Author Notes
The last scene of this chapter has divided people. Grown men have admitted to crying, others think it’s bombastic and utterly out of character. Remember that at the time, most people reading the book knew the Doctor died in it. The guy’s just come back from the dead, so I think he’s allowed a big entrance. If it had been a TV story, it’s the bit that would get the biggest cheer at conventions.
The Doctor’s descriptions of himself come from various books including, for the first time, the forthcoming BBC ones. ‘The man that gives monsters nightmares’ was coined by Paul Cornell; the ‘Bringer of Darkness’ is from the Remembrance of the Daleks novelisation by Ben Aaronovitch, more than any other book the harbinger of the New Adventures era; ‘Eighth Man Bound’ is from Christmas on a Rational Planet; the Doctor had been ‘Time’s Champion’ throughout the NAs, and became ‘Life’s Champion’ in Vampire Science; ‘the guy with two hearts’ is from the TV Movie and ‘I make history better’ is from the short story ‘Continuity Errors’ by Steven Moffat. ‘I... am... the Doctor!’ was from the TV Movie – more specifically, the adverts for the TV Movie.
I had really wanted to have a symbolic handover from the Virgin books to the BBC books – the Doctor literally having something in his hand at the end of this book that he still had in his hand at the beginning of the first EDA. But my book was finished before The Eight Doctors was commissioned, so that proved impossible. The short lead times for to the BBC books meant that a number of things I wish I could have done couldn’t happen. The original plan for the EDAs was that Grace would be the companion – that changed very late in the day, so late that Kate and Jon wrote sections of Vampire Science with Grace. The Dying Days would have had Grace in if I’d have known the BBC books couldn’t. I’d have mentioned Sam, the new BBC companion, if I’d had the chance.
My favourite line in the book is probably ‘And it was’. Virgin were constantly being accused from some quarters of ‘betraying Doctor Who’, ‘pursuing their own agenda’, ‘change for change’s sake’ and having ‘an ego that wants to see Doctor Who destroyed’. As, of course, have the EDAs, Dan Freedman, Big Finish, Phillip Segal, ‘Curse of Fatal Death’, JNT, Robert Holmes, Patrick Troughton and, if you go back far enough, Nigel Kneale, HG Wells, and the first caveman to daub paint on a wall. Anyone making Doctor Who that doesn’t get that reaction is almost certainly doing something monumentally wrong. The Doctor’s not back, he never went away and he never will.
