Return to Peladon is my first Eleventh Doctor story. I began to write it after only two episodes of the 2010 series, when I hadn’t really got to grips completely with his character or with Amy. Subsequent editing added detail to the blank canvas. But events in the series itself left me with a dilemma. First, Rory came into the episodes, and this story has no mention of Rory in it. Then, after I had written story number two with Rory in it, they killed him off on TV. So I was then left with a puzzle about where both these stories should come in the chronology of Doctor Eleven and Amy. I decided to leave them alone, then, until the end of the series to see what transpired. As it happened, the final story saw Amy and Rory alive and well and getting married before going off with The Doctor in his TARDIS on their wedding day. This means that my second story fits in perfectly as a follow on from where the series left off. But this one doesn’t. I considered ways of editing it to put Rory in, but there really WASN’T a need for another male character in this story. Then I realised I just had to drop him off somewhere first. I just needed a few lines in the first page about Rory being at an intergalactic nurse’s conference while Amy got to see romantic Peladon.

EVERY Doctor Who fan knows about Peladon, of course. It has to be the bleakest, most miserable planet in the galaxy, but people persist in living there. Two stories from the 1970s gave us two generations of the Peladonian royal family. It was obvious, therefore, that this story should introduce another generation. The idea of a child queen in danger from a wicked regent fell easily into place. Neither of the two adult monarchs of the 1970s had particularly good judgement about their advisors. A child would have even more trouble. And it allowed The Doctor to make the observation that a child on a throne was never in a particularly happy situation. He quotes literary rather than real examples, but it is a truism, all the same. Everyone from Hamlet to Harry Potter has struggled with wicked uncles messing up their lives.

The idea of taking the child queen and letting her grow up before bringing her back the next day as an adult queen ready to expose her own enemies owes a tiny little bit to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. In Wyrd Sisters, the three witches of Lancre send the orphaned baby king away for his own safety, but soon realise his despotic uncle is a big problem. They perform a magic spell that moves the small country of Lancre forward fifteen years so that the baby is now an eighteen year old ready to claim his throne. It doesn’t quite work out that way in practice, but the theory is sound, and a TARDIS equivalent of the same trick is relatively easy. The Doctor just has to send Amy and the TARDIS fifteen years into the future while he stays on the quiet planet of Ventura and helps the Queen prepare to return to her home. When she does, she brings a husband with her, and it’s all over bar the shouting for the would be despots of Peladon.

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Curse_of_Peladon

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Peladon_%28planet%29

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Monster_of_Peladon

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