Old Mole

The chapter title is the first of several allusions in this section to Hamlet's encounter with the ghost of his father, also murdered horribly, also seeking revenge.

When Innocet reels off the various versions of Rassilon's consolidation of his power, it's clear that history is rarely factual. It depends far more on who's writing it. A bit like whether you read The Guardian or, heaven forfend, the Daily Mail. But whichever version you read, the poor old Other gets a pretty bad press.

Omens (which the Doctor doesn't believe in): When I was at school, there were afternoons when we were required to watch the 1st XV rugby team. During one match, everything suddenly went very quiet. The breeze dropped and the birds stopped singing. The match continued, but the hush in the air was heavy and palpable. After at least a minute or so, we heard a distant car, a screech of brakes and a horrible thud. At the next corner along the road, a man had been hit and killed by the vehicle. The silence beforehand had not been my fantasy, because several people commented on it. It's not explicable by any law I know, but I am certain that particular event was anticipated on a far deeper level than I can understand.

On the appearance of Quences's ghost, the Doctor invokes protection from angels and ministers of grace. It's another Hamlet line, but the Ministers of Grace also turned up briefly in a short story The Duke Of Dominoes in the first Decalog collection. And in a Dalek story I planned that never really got off the ground. The MIGs are a faction of self-appointed guardians of our morals, galactic Mary Whitehouses, determined to make the cosmos a better place. They are probably Daily Mail readers, are in a permanent state of shock over the moral decline of universe and would like to hang nice net curtains around absolutely everything.

It was standard practice for pictures of Adam and Eve, neither of whom had a 'natural' birth, to show the naked couple without belly buttons. So the children of Gallifrey, born fully grown from genetic looms in which their DNA is woven, don't have navels either. The looms are allocated one to each House, and have controlled the numbers of Gallifrey's otherwise doomed population for aeons, ever since the Pythia's curse rendered the people sterile. Consequently there has been no natural evolution in the Gallifreyan form either. The looms are just a people factory. There are no real children. Random physical features are in place to preserve individuality and some semblance of gender. But nothing fluxes or changes. Or to quote an old Mid-Gallifreyan nursery verse:

Isn't it dark
Isn't it cold
Seek out the future
Before you get old
Once there were children
This is their doom
Now all the people
Are born from the loom