Doctor Who Future (Series Four)

Behind the Scenes

Welcome

Welcome to my first ever Behind the Scenes overview. In this chapter I will go through each individual story and explain how it came to be.

Prequel - Pursuit

Okay so with this prequel, I knew I needed to have Max back by the end of it as he would be in the other episodes of Series 4.

I started thinking about this story while I was at school. I had left off the cliffhanger at the morgue and they couldnt stay there for the whole story so they had to get back into their ships and fly somewhere else. The other location they would land at came to me when I was walking around a nearby quarry. This quarry also became a location in mind for the building blocks of Coagulus (Story 2), but as I used the lake for this story, I had to adapt it in Coagulus to an orange sea. The quarry was used as a location in Ressurection of the Dead (Season 3, Story 5) too.

As it was a story based around a pursuit of the Master, the Tardis's crashing added more dramatic effect and continued the story on.

I then had to think about how the Doctor would change the Master back into his familiar alter ego and I thought the power of emotion would do that quite well. I also had to put in a dangerous element in, to sort of push the Master over the edge and back to Max.

Quote - "The substance this lake is made of, its half liquid, half solid."

"And?" Stacy questioned the significance.

"Oh dear!" The Doctor fought to lift his head. "I'm sinking!"

"Ma- I mean the Master is sinking too. He's just lying there, completely still," Stacy explained.

I also decided to reuse the mental battle for Max to return as I found it to be quite effective in the previous season.

1. Secret City of Saturn

The idea of souls has been used in Doctor Who Future before in Season 2, Story 2 (Turn Off the Light) and that turned out to be quite a success. I decided to bring back the soul aspect in this story too only having a more sophisticated storyline to go with it.

Whilst theorizing this story, I watched a documentary about strange and necessary rituals that we might have to do in the future and I thought I should add a necessary ritual gone wrong into the mix for this story.

Then, placing the final building blocks, I took an unused storyline from my original story, Nate, and used an apocalyptic setting. Throwing in twists about Daniel's ancestors was a finishing touch to push Stacy over the edge as I knew this would be her penultimate story as a regular.

After finishing this story I think it's a quite good opener, and I think I topped the previous Seasons opener (Mould Malice).

2. Coagulus

The second story in this season was originally called Crystal of Khan which involved mind swapping, foreshadowed in Season 2's finale (Feud). But eventually it was scrapped and Coagulus, which was meant to be in Series 5, was pushed forwards to Series 4.

As I said in the Prequel section, Coagulus's location was also thought up at the quarry and adapted to be an orange sea. The machine preventing the water from blowing up was based off of an actual machine beside the lake that pumps water through pipes.

This story was theorized twice. In the first draft, vats in the cliffs above the quarry were sabotaged by the believers and the whole universe was destroyed but I found that I couldnt find a satisfactory resolution for the next Episode. Plus I had to cut the episodes down.

Unfortunately, this story ended up being quite a mess. Originally it was intended to be a 6 parter but it had to be cut down to 4 parts making it feel quite rushed. The ending to Stacy wasn't particularly great, especially as she had been in it since the start and the miniature people in the pipes actually served no purpose in the end.