 This story has been written by award winning screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce. This is his second Doctor Who story - his previous being the 2014 story "In the Forest of the Night".
This story has been directed by Lawrence Gough - his second story of this season.
Ralf Little, who plays the part of Steadfast, is no stranger to Doctor Who as he voiced the part of Guy Fawkes in the 2011 adventure "The Gunpowder Plot" - the fifth and final episode of Doctor Who: The Adventure Games.
Mina Anwar, who plays the part of Goodthing, is also a well-known face in the Doctor Who universe. She starred as Gita Chandra in four series of The Sarah Jane Adventures.
Other familiar names on the credits include Kiran Shah who plays an Emojibot - having previously featured in the 2014 story "Listen" - and Kaizer Akhtar as Praiseworthy.
The read-through for this story and the previous story, "The Pilot", took place on the 14th June 2016. Filming for both stories took place in the first production block which began in Cardiff on the 20th June 2016 and concluded on the 28th July 2016.
The story was partly recorded in Valencia in Spain - as the cast and crew spent a week working in the city, on the Spanish south-eastern coast, from the 25th July 2016 - and features some stunning locations, including Valencia's futuristic City of Arts and Sciences complex. The buildings were designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, and have previously been used as a location for scenes from the 2015 George Clooney film Tomorrowland.
Travelling companion, Bill Potts, is still learning about The Doctor and in this story she discovers that he has two hearts! This aspect of his anatomy was first revealed in the 1970 Third Doctor story "Spearhead From Space" when a medic ran tests on the unconscious Time Lord and came across the anomaly, initially believing it to be a hoax! The Doctor confirms that his binary vascular system though gives him high blood pressure.
The Doctor is heard telling Bill to ‘Stay away from my browser history!’ echoing his plea to Osgood in the 2015 story "The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion" where he requested ‘Don’t look at my browser history!’.
Bill again calls The Doctor ‘a penguin with its arse on fire’ when she sees him run. (see "The Pilot").
Nardole reminds The Doctor that he can't go off-world because he promised (see "The Pilot").
The Doctor is heard calling Nardole ‘Mum’, indicating that he acts like his boss.
The Vardy can eat other species, leaving behind just bones and skulls. They can cloak themselves as walls and buildings, by interlinking with each other. They are able to detach themselves when needed. They are now the indigenous species on the planet. The Doctor describes them as being the ‘worker bees of the Third Industrial Revolution’. They have identified grief as the enemy of happiness.
The Vardy are named after Andrew Vardy, a professor of swarm robotics at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Andrew Vardy once worked on a short story with Frank Cottrell-Boyce based on his robotics research.
The Doctor has previously encountered nanorobots, that have caused trouble for humans, in the 2005 Tenth Doctor story "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances".
The Doctor has previously met tiny creatures, that can turn a living human into a skeleton in seconds, in the 2008 Tenth Doctor story "Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead".
The Emojibots are an interface of the Vardy.
The Emojibots speak Emoji. Emoji used by them include: a smiling face, a skull (a symbol of death), a crying face, a light bulb (symbolising a new idea forming), a
puzzled face, a question mark (indicating confusion) and thumbs up (indicating approval). Emojis date back to the late 1990s and the word itself comes from the Japanese (meaning ‘picture’) and moji (meaning ‘character’ or ‘letter’).
Stories in which servants have turned against their masters have already been seen in "The Robots of Death", "Voyage of the Damned" and "The Beast Below", as well the Ood race.
Bill is heard asking why the chairs in the TARDIS are so far from the console and whether The Doctor has ‘stretchy arms’ like Mister Fantastic. She also asks him if she has to wear a seatbelt during flight and if there is a steering wheel.
Bill is heard questioning The Doctor on the police box exterior, and deduces that he likes it because of the sign - which reads ‘Advice & assistance obtainable immediately. Officer & cars respond to all calls’.
The Doctor states that you have to negotiate with the TARDIS and that the time machine takes him where they need to go, rather than where they want to travel to (see the 2011 Eleventh Doctor story "The Doctor's Wife").
The Doctor confesses that he stole the TARDIS (see the 2013 Eleventh Doctor story "The Name of The Doctor").
The Doctor says the TARDIS has broadband and suggests that Bill watch some movies or something to pass the time while he returned to the colony.
The planet The Doctor and Bill visit is called Gliese 581 D and the colony’s spaceship, that The Doctor and Bill find on the planet, is called the Erehwon. The company that owns it is called United Earth.
The name of the spaceship is based on the work Erewhon: or, Over the Range by Samuel Butler; the story is of a man that finds a seemingly idealistic society but then turns away when he discovers there are harsh penalties for even slight offenses.
