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INTRODUCTION TO RETURN TO EARTH
SYNOPSIS: The Doctor and Pip arrive in Stockbridge where The Doctor is reunited with an old friend. Kara Connor. It's been a long time since they have seen each other and Kara thought she would never see the Doctor again. When the Doctor and Pip stumble across into her life, Kara is happily married and has moved on with her life since leaving the TARDIS.
NOTES: This was always the plan, to get Kara back into Doctor Who. And it's about time. She was a bit later due for a return than I originally expected her to come back.
If I had done series three in 2017, Kara would have turned up again in the 2017 Christmas special, which was originally planned to have the Yeti and the great intelligence in it, but that didn't happen due to the fact that there wasn't a series last year.
So that meant that we had to come up with a way of getting Kara back into the show very quickly. I emailed Christopher Cribb and got him and his partner Stephen Hynes to write a draft script for the episode which had a title which was penciled in "Forget Me Not" which was modified to "Return to Earth" in later drafts.
The idea of the story was that Kara would be living an alternate life, one where she had never met the Doctor, and the result of the problem was that she had a Beetle creature controlling her mind, making her forget. When that fell through and Chris and Stephen had to write something else very quickly, I worked with them very closely to ensure the best possible result and in the end, I don't know who came up with the final idea, but what was decided was a time fugitive had arrived in Stockbridge and was using a dangerous device which could destroy the world and the Doctor, Pip, and Kara had to work together in order to fix the problem.
With that idea in place, Chris and Stephen wrote the script in ten days.
