SYNOPSIS: The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Pip to the battleground of the First World War and trench warfare. Caught up in a chain of unfortunate events, Pip poses as a nurse and attends the wounds of fallen soldiers and The Doctor impersonates a governing officer from the war office. However something is very wrong, as events collide in on themselves as the time travellers soon find out when they cross time paths and end up at the battle of waterloo and again in the middle of the French revolution.
NOTES: To start off with when coming up with ideas for episode four the original idea as a briefing was The Doctor and Pip find themselves in palatial gardens of an emperor warrior king where nothing is ever quite what it seems. I approached a number of writers, these including Oliver Eaton, Richard Walkins, James Norman and Joe Hackman. Writing Doctor Who has its own problems anyway, it's a show in which it can be anything you want it to be. It can be a soap opera, or a drama, or a slapstick comedy but what happened was the writers buckled under the pressure. Oliver Eaton couldn't do it. Richard Walkins turned it down, James and Joe weren't up to it. So I started looking for other writers and I ended up writing with Jessica Charlton. She won't mind me saying this but she's a safe bet. She is the safe option and I usually don't resort to the safest option until the very last minute.
We changed the idea, came up with the concept of the World War One crisis but the problem there was we didn't have enough story in the World War One plot to last 20 - 30 minutes. It would have made a nice short story but we needed something else, so we worked other famous moments in history into it. So The Battle of Waterloo where Napoleon surrendered, and the French Revolution and there we had invented a time crisis. I also wanted to make reference to the fact that what if someone or something took the doctor out of his own personal time stream and put a later version of him in his place. Then once that came into fruition, the whole story came into fruition. - Daniel Bury, 30th of January 2016.
The process started back in September 2015, I heard that Dan was doing more Doctor Who, and after having a pleasant experience writing for him for the first series it was only in my natural interest to accept his offer of doing more doctor who. I want to be a writer for TV when I grow up and this'll be good for my CV if I have as much writing credit to my name as possible. I'm not really a Doctor Who fan. I don't watch the show. However I don't have to be a big fan in order to create a sci-fi concepts like the crossing of the time scales. I don't have to know the character's in depth I just have to write a consistent story that makes sense and overall come up with something which people can enjoy. If people like that then I've done a good job. - Jessica Charlton, 30th of January 2016.