The Doctor discovers that the Erewhon has a Fleishman Cold Fusion Engine and the engine has a Kelvin Calorimeter. The name Fleishman could be a reference to British chemist Martin Fleischmann (1927-2012) who, along with his colleague, Stanley Pons, declared in 1989 that they had produced fusion at room temperature. This process was soon after dubbed ‘cold fusion’. It’s worth noting, however, that the name as it appears on the apparatus The Doctor reconfigures is spelt ‘Fleishman’ and not ‘Fleischmann’.
There is a bust of Queen Nefertiti in the colony’s spaceship (see the 2012 Eleventh Doctor story "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship").
Bill is heard to say that she is in a ‘proper spaceship’. The Tenth Doctor was previously offended when Donna Noble said something similar in the 2008 story "Planet of the Ood").
We’ve seen The Doctor visiting many Earth colonies including settlements on Pluto (in the 1977 Fourth Doctor story "The Sun Makers"), Frontios (in the 1984 Fifth Doctor story "Frontois") and the planet Uxarieus in the appropriately titled 1971 Third Doctor story "Colony in Space".
The idea of humanity engaged on a hazardous journey through space, to find a new home, has been the basis for many previous Doctor Who stories, ranging from the 1975 Fourth Doctor story "The Ark in Space" to the 2007 Tenth Doctor story "Utopia". The concept was first explored in the 1966 First Doctor story "The Ark", where the TARDIS travelled to the distant future, landing on a vast spaceship that’s on a 700-year mission, transporting Earth’s surviving plant and animal life (including mankind) to the planet Refusis II.
On realising the danger they are in The Doctor tries to leave Bill in the TARDIS, to keep her out of danger, in the same way as the Ninth Doctor did with Rose Tyler in the 2005 story "Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways" and the Eleventh Doctor did with Clara Oswald in the 2013 story "The Time of The Doctor".
The Doctor and Bill are heard to mention Aberdeen and Wiltshire as potential future destinations. Wiltshire was the setting of the 1971 Third Doctor story "The Dæmons" and Aberdeen was the place where the Fourth Doctor left Sarah Jane Smith at the end of 1976 story "The Hand of Fear", believing it was South Croydon.
The Doctor is heard reciting the line ‘I'm happy, hope you're happy too’ from the David Bowie song Ashes to Ashes. Reference is also made to the song Any Old Iron made famous by Harry Champion.
The Doctor is heard to say that the colonists will come expecting the ‘Garden of Eden’.
The Doctor and Bill receive sound implants on arrival at the colony. The Doctor calls them ‘thingamabobs’. All inhabitants and visitors are also given mood badges. The Doctor says that smiling psychologically has an effect on the mood.
The Doctor and Bill are served squares of algae jelly. According to Bill, it smells of fish. The Doctor reveals that he does not like fish.
The Doctor is heard saying that he knew an emperor made of algae that fancied him.
Because Bill is only served one jelly, while The Doctor is given two, she asks whether they have food sexism even in the future.
The Doctor explains that because space is curved, the Earth is in any direction you choose to look in.
Bill is heard to ask The Doctor why he is Scottish.
The Doctor says that Scotland demands independence every planet they go to such as when they wanted a separate spaceship from Starship UK in the 2010 Eleventh Doctor story "The Beast Below". In real world current events, at the time of this story's release, Scotland was again seeking independence from the United Kingdom, as a result of Brexit.
The archives, that Bill discovers in the colony’s spaceship, shows the entire human history. It includes tribal people ("An Unearthly Child"), Vincent van Gogh's self-portrait ("Vincent and The Doctor") and Stonehenge ("The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang").
The Doctor previously visited a human colony, in the 1988 Seventh Doctor story "The Happiness Patrol", in which unhappy people were also killed.
Bill and The Doctor use the ‘turn it off and on again’ joke when he resets the Emojibots.
Like in the 2015 Christmas special "The Husbands of River Song" The Doctor again avoids giving a long explanation by saying ‘a thing happened’.
The Doctor mentions how Vikings used to turn boats upside down and use them as houses. He met Vikings in the 1965 First Doctor story "The Time Meddler" and the 2015 story "The Girl Who Died".
Bill suggests the slaughter took place all in one day. The Doctor has experienced events occurring all in one day before (see the 2008 Tenth Doctor story "The Doctor's Daughter").
This story contains an error. When Kezzia states that she is using the Vardy to pollinate the wheat. However, the field used in filming is not a field of wheat, but a field of barley.
At the end of this story, when the TARDIS takes The Doctor and Bill to another location, we see an elephant. Over fifty years earlier, the 1966 First Doctor story "The Ark" was the first Doctor Who story to feature an elephant. In this earlier story it was a baby Indian elephant, named Monica.
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