I'm sure everyone has been as worried as me by the brief mention in CoaRP of 'Sarah Jane Morley’ saying that ‘As I once told the reigning monarch of, er, a small nation in the former Soviet Union...there's nothing ‘only’ about being a girl.’

Well, I’ve spoken to Lawrence Miles about it, and after some argument he admitted that it’s not the sort of thing a feminist would do – change her name to her husband’s (god the degradation! How can ANY woman do it?) but it was necessary for aesthetic reasons, since ‘Sarah Jane Smith’ would be too obvious and spoil the joke.

Actually, I don’t expect anyone else gives a •••• about this point...I just wanted to brag that I’VE MET LAWRENCE MILES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was wondering where this post was headed.

So, did you smack him for killing the 3rd Doctor in "Interference"?

SMACK him? Are you MAD??? I was too busy grovelling at his feet begging for more books. Someone told me afterwards that they could see his ego visibly swelling as I spoke to him...

Somehow I have a hard time visualizing you in the act of grovelling.......

Oh, you'd be amazed at what I can stoop to when I am honoured by the presence of a Supreme Being. It's just that...for some reason...the situation has never arisen on this bb.

Right, that's it, I'm off.

When I said this was saturated with Whoness, I was underestimating...Lawrence Miles said he put in a reference to all 159 televised stories, thinking that a lot of them would be removed by the editor, but...they weren’t. *Whips out CoaRP, a pencil and a list of episodes* Time for a reread :)

By the way, Gareth Roberts is THE ANTI-CHRIST. When CoaRP was submitted, he...*starts sobbing* _accidentally knocked it behind a shelf where it stayed for 18 months_...and when it was finally dug out it was commissioned immediately *starts knocking head against nearest wall* I can’t bear it...can you IMAGINE how many more Lawrence Miles books we’d have been blessed with if not for that?

This book is so intelligent that it makes me want to wipe my arse with books written by the likes of Gary Russell.

PS. I loved the Carnival Queen and her Gynoids.

Luke, please watch your language when posting.

sorry (sheepish grin)
i thought there was some automatic editing thing that took care of that!

I finally got a copy of this, and finished reading it last night. My reaction to it was the same I've had to all of Miles' books--impressed with the style and characterization, and completely lost as to what actually happened in the story.

I'm not sure there were actually references to all 159 TV stories, but it was darn close.

Reading this out of order (i.e., after reading "Interference", "Dead Romance", and other Miles books), I really noticed Miles laying ground for Faction Paradox. There was the Grandfather Paradox reference, and a comment about the bottle universe that keeps showing up in Miles books, and even a passing comment about voodoo.

Well, Lawrence does admit that it's stretching a point to claim that mentioning blue switches at one point is a Terminus reference. Plus the fact that the mention of a female Time Lord President was SUPPOSED to count as the Five Doctors reference, but then Happy Endings went and made Romana President.

I only spotted about 70 TV stories, to my eternal shame.

I've just re-read this. CoaRP is the abbreviation which re-arranges itself to o PaRC. Or something else which I can't put just in case Mike the Moderator steps in again

Actually it's not that bad. The spine broke into a couple of pieces so it must be at least OK. Like Emily I've also met Lawrence but, in regards to this book he told me "don't hold it against me, I was young at the time". And that sums it up. There's a lot of ideas but they don't quite gel into a cohesive and (ahem) rational whole. Given what he produces later on it can be forgiven but as it's own entity it really needs an editor to give it a much stronger direction.

Most of the bits with the 159 stories are subtle so they don't leap out and break the suspension of disbelief but the Jake McCrimmon bit at the end was just pure Gary Russell strength fan-onanism.

Rubbish. Christmas is an utter joy and happiness (in a slightly-beyond-our-comprehension kind of way) and don't think Lawrence agreeing with your attitude (and acronym) is gonna save your life the next time I set eyes on you.

Jake McCrimmon? Where?

