Missing Years introduces an interesting idea for getting heroes into trouble – a time ribbon. Some readers had ideas about where I got it from. But in fact they were wrong. I wasn’t in ANY way thinking of the "energy ribbon" that causes so much trouble in the Star Trek film, Generations. I HAD seen that film, but I wasn’t thinking about it at all when I had the idea. If there was any film reference at all, it was Twister, the film about tornadoes. The line - “It was like a tornado, hitting people at random. It took one person, left the one sitting right next to him” was loosely based on a line from that film in which the tornado was described hitting one house and missing the one next to it.

The story allowed me an opportunity to show Julia as a grown up for a brief time. Throwing Chrístõ forward twelve years and showing him what happened to everyone when he wasn’t around was an idea I played with for a while, working out exactly what WOULD happen. The most obvious thing, of course, was that Natalie and Li Tuo would both have died without him being there. And that would be upsetting. The death of Humphrey, is even worse.

The encounter between Chrístõ and his half-brother, now nearly thirteen, is less awkward than it might be. Chrístõ does an ongoing job of trying not to care about Garrick, but it is obvious that he DOES care about the boy. Which slightly contradicts the memories that The Doctor has in Unfinished Business, New Lords of Time and Ten, in which he seems never to have managed to be reconciled. But there were several centuries of time for a rift to form between them again.

The real problem is Julia. She is now a very attractive young woman, working as a teacher, and still hanging on to the hope. When she finds out that he is alive, it seems as if everything is ok now. But for Chrístõ it isn’t.

Since Chrístõ isn’t the ONLY one who still thinks of her as a 12 year old girl, the nude scene was uncomfortable to write and to read. But that is the point. None of us can yet think of her as a grown up. It would never work between them. He just DOESN’T love the grown up Julia, who feels like a stranger to him.

So The Ambassador pulls some strings at the CIA – the Celestial Intervention Agency. They were only mentioned ONCE in the TV series, in The Deadly Assassin, but that was enough to fix them in Doctor Who mythology. I established already that Chrístõ’s father worked for them in the past.

The story about the ‘pretti fish’ which his father tells when they are waiting for the CIA to arrange his return to his own time has re-occurred several times in my stories. It is a sort of connecting ‘seed’ between all of the different series. This particular telling of it doesn’t count since Chrístõ won’t remember being told about it.

The time portals, like the CIA, also only appear in one Doctor Who story, The War Games. Zoë and Jamie are sent through the portals to their own time and place as part of The Doctor’s punishment for disobeying the Time Lords. The same technique is used to send Chrístõ back to his own time. But in this case it causes a paradox that means The Ambassador was never there to operate the portal. Chrístõ’s life is still before him, including marrying Julia when the time comes.

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

http://www.rdwf.org.uk/doctors/D2/s6/07thewargames.htm