Lazarus Legacy of course uses a bit of Doctor Who history. The Lazarus Experiment introduced a machine that allowed Professor Lazarus to become young again. But it went wrong and turned him into a murderous mutation.

I put that idea along with a story I remember reading years ago, in which the people in an old people’s home jump at the chance to be children again, only to find out that it isn’t as easy as they remember. I can’t remember who wrote the story or what it was called. I do have a vague idea it was one of the Bradburys, but I still can’t place it. Anyway, it was one of those recollections that came in just the right time and place.

Fergus was mentioned in the same mini stories from which I created the character of Connie. He has been referred to a couple of times in Jack’s recollections of the 1950s Torchwood. I was in two minds about whether he would be the good guy or the baddie in this story. Jack talks of ‘Fergus going rogue’ but then for a while it looks as if he is the good guy when Ianto helps bust him out of the Rest Home. But Jack sees through him once he begins to tell his story and it is revealed that Fergus has been hacking the Torchwood files for decades and knows all about everything.

I always intended to have Jack stuck in Fergus’s rejuvenating machine at some point. Whether he got aged or rejuvenated was the question. In the end I chose to do both. First, Fergus pushed the dial towards extreme old age, to try to kill himself. Then Jack pushed it the other way. He didn’t want Fergus to die. And perhaps old loyalties wouldn’t let him see his friend go to jail after all. So he reverted him back to babyhood. Apart from anything else, I liked the line from Toshiko when she was handed the Fergus infant – “Just so long as you don’t expect me to breastfeed him’.

As for Connie’s decision – How to please her lover and her grandson at the same time. Her solution – to age herself just so far that she was no longer a young woman but was an attractive 50 something who could be Michael’s lover once a year and David’s grandmother, still. A happy ending to it all.

Oh, and Ianto needs a new car. I seem to keep destroying their cars. First Alun’s, then Owen’s, now Ianto’s.

http://www.rdwf.org.uk/doctors/D10/29/06lazarusexperiment.htm