Jake McCrimmon appears on pp266-267. As does the quote "the strangeness was in his very blood". Definitely Gary Russell territory there.

I'm actually looking forward to find out what Emily will do to me the next time we meet. Best keep my thoughts on 'Down' quiet then

Ah. Well, I myself used to have incorrect thoughts vis-a-vis Down. (Unfortunately recorded for posterity on this very site.) So it would be hypocritical of me to slaughter you on those grounds (all the same, yes, better keep 'em quiet). A reread mercifully put me straight on this issue, and - goody! - at the rate you're getting through the NAs you'll soon be experiencing the pleasures of Down along with all the other Benny NAs (unless you do something REALLY s t u p i d like rereading the MAs first). However, if experiencing Down for the second time doesn't do the trick, I would be happy to set up a Soviet-style rehabilitation centre in order to set you straight on this issue, the next time you're in the UK.

I can't say I was all that impressed with this book. It seemed like the lack of a 'rational universe' resulted in Miles just writing whatever he wanted, confusing me for the 5 days it took me to get through the book. Nothing had to make sense or be logical because of the Carnival Queen's influence, but it just seemed so silly and sloppy.
And why bother setting it at Christmas? It never, ever felt like that time of the year, nor was the season relevant to the story, so why bother?
As for Sarah Jane taking the name 'Morley', well, I guess since she's not Morley during School Reunion it was a short marriage.

It seemed like the lack of a 'rational universe' resulted in Miles just writing whatever he wanted

And this is a problem because...?

Honestly, Lawrence writing whatever he wants is about as much joy as you're gonna get, outside of the new series.

Though admittedly he does now see CoaRP as rather self-indulgent, especially the references to every single Old Who TV story ever...

confusing me for the 5 days it took me to get through the book. Nothing had to make sense or be logical because of the Carnival Queen's influence, but it just seemed so silly and sloppy.

No doubt it did all make sense...in an irrational way. It certainly made sense of puzzling things in the 'real' Whoniverse - what a great explanation for Mondas.

As for Sarah Jane taking the name 'Morley', well, I guess since she's not Morley during School Reunion it was a short marriage.

Or maybe she's still married, but remembered she's supposed to be a feminist so took back her maiden name. And just lied to the Doctor about never having met anyone, just to make him feel more guilty (and who can blame her).

It's a problem to me, personally, because after I finish reading a chapter I'm left mumbling, "Uh...what? Huh? Whaazat..? I think, um, no, I think...WHAT THE H-E-DOUBLE HOCKEY-STICKS IS GOING ON?!", because it made no sense. It seemed to go beyond fantasy where you can have a talking tree or something like that.
I guess I'm just too stuck in my preferences for literature that Miles is and never will be my cup of tea.
I'm also less than a fanatic than I thought, because I only noticed about a dozen tv show references, and two of them, Sarah Jane and McCrimmon, were so obvious.

It's a problem to me, personally, because after I finish reading a chapter I'm left mumbling, "Uh...what? Huh? Whaazat..? I think, um, no, I think...WHAT THE H-E-DOUBLE HOCKEY-STICKS IS GOING ON?!", because it made no sense.

Oh. I LIKE having that feeling, providing (to misquote Warriors' Gate) it's the right kind of no-sense. It's that too-convoluted-and-epic-and-clever-to-comprehend rather than the insult-to-your-intelligence type of, say, Twin Dilemma, which doesn't make sense because they obviously just couldn't be bothered.

I guess I'm just too stuck in my preferences for literature that Miles is and never will be my cup of tea.

Well, he does write drastically different stuff. If you don't like Christmas, try Adventuress of Henrietta Street, which deals with the same sort of thing but in the style of a non-fictional historical biography.

I'm also less than a fanatic than I thought, because I only noticed about a dozen tv show references, and two of them, Sarah Jane and McCrimmon, were so obvious.

