The whole 12-year-old Supreme One suddenly changing his tune about everything because he decided he loved Benny just didn't wash with me.

And the spider guy just seemed tacked on.

Well, he IS twelve. He's not SUPPOSED to be logical.

And yeah, the spider was tacked on, but as he's the most enjoyable bit of the book, I'm not complaining.

So the Doctor detroyed the Friar-projection-whatevers on the dance floor, but what about the real things back on Pangloss? They're still there, mad at him, ready to try something else. Or does the loss of their slaves leave them impotent? How did they subdue them in the first place? Just by telling them they were cursed? (They deserved to be slaves then; too d*mn stupid to be anything else.)

DWM: 'Another first is the sympathetic treatment of a gay character. The only other gay people in the New Adventures have been sordid rent-boys, dominatrix lesbians, or deeply unhappy people who die of AIDS.' - Blimey, is this TRUE? I certainly didn't notice. Or at least, I don't REMEMBER noticing.

Gareth Roberts in DWM spends several paragraphs attacking Doctor Who when it has a 'message' ('The Mutants was designed as an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist story; how inflammatory that must have been for the millions of imperialists in the audience!') before annnouncing 'And before anybody that actually made it to the end of my book Tragedy Day has a chortle, let me tell you that I have personally erased it from the time stream. Not only does it no longer exist, it is as if it never existed.' - I like a bit of modesty in an author, but the fact remains I think of Tradegy Day's anti-charity polemic EVERY TIME I'm sitting in front of the TV waiting for Children in Need to FINALLY disgorge its latest Who offering...

Except that 'The Mutants' was made at a time when the dismantling of the British Empire was still a current affairs thing, and a lot of the viewers would have been, if not 'imperialists' exactly, people who experienced the end of empire first hand. But perhaps you shouldn't expect anything else from a writer whose first TV series script has the message "olden days people aren't any different from us"?

Hey! The Shakespeare Code didn't say anything of the sort! It implied people were a LOT less politically correct in the Good Old Days...

'Barbara knocked on the door of Susan's room...[Susan] was sitting bolt upright in her bed...Susan wriggled herself under her sheets'...Susan has a ROOM? Susan has a BED? A bed with SHEETS? Those couches in Edge of Destruction were all some hideous hallucination, then?

'The Friars controlled the strange frictions that bound the galaxy of Pangloss together in eternal suffering' - and the Doctor is WHERE during said eternal suffering, exactly? Given that it took him all of half an hour to dispose of these galaxy-ruining monsters when he FINALLY deigned to take an interest...He had more trouble with the TWELVE-YEAR-OLD, for heaven's sake...

Why would Ace assume that this is Earth?

The crowd are perfectly capable of reacting - to food, to aircars, etc - so why do they totally ignore Ace? And why doesn't she try...y'know...TALKING to them? (Doctor: 'I think these people can speak for themselves.' Ace: 'You're right'.) Say, the NEAREST ONES instead of leaving the Doctor and Benny for a ten-minute stroll that what she must KNOW from bitter experience will involve a days-long separation and at least five different near-death experiences.

Why does everyone on this planet (the Doctor and Benny included) think he looks old enough to be her father? Were the NAs assuming that another year or two with Ace would have aged Sylvester McCoy out of all recognition (and not counting on the telemovie to come along and prove otherwise)?

'So much for the TARDIS without the captain at the helm' - the Doc's deluding himself that he chooses where Sexy goes? The Doc's deluding himself that HE lands at NICE destinations? And what was the point of giving the TARDIS her head, anyway?

'The buildings had been thrown together by a thousand architects, each with his own aesthetic axe to grind' - a thousand architects, and ALL of them MEN?

'I think we'll sleep on the problem and think about it tomorrow' - since when has the Doctor needed to sleep, let alone needed to sleep on a problem?

Why not bother to programme your robots with proper memories? Seeing as they've got to persuade people that they're real, and all?

The Doctor is 'rather scared' of guns? Benny is brilliant at unarmed combat?

Why does the Doctor keep getting his words mixed up? What is this, Time and the Rani?

If the Doc 'never met [Henry VIII] personally', who was it Hartnell threw a parson's nose at? (And that's not even including (TARDIS Wiki): 'The Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown visited the court of Henry VIII on 4 May 1536 (AUDIO: Recorded Time), as did the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa in December 1539. (PROSE: God Send Me Well to Keep) The Doctor received six wedding invitations from Henry VIII. (COMIC: The Gift))

'Stop him, you idiots!' - why exactly did the guards need that order to stop the Doc desecrating - sorry, topiary-ing - the hedge?

'The ship was black with red markings. It was about the size of an upturned double-decker bus' - wouldn't a NON-upturned double-decker bus be...well...exactly the same size as an upturned double-decker bus?

Why would the Friars hire a nearly-nine-months pregnant assassin instead of the spider one in the first place?

'The result of his request for information on bivalve species both intrigued and disturbed him. Apart from a couple of monopod creatures and a drone race there was only one possibility. "A Time Lord"' - funny, cos the perfectly-normal-looking humanoids in Parallel 59 have two hearts.

The Supreme One took over Luminus SIX YEARS ago? As in, when he was six years old??

