I didn’t want this story arc to stretch to twelve episodes – one for each life. So this story was always going to see us through two of Chrístõ Mian’s lives. In the end it saw three of them done with.

The first was always intended to be a short one where Julia simply brought Chrístõ Mian into the TARDIS to do his duty for his future self and inquire about Hext, who obviously still wasn’t feeling too good after his dizzy spell. I had intended for Hext’s illness to manifest itself in a later story, but I decided against it and spread it over these earlier episodes. Having this many characters is slightly problematic as there isn’t always enough for them to do, so confining Hext to the Zero room for an episode gives me some leeway.

The main story concerns Chrístõ Mian’s next incarnation. Are you counting carefully, by the way? And it raises some of the issues Chrístõ has had about his father and the whole assassination business. But I didn’t really want a confrontation between Chrístõ and Chrístõ Mian just yet. I already had a storyline planned where that would happen. Rather, Julia is the one who fields the questions while Chrístõ, wounded, is being tended to by Romana – two more characters slip into the background leaving two to talk to each other. Julia asks the very relevant question about the arms factory that Chrístõ Mian has blown up – was it empty? I used to ask questions like that when I was young and I saw films like Dambusters where German weapons factories and whatever were swamped by the dam water. And of course, they weren’t. There were a lot of war films made in the 1950s and 60s that were on Saturday afternoon television in the 1970s, and they often showed the gallant allies bombing bits of Germany and it always struck me that innocent people were dying there just as much as they were in the films that showed the victims of the blitz.

So I really wanted Chrístõ Mian to answer the question about the factory, to admit that he had killed innocent people, even though he firmly believed that it was for the greater good. The important thing is the point Julia makes afterwards. That Chrístõ would have found a way to give the workers a chance to escape before destroying the arms factory. In doing so she points to the fundamental difference between Chrístõ Mian and his son – at least in his Celestial Intervention Agency days. And that was the issue to be addressed in that part of the story.

The last part of it was literally about the father and son relationship in that unique form. Chrístõ Mian, having taken charge and brought Chrístõ and Hext to Anchoriss for a rest cure, came back in his Eighth incarnation to help speed up their quest, and to spend some quality time with his future son, whose mother he has not yet met. It was a time for some pure sentimentality between the two of them, which might not be appreciated by the action fans who enjoyed the sword fighting on Xiang Xien more, but was fully enjoyed by the growing core of Kristoph/Chrístõ Mian fans who enjoy the romantic Marion and Kristoph series, and have been having double fun since I began the Lives of Chrístõ Mian story arc. This was their reward for their loyalty.

A confrontation between the assassin and the pacifist was going to come, though.