I only spotted half of 'em, even when I was searching...there are richer pickings near the end where he's trying to cram in the remaining stories - one paragraph about Daleks contains half-a-dozen references...

Thanks, I'll have to go back and check them out...
HEY! Waitaminute! You're just trying to get me to re-read COARP again! Verrry sneaky!

*Evil laughter*

'Time Lords have no understanding of myths, no understanding at all. And they have very little time for fairy-tales' - Genetic Politics Beyond the Third Zone. Pah! Alien Bodies says 'Time Lord folk stories are full of cautionary tales about characters who inadvertently murder their own ancestors, or disobedient children who break the First Law of Time'...not to mention 'the Spirits of the Faction had been numbered among Time's bogeymen, like Rassilon's Mimic or the Great Vampires.' Come to think of it, the Toclafane were Gallifreyan fairy-stories, weren't they...

Ha! It turns out Lawrence never believed for a moment that Katarina and Sara were Companions (though he DOES count Kamelion for some reason). He just had to include 'em in the Doctor's 'I've lost four Companions' because the Seventh Doctor referred to them as such in Timewyrm: Revelation. This has been bugging me for YEARS, second only to 'Sarah Jane Morley'. (I suppose you could argue that SJA: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith backed up the absurd idea that she might change her surname on marriage but bear in mind she was UNDER ALIEN MIND-CONTROL at the time.)

Oh, and amusingly, the TARDIS became a woman in COARP's first draft. Then Lawrence realised this was a TERRIBLE idea, just as Rebecca Levine rang to tell him it was a terrible idea. Sadly The Doctor's Wife merely confirmed this belief.

But the TARDIS doesn't become a woman in The Doctor's Wife - its essence is zapped into a woman's body. Completely different thing!

Well, for all I know the TARDIS was gonna become a woman by being zapped into a woman's body. I doubt a Compassion-style transformation could have been squeezed into Christmas along with everything else.

The Death of Art: 'Even the Carnival Queen had fitted into science somehow; if only as a personification of a potential Kuhn Paradigm shift in the way the consciousness of observers was collapsing mixed-state events. At least [Chris] told himself that now, a after a week shut in the TARDIS library reading Findecker's Der Nexus Doppelgangen and an ancient children's book A Brief History of Time' - hmm. Someone (and by someone I suppose I mean 'me') should bear this claim in mind the next time they reread Christmas. Cos I REALLY didn't get the impression the Carnival Queen fitted into science by ANY stretch of the imagination.

Bookwyrm:

'The Bottle concept will turn up in both the post-Docor Who Benny NAs and the Eighth Doctor Adventures as well, instigated by Miles in both cases since, as he saw it, continuity was falling more and more apart. What's interesting here is that the eighth Doctor is definitely inside the bottle, whereas after it will be suggested that it's the NAs that took place inside a bottle universe. Then again, the possibility that the NAs are inside the EDAs while he EDAs are simultaneously inside the NAs is just magnificent' - that's...a very positive way of looking at this whole bottled mess.

'"Even if people died (Kat'lanna died) and worlds were burned (Kat'lanna died) and the walls caved in (Kat'lanna died, probably), that was the way of the Doctor." Except that...Kat'lann most certainly did not die' - oops.

'Not only is the Carnival Queen implicitly the Pythia' - the HELL she is!

'When Chris is told that he can birth a gynoid, he looks understandably distressed. However, given that he's spent much of his time with the Doctor knocking up random women, one can't help but feel a little shadenfreude joy at his sudden discomfort' - didn't he n'Roz already get knocked up in Sky Pirates? Also, bear in mind both women in question DELIBERATELY got pregnant by Chris without giving him a say in the matter. (The ultimate crime on Dep's world if not on Ishtar's.) So this feels rather mean-minded.

