The Abysm

On route, the journey back into the Doctor's past takes in each traumatic moment of regeneration that ended his former lives, and then we're back at the gates of the Past and Future. The old vulture with the eyepatch is (or was) the Pythia who once ruled Gallifrey. Unable to see the future anymore, she tore out her own eye and replaced it with that of the severed head of the Sphinx of distant Thule, which she had stolen from the Academia Library at the Capitol. She's none too fond of the Doctor, who had an inadvertent hand in her downfall. The Doctor's "Is that you, Sybil?" is the Emperor Claudius's greeting to a vision of the Oracle of Delphi as he lies dying in the TV version of I, Claudius. And the Rose Woman is the Goddess of Time who reappears on and off through the New Adventures series. The Doctor is her chosen champion.

In Deadly Assassin, Chancellor Goth confesses that he first met the Master on Tersurus. That planet has probably been under the aegis of Gallifrey for millennia, as both Rassilon in Time's Crucible and the Other in this story, have Tersurran servants. Their word Meyopapa seems to be a term of respect, the Tersurran equivalent of the Malayan word tuan or the Swahili bwana. Tersurus is also where the Children in Need mini-epic The Curse of Fatal Death is set.

Susan at last! She must be very young at this point, although we were never told how long she and the Doctor had been travelling together before they landed up on Earth in 1963. But at this point, her grandfather isn't the Doctor at all. There are shades of Verdi's Rigoletto here. This other grandfather keeps Susan hidden away, just as the Duke of Mantua's hunch-backed jester, who was party to all sorts of his master's debaucheries, hid his own innocent daughter from reality - with particularly blood-curdling results.

This shady figure, whoever he is, has obviously been on Gallifrey long enough to become a grandparent, although we don't know to which of Susan's parents he is the father. He may not even be Gallifreyan himself. Who knows? And while Susan was the last child born alive before the Pythia's dying curse rendered Gallifrey a sterile world, we learned in Time's Crucible that Rassilon's own unborn daughter was a victim of the curse. Susan's father died on one of Rassilon's bow-ships, which implies he was involved in the Vampire Wars. Meanwhile, on the alternative Gallifrey of Auld Mortality, where the Doctor definitely is Susan's natural grandfather, we hear that Susan's mother thought he was a bad influence on his grandchild.

Has it occurred to anyone else that all the characters on the Sandminer in Robots of Death are dressed as chess pieces? How many chess games have appeared in Doctor Who? (That's another one for the Forum.) Rassilon's multi-layered game within a game within a game etc is certainly the Mother of all Chessboards, knocking out Mr Spock's game by several extra dimensions. It sounds dangerously addictive. Meanwhile, the Other's words about being "a pawn on the board in the thick of it" echo the Doctor's own words in Chapter 21.

I have a sneaky feeling that this historic confrontation should take place at Number 10, or more likely, the garden at Chequers. Only the costumes wouldn't be nearly as good. The Other first appeared in Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks. (What was his name again?) He is an eminence grise; the power lurking behind the throne, like a skulking, limelight-shunning version of Alastair Campbell or Peter Mandelson, who manipulates the emergence of Gallifrey as one of the supreme seats of power in the Universe. But Blair and Campbell/Mandelson are puny substitutes for Rassilon and the Other. Only Thatcher (all squawks and eyepatch), from whose evil Pythian empire a new world is being built, is worthy of comparison.