Alliance of Unity was a term I settled on for the form of marriage on Gallifrey. The term was deliberately made to sound like a contractual arrangement rather than anything to do with love, because Gallifrey is such a strange society with so many binding laws and traditions that a love match almost seems unlikely. I have mentioned many times that a Gallifreyan wedding takes twelve hours of very complex ceremony. The final episode of Unfinished Business goes into that ceremony in detail, but this story was online several months before then and I didn’t want to pre-empt that finale, so the weddings of Cassie and Terry and Bo and Sammie were a cut down version of the ceremony, but binding on them all.

Cassie becoming pregnant on the TARDIS raises some issues, quite apart from the fact that she wasn’t married to Terry, which is something I don’t intend to go into. The problem is the idea of the TARDIS being in a state of temporal grace where people don’t grow old within it. Logically, a conception and pregnancy shouldn’t be able to take place, either. But frankly, I think that was one of the dafter ideas to come out of Doctor Who. People clearly DO get older. The Fourth Doctor, the one we saw the most of, was visibly older by the end of seven years. The same was true of companions from Susan to Sarah Jane to Rose, who clearly “grew up” in the TARDIS. So I basically threw the idea out of the window. And Cassie not only conceived aboard the TARDIS, but went through several months of her pregnancy aboard.

 Penne Dúre meeting Mai Li Tuo is an incidental part of this story. But it is something that will come home later in the series. Watch the space!

http://www.pearsecom.co.uk/doctorwho/83allianceofunity2.htm