Written by Mike Tucker & Robert Perry, this was a three-part Cybermen story set in war-torn London of the 1940s. They had completed the first two episodes in script form and the final episode as a storyline, and were planning to submit it during the start of production on season 26. Fellow writer Ben Aaronovitch intercepted the script, suggesting that submitting to script editor Andrew Cartmel a World War II script when he was currently already editing something similar ("The Curse of Fenric") was a mistake and to instead submit it for the following series. Tucker & Perry later adapted the story as a novel for the BBC Past Doctors range in October 1997.