'You've never married' - Benny to Doctor. How the hell would SHE know? Has he never mentioned his granddaughter? Why, exactly, if so convinced of his asexuality, did she hurl herself at him in The Dying Days?

Why would Luminus take the Doctor to the island where they've just SLAUGHTERED EVERYONE (almost certainly including his pal Ace) to allay his suspicions?

'I haven't done one of these for a long time. Not since Genghis Khan, in fact' - whatever happened to that baby he delivered in The Settling?

Benny's 'safe and well' the Doctor assures Ace, completely ignoring the fact that their last telephone call was abruptly cut off (when she was gassed and kidnapped - alright, he wasn't to know the specifics, but surely that's the most LIKELY explanation?).

'Let's discuss matters on the way back, in private, yes?' - and the return journey will be 'private' in WHAT particular sense, exactly?

To be continued...

So the Doctor detroyed the Friar-projection-whatevers on the dance floor, but what about the real things back on Pangloss? They're still there, mad at him, ready to try something else.

Nope, they weren't just projections, they were the Friars' actual souls (or something). Lost in the Vortex (or something) forever, resulting in the deaths of their bodies back on Pangloss.

Or does the loss of their slaves leave them impotent? How did they subdue them in the first place? Just by telling them they were cursed? (They deserved to be slaves then; too d*mn stupid to be anything else.)

Yup. They were told they were cursed by a piece of red glass. They believed it. And for six hundred years after said red glass went walkabout, none of 'em had the guts to raise their eyes and NOTICE. I have to admit, there are times I have a sneaking sympathy with Biroc's declaration that 'the weak enslave themselves'.

'Ace took the baby from Forgwyn...Ace yawned and made herself comfortable in her big padded seat. "Yeah," she said and drifted into sleep' - while still clutching a baby?!

'Kill the Time Lord' - yet the Friars forgot to impart the somewhat important information that HIS NAME IS THE DOCTOR?

Since when have Benny n'Ace been let's-go-back-to-the-TARDIS people? Benny in a quivering-lip 'I can't take it' kinda way, Ace with an indifferent 'Not our problem'...both INCREDIBLY uncharacteristic.

'This planet becomes less attractive by the minute. Even the kids here are obnoxious' - surely kids EVERYWHERE are obnoxious?

'Both Ace and Ernie attempted to put out its tyres and missed' - Ace is an excellent soldier, Ernie is the best assassin in this sector of the galaxy (plus has eight arms)...how the hell could they MISS when GWEN COOPER can shoot out ALL FOUR of a vehicle's tyres without batting an eyelid?

'I can't kill the man who saved my life and the life of my child...Now, where's the Doctor? I want to thank him' - Ace, Benny and Forgwyn actually SWALLOW that?! Which part of 'she's a ruthless assassin hired to kill the Doctor on pain of eternal torment' somehow slipped their minds...?

The Seventh Doctor does NOT have 'deeply lined features'.

'Meredith closed her eyes and prepared to fire' - what sort of useless assassin IS she?!

'They were used to queuing. It had become a way of life. Did it matter what was waiting at the end?' - I'm thinking that, as it's 'walking onto the fizzing, crackling dancefloor of destruction'...YES. I'm REALLY not convinced by thousands of people's sudden and inexplicable desire to queue for death.

'The valve opened by Ernie McCartney had weakened the structure of the Gargantuan considerably' - what sort of pathetic submarine IS it?

'Ace, Bernice and Forgwyn tumbled to the floor. The Doctor went to check their life signs. "Yes?" Crispin said impatiently. "You were saying. About the calculations"' - whatever happened to him being in love with Benny? Why does he suddenly not care if she's alive?

'The Doctor knew from his studies of galactic folklore that this must be Portellus, one of the most feared of immortal beings' - the Doctor's WHAT!

The Friars agree to spare the Doctor to give them TARDIS-instructions...and then decide to kill him after a two-minute crash course?

The TARDIS is completely unscathed by antimatter?

A waste of space, just not quite as much of a waste of space as half the other NAs. The Seventh Doctor is mildly entertaining, albeit only when he seems to be in Tom or Troughton mode. Ernie is also fun, what with his dead fly biscuits and his fear of scuttling humans.

Bookwyrm:

'"Once again he found himself longing to administer a little violent correction, which was most unlike him" We'll say. The seventh Doctor, master of a thousand chessboards, champion of Time and destroyer of worlds... harbours a secret desire to beat up small children?' - well, YEAH. Who doesn't?

(Also, the 'small child' in question isn't that small - twelve years old - AND is a genocidal dictator so sadly we can't draw any general conclusions towards the Doctor's attitude towards kids from this.)

Forgwyn is 'the first gay character in the NAs not to be evil or dying of AIDS' - BLIMEY. You think the NAs are progressive but (see Bernice Summerfield: Beyond the Sun) they're really not, are they.

(I mean, neither of Beyond the Sun's gay characters* are evil or die either but gay marriage was...an unthinkable impossibility.)

(*Actually I seem to remember Scott was bi not gay (or does his willingness to shag aliens make him omni?) but am simplifying...oh gods, maybe in twenty years' time my willingness to call a bi guy 'gay' will look as insanely homophobically outdated as Benny's 'About as much likelihood of Emile getting married' comment...?)