'The writing itself is utterly magnificent, with every sentence being lovingly crafted. But it's the Finnegans Wake of the NAs, a book that's so dense most people will be unable to make sense of it, despite every word being delicious' - we don't need to MAKE SENSE of it! We can just take a...Carnival-Queen-like attitude towards it, we're not TIME LORDS.

'The book sets up a dichotomy between the female-centric gynoids and Carnival Queen, who represent cacophony, versus the (predominantly male) Time Lords (known as the Watchmakers) and the TARDIS, who represent rationality. What's interesting is that the Doctor is placed firmly on the side of reason and order in his confrontation with the Carnival Queen, yet he's the caillou, an agent of chaos, as far as the Shadow Directory is concerned. The confrontation is explicitly set up as a gender war...It's hard to see the sexless seventh Doctor as the embodiment of maleness per se' - never mind the Doctor, the TARDIS sure as hell isn't isn't male!

'Sounding the death knell of the NAs' - ooh, that's a bit...harsh. That was the telemovie, surely?

'Time Lords have no understanding of myths, no understanding at all. And they have very little time for fairy-tales' - Genetic Politics Beyond the Third Zone. Pah! Alien Bodies says 'Time Lord folk stories are full of cautionary tales about characters who inadvertently murder their own ancestors, or disobedient children who break the First Law of Time'...not to mention 'the Spirits of the Faction had been numbered among Time's bogeymen, like Rassilon's Mimic or the Great Vampires.' Come to think of it, the Toclafane were Gallifreyan fairy-stories, weren't they...

And then there's Eleven in Power of Three: 'I loved a good bedtime story. The Three Little Sontarans. The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes. Snow White And The Seven Keys To Doomsday, eh? All the classics.' And Thirteen in It Takes You Away: 'Solitract! It's a theory, a myth, a bedtime story my gran used to tell me.'

Of course, the whole Hybrid fiasco (Time Lord and Dalek my arse) did indicate Time Lords have precious little grasp of legends, but they ARE au fait with fairy tales, at least...

'I compressed my sensory input to human normal. This is something I do from time to time, a little game which keeps me entertained and alert' - Eye of Heaven. Doesn't Christmas imply s/he spends MOST of her time in human mode?

'But Time Lords do not reproduce organically, and all their young are born from the gene-looms' - *wince* a bit out-of-date...(Of course, as far as I'm concerned, the jury's still out on which is sillier - Time Lords breeding via gene-looms or via organic-reproduction. Guess I should just be grateful they...no longer have this problem.)

'He'd been trying to wean himself off the umbrella' - why! WHY!!

'A set of Egyptian manuscripts, found by our own Cardinal Scarlath, describing a world built by one-eyed supernatural horrors...' - well, becoming a Cardinal is certainly one way of avoiding the pitfalls of holy matrimony, but wouldn't this make a surprising number of Scaroth-splinters within a mere few centuries?

'The male and female of the species, of every humanoid species, have completely different psychologies' - now practically every Time Lord we've heard of has had a sex-change regeneration this is looking SERIOUSLY mistaken.

'The female psyche has no need to construct, no need to control -' blimey, he really HAS forgotten Mummy Tecteun, hasn't he.

'There were no organizations here that might know the Doctor, no LONGBOWs or PROBEs' - OMG did you just CANONISE those PROBE videos?!

'Roz had been born nearly a millennium after the fall of the United States' - think you're been a bit optimistic - aagghh! I mean pessimistic, of course I do! - Roz is thirtieth-century-born, isn't she...

Roz re the cold-blooded murder of a historical figure: 'The only way out of this place. The only way to let the Doctor know where she was. The only way to summon a Time Lord.' I've said it before and I'll say it again: MOBILE PHONES ARE YOUR FRIENDS, PEOPLE!

Since when have people's SPINES expressed their...psychicness?

The food machine trundles along the ship's passages? BLESS!

