#callback (trope)

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

At least Spong didn’t force the Inspector to wait around for an entire year to get back to the Spacetime Hotel.

That would have been very derivative of the Eleventh Inspector episode ‘Cubed’, in which viewers were treated to a montage of the Inspector doing chores and other activities to kill an hour.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

The seemingly random places that the Inspector turns up in at the very beginning of the special

turn out to have very important purposes in being there, except for the Grosvenor Hotel, which was only included to connect the Inspector back to the Blitz.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

As it turns out, the Wurlitzer in the Fifteenth Inspector’s BOOTH

was a callback to ‘The Beginning of the World’, in which the evil Sir Cassius uses an archaic record player to kick off the festivities as the first lumps of space dust that become the Earth collide.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

Just like in ‘The Inspector’s Ex’,

a malevolent creature takes over control of the BOOTH.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

Despite the fact that the audience knows where the Inspector has gone, Emerald doesn’t.

As such, she returns to where the BOOTH sits deteriorating from lack of maintenance, as if expecting the Inspector would appear out of thin air, just as he disappeared.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

It’s rather strange that the BOOTH’s scan doesn’t disclose whether Emerald is human or a half-human hybrid or something completely alien during ‘Time Geezers’,

yet the Inspector insists in ‘Confederacy of Afterlife’ that she’s fully human.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

Lyman Spong certainly made plenty of callbacks to his time writing and running the programme in ‘Kablooey’:

HieroRelm Corp. from ‘The Fulsome Adult’, the 11th Inspector’s favourite snack (coffee and custard creams), talking to an Associate who’s just died (as in ‘Hell Turned’), and the crusaders from ‘The Space of the Lions’.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

The Warrior Inspector’s BOOTH looked worse for wear

mainly as a callback to when the BOOTH’s prop was improperly stored and damaged during the Seventh Inspector’s run.