Not having Sky satellite, I didn’t know when I wrote “Lost” that there WAS a series by that name on TV. I don’t really care. It had nothing to do with my story which was simply about Chrístõ being ‘lost’ to his friends who can’t find him, and to himself due to his loss of memory. I wanted to start with him not knowing who he is at all, from his own point of view, with the nurse filling in some of the blanks for him, and gradually build up a flashback picture of exactly what happened to land them all in hospital.

The nurses calling him ‘Angel Eyes’ is a slight bit of over-sentimentalism that I have considered taking out, especially since they couldn’t have known what his eyes were like properly before he woke up, but it would make such a huge rewrite I have baulked at the idea somewhat.

In my fiction, all passenger ships are named after science fiction writers and all hospital ships after famous female medical people. I have mentioned in passing in various stories the SS Florence Nightingale, SS Marie Curie and SS Grace Holloway. Grace Holloway of course, is a fictional character from the Doctor Who movie of 1996, so in fact this hospital ship crosses Chrístõ’s timeline in a big way, being named after somebody he won’t meet for several centuries. But it IS science fiction. What the heck!

This is the first time Chrístõ’s father has been in the ‘flesh’. Before he had appeared on the video screen.

Finally, he meets his son’s friends and Terry becomes his ‘lieutenant’ as he searches the hospital. Sammie is probably the one Lœngbǽrrow senior has most in common with, since he, as is learnt later, is a former soldier, but it is Terry that he forms the first relationship with.

The nurse recognising something in the father’s eyes IS again slightly sentimental. This is, in many ways, a sentimental story. But it has a hard side to it, too, in the huge tragedy of the space station. Chrístõ’s bomb disposal effort owes itself to any number of films and TV action series’ where stopping a bomb going off was the main action. It differs from the majority in that some of the bombs DID go off and many people DID die, representing a partial failure on his part, but hardly his fault as the odds were against him. Since, in later life, failure is something The Doctor rarely faces, it is an early lesson for his character.