'Caillou, the word her employers in the Shadow Directory used to describe an individual around whom the world itself would shift and change, one so out-of-tune with the natural order of the universe that even history would warp and buckle around him. Caillou. Maker of distractions. Changer of rules. A pebbled dropped into a pond' - •••• that's a good description of Our Hero. (Though surely so IN tune with the natural order of the universe...? According to Nine n'Ten anyway, who claim they see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. On the other hand she does turn out to be from ANOTHER UNIVERSE, unless RTG would care to retcon this...?)

'Most of the rain seemed to be missing [the Doctor] somehow, as if the droplets knew that he wouldn't grow no matter how much they watered him' - awwww!

'"Stranded, for weeks on end, months on end, left in the middle of some dead-end no-hope planet' - it's your own planet! - 'with no way of getting away from it, and no way of even knowing if you're going to be spending the rest of your life there?" "I have a place in mind," the Doctor muttered. "A planet where you fit in so badly that they take one look at you and decide you're either a criminal or part of a freak-show?" "I have a place in mind," he repeated' - the Doctor had BLOODY WELL NOT BE dissing his UNIT years...

'I don't believe it's possible to communicate with the TARDIS, at least, not directly. Its thought processes are entirely alien to the organic psyche, and its mental capacity is beyond the comprehension of anything other than another TARDIS' - The Doctor's Wife says otherwise...

To be continued...

'The artronics have cancelled themselves out' - hmm. We all know about artron energy - and, indeed, Artron the Time Lord after which it was named - but ARTRONICS...?

'Surrounded by the familiar roundelled walls and ion-blistered atmosphere of the TARDIS' - if Sexy's so full of ions what's with the Doctors' pathetic obsession with the Eye of Orion and its high bombardment of positive ions?

'"Do you know any of these people?" the Doctor asked. Roz shrugged. "Some. A couple are customers of mine." A look of absolute horror briefly crossed his face, but he hid it well. "Customers?" "I'm in the fortune-telling business." He seemed to relax' - the Doctor assumed that Roz had become a PROSTITUTE? How does the Doctor even know about the EXISTENCE of said...profession? And since when has he found it so appalling since he bloody MARRIED one in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street...

'Duquesne forced a smile. "'There are more things in Heaven and Earth..."' she began, hoping that the English quotation would appeal to him. Instead, he just stared. "More things than what?"' - Shakespeare doesn't last another millennium? Unlike Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie...?

'They'd dragged the Doctor out, cursing in a bizarre alien language that made great use of the letter X' - OK, even given this claims the Doc's doing this for effect, what IS it with the novels' conviction that the Doctor spends his time cursing in Old High Gallifreyan?

'"If there's some dark and terrible secret in my past that you'd like to torment me about, please get it over with." The Doctor sniffed haughtily' - to think s/he's gotta wait till Timeless Children...

'The Doctor scowled. "I've been very busy." "Really? If I was going to be vicious -" "Were going to be vicious. Grammar."' - awww, just like when he's Ten in Sontaran Stratagem!

'"Are you a servant of the Devil?" the woman trilled, formally..."No," said the Doctor, cheerily. "But I may be a relation"' - Well you didn't greet him as a long-lost relative in The Satan Pit! And even if you WERE related this is a TERRIBLE time to publicly admit it!

'K. S. Lethbridge-Stewart, The Zen Military - A History of UNIT (2006, unpublished)' - BLIMEY.

'When examining the early history of UNIT, we still tend to focus on the "big two" invasion attempts; the now-famous London Underground episode, and the Cyberman landing of the following year' - a) it's FOUR years according to the Brig in Invasion and b) shouldn't you be focussing on all those Fifth Operational Corps/Candy Jar prequels? Oh, and there's a Grand Serpent you might like to take a look at and c) NOW-FAMOUS?

'UNIT had its roots in the Intrusion Counter Measures Group' - see above re Fifth Operational Corps.

