glimpse of it.

Incidentally, Dover Castle itself was used in the Third doctor story Mind of Evil as Stangmoor Prison.

The meeting with the Fourth Doctor takes place beside Loch Ness, with The Doctor explaining to Romana II why he saved the Skarasen – otherwise known as the Loch Ness Monster. This is a postscript to Terror of the Zygons, of course.

For the Third Doctor I took it back before he met Jo, because we’ve been through Wyn and Stella meeting their mum in the past already. I set it at the time when The Doctor was first exiled to Earth and his TARDIS was installed at U.N.I.T. HQ. Instead he is out in Bessie, being chased by aliens. Enter the three companions plus robot dog to help him out. The strands of angel hair that cover everything are inspired by a similar process seen in John Wyndham’s Chrysalids.

The next location is a bit of a cop out. The story was getting overlong already and there didn’t seem much point in three more individual stories. The irony of putting them all in the café at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry is that in 2007 the Doctor Who Up Close Exhibition was there, and we had a very wet visit to it during that phenomenally unsummery summer. Having sat in that café for some time talking about Doctor Who with our friends, it seemed a great idea to put the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors together, three quite outrageously dressed Doctors who would stand out a mile anywhere.

There was something of a comic element to that section, but the final section turns to tragedy again. I decided it would be nice to meet the First Doctor BEFORE he was the grumpy old man with a granddaughter. They catch up with him in Brussels, just after he had sat with his old friend, Puccini when he was dying. The idea that Puccini was a friend of his comes from the 1996 film, of course. In a couple of Unfinished Business stories I wrote about them becoming friends when The Doctor was travelling the universe in his first life’s middle age.

I was surprised to find that Puccini died in Brussells, not Italy. Apparently he was there for an operation for throat cancer and suffered a heart attack a few days later. It came as something of a shock to his friends and family. And it was easy to imagine that The Doctor was emotionally affected by it.

That more or less wrapped it up. But I had one more little piece I had to put in. When I found out there was a place in Brussels called Parc Astrid (French) or Astridpark (Dutch) it had to get a mention. Astrid is an anagram of TARDIS, after all!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Warning_%28Doctor_Who_audio%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_castle#The_secret_wartime_tunnels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_cliffs_of_Dover

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysalids

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dottore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commedia_dell%27arte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Puccini

http://www.rdwf.org.uk/doctors/D4/s13/01terrorofthezygons.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Science_and_Industry_in_Manchester

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrid_Park