House of Ixion brings Chrístõ home to Gallifrey for the first time since he set out on his travels as a student in his gap year. He does so to give testimony in the inquiry into the possibility that the House of Ixion exists, after all.

And it isn’t a happy homecoming. His TARDIS is sent to the Chancellery Guard. Doctor Who fans will recall that happening when the Fourth Doctor returned home, too. The King-Emperor of Adano-Ambrado is rightfully indignant at their treatment, and so is Chrístõ.

Then there is Garrick. Chrístõ’s ambivalent attitude to his half-brother is tested here. He, having travelled beyond Gallifrey, is the one who is able to identify Garrick’s illness as liver failure. When he tells his father that he is slightly cold, but not so much because he hates the child, as his scorn for Gallifrey’s indifference to medical advancement. He rightly points out that the medical attention Garrick needs would be easy on other planets.

So it is a distracted and worried Lœngbǽrrow family who go to the inquiry at the Panopticon, in the Citadel, in the Capitol, on the northern continent. The names of these places, have been used over the years interchangeably. There seems consensus that there is a rather glorious domed city called either the Citadel or the Capitol. I decided to call the city Capitol, and within it would be building called the Citadel, and within THAT, the Panopticon, which would be the place where Gallifreyan government and important ceremonies happen. A Panopticon is actually a room with all round view, usually used in the design of prisons. It would NOT be a whole building. So I settled on that order of things.

The inquiry, of course, is a farce, conducted by Lord Ravenswode, who dislikes the Lœngbǽrrow family and is using it apparently as a way of embarrassing Chrístõ’s father, but as it turns out, for something even more serious.

The inquiry is wound up, and Penne awaits their conclusions. Meanwhile, Chrístõ is faced with a crisis. Garrick is fading fast. He needs a transplant immediately and won’t reach another planet, even by TARDIS. Chrístõ has to do the operation, with his father supplying the donor piece of liver. Now, I am certainly no expert on liver transplants, but it is true that an adult can donate a piece of their liver for an infant transplant. In the adult and child the liver ‘regenerates’ over time. In a Time Lord, the regeneration would be even faster, so Chrístõ’s father is not in a lot of danger when he agrees to the operation.

The DANGER is outside the operating room, where Lord Ravenswode is up to a serious piece of treason!

http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/articles/article.aspx?articleId=233