'Parts of the new personality had been modelled on the former TARDIS user called McShane, so Interface knew a thing or two about manipulation' - oi! Ace realised she was TOTALLY in the wrong for accusing darling McCoy of manipulation and APOLOGISED for it in Power of the Doctor! And...'former TARDIS user'? That's cold. Sexy telepathically told MEL 'You will be missed' so she might at least regard Ace a bit more fondly as a Stray.

'Accounts of his adventures with fictional characters like Old Father Time and Abslom Daak' - Daak isn't fictional! Deceit said so and more to the point, so did Time Heist!

'An intelligence so gigantic and abstract that Interface could only bear to look at it out of the corner of an imaginary eye. And even that huge sentience was just a tiny sliver of the Matrix' - hmm. The Matrix has never struck me as particularly intelligent or sentient. But then I'm mainly going by the Gallifrey audios, which destroyed it with zero repercussions other than votes having to be counted by hand...

'Of course, I usually just say my name's "Smith", if anyone asks, but I've ben thinking about finding another pseudonym. It's getting dangerously close to becoming my real name' - I'm not sure that's how Time Lord names WORK, well, according to Forest of the Dead ('There's only one reason I would ever tell anyone my name. There's only one time I could'), though of course that's later contradicted by Name of the Doctor ('I made him...it took a while')...

'People go crazy when the numbers change. Like in 2000, when they started launching the old space stations, and there were those riots across Asia and South America' - don't remember THAT from the telemovie or millennial-PDAs...?

To be continued...

'And what about 3000? Yeah. Just before me and Chris left, the day we packed up and moved into the TARDIS...uprisings on Solos and Murtaugh' - didn't Solos gain independence 500 years earlier in The Mutants? Dammit, should've KNOWN that half-wit Cotton would have screwed it all up...

'"TARDISes are built," she told him, knowing he wouldn't understand a word she was saying. "This one just happened"' - nah, TARDISes are grown not built (admittedly-cut scene from Journey's End).

'"They seem uncommonly lucky, but that luck is merely a manifestation of their great and unearthly experience," Hulot wrote. "The older they get, the more extreme the coincidences that surround them become."' - SO HAPPY to finally have an explanation for the insane numbers of coincidences that surround Our Hero but how the hell did this Hulot know how old the Doc was when s/he and, more to the point, WE, had sod-all idea about all that Timeless Children stuff...

'The Doctor sighed once more. "There aren't nay Watchmakers, don't you see? At least, not in any sense but the metaphorical one"' - hate to agree with the loony above my Doctor but THERE TOTALLY ARE WATCHMAKERS. (Er...were. Before the Time War and Master and suchlike.)

The fifth law of thermodynamics is that 'Everything always gets slightly worse'?

'The seemingly endless corridor known as the TARDIS library' - Sexy couldn't afford a ROOM for a library in those days?! And the Doctor spent TWENTY-SIX YEARS reorganising the books in this corridor? AND this library corridor is TELEPATHIC?

'Stray books with titles like The Catcher in the Rye and Black Orchid 2: This Time It's Personal flapped down the passage' - OK, not even gonna ASK who wrote the sequel...

'"Oh, wow," said Cwej. "Look, it's a little universe in a bottle. You can see all the tiny people"' - HOW! Given it's an ENTIRE UNIVERSE!

'I wonder what he's doing in San Francisco' - oh-kay, so the telemovie/EDAs are inside the bottle and - oh, never mind.

'"He shot me," the machine continued, its body bathing in the bright orange fire..."A mercy killing, he would have said. Certainly, he felt less guilt about me than he did about his human companions"' - well, to be brutally honest Kamelion, YOU WERE LITERALLY ASKING FOR IT - 'But then, we machines have no souls' - NEITHER HAVE HUMANS YOU MORON (just ask the Reverend Magister)...

'Of course, blame is as relative as time itself. You could say that the creator of the universe was at fault for starting off the whole process. However, the creator of the universe never really understood the concept of responsibility, and seldom acknowledges complaints' - HELLO! THERE IS NO CREATOR YOU MORON!! (For heaven's sake, Lawrence is an ATHEIST! Well, technically speaking a Hindu, but only because a) Hindus welcome atheists and b) he claims Ganesh the Elephant-Headed God IS the Doctor, only with an elephant head which apparently makes him superior to the OTHER Doctors...)

(Well, admittedly the Toymaker claims there is...er...WAS a God but how seriously does anyone want to take that jack-in-the-box stuff?)

'Consequences. You never know what you've started. It's the bloodlines that worry me the most. I may have affected my companions more deeply than I like to admit.' - is THAT why you 'accidentally' sterilised Sarah Jane (Interference)? - 'Genetically. Bernice's children will be born with a little piece of Time Lord in them' - a) Nope, Peter Summerfield's all genocidal-Killoran/Human-Hybrid and b) Oh, so THIS is where Moffat...conceived River Song. No surprise, he even nicked Big Bang's 'Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue' from Lawrence - 'Timothy Dean would have introduced almost unthinkable quantities of Time Lord DNA to the human species' - only if he reproduced which considerable millions of his generation didn't, though admittedly in the novels - unlike in the TV version of Human Nature - he refused to fight in World War One - 'Christopher must have planted several family trees by now' - only a couple of sprogs (Happy Endings, The Also People) and if you're so concerned why didn't you explain the concept of CONTRACEPTION to him? - 'Ancelyn may have spread innate abilities throughout mankind that aren't even supposed to be possible in this universe' - look, the novels claimed Bambera had his twins but two kids aren't exactly mankind (MANkind?!) and anyway, the UNIT audios claim they did nothing of the sort and he buggered back to his own universe without spawning - 'And there there was Jo. Poor Jo. I sometimes wonder if her dynasty ever...well, too late to worry now' - jeez, one of her thirteen-and-counting grandchildren was dyslexic, it's not the end of the world...

To be continued...

The fifth law of thermodynamics is that 'Everything always gets slightly worse'?

No, it's "There will always be discrepancies between experimental results and scientists' prior expectations"

Oh!

'"They can't do that," said Daniel, and his voice sounded as hollow as a Drahvin's defence at a war-crimes trial' - BLESS! (Though honestly, 'I was CREATED to be a half-wit warmongering clone' might actually be a fair point...wouldn't work for their commanders, of course...)

'He kept remembering that one simple sensation, the bottle breaking against his face, tiny pieces of glass sticking in the corner of his eye...one eye was gummed up with blood and splinters of glass' - OK *sigh* I guess that's your statutory eye-gouging duties performed...

The Doctor 'muttered an ancient Miasimian curse that contained an almost obscene number of "X"s' - it's astonishing how often the Doc's cursing in the books when this never happens on-screen...

'He'd followed his usual procedure, adopting the basic thought-processes of a human - albeit an exceptionally gifted human with an unfeasibly large hat collection - so he could understand the psychology of the enemy, while still retaining the edge. He'd slipped into "ephemeral mode" easily enough, remembering to think in three geometric dimensions and to perceive time as a linear experience rather than any of the more exotic alternatives' - BLIMEY. That certainly explains a lot about Our Hero...as does 'a forced shift of perspectives often left him temporarily confused, absent-minded, or unable to remember what candyfloss was'...

It's extraordinary that no one but the Directory has thought to Doctor-proof their agents.

'Your martial arts skills are considerable, though your left arm seems to be doing twice the work of your other extremities. I suspect the species which developed the moves you attempted possessed a fifth limb, or other such protrusion' - those Venusian nuns had a FIFTH ARM? Someone-who-isn't-me please reread Venusian Lullaby...

'My superiors in France are quite keen on the ideals of fraternity and equality, as you may know. And you do seem to have more than your fair share of hearts' - *sigh* Lawrence was always going to rip out one of the Doctor's hearts, wasn't he...

'The two million who were about to die of that rare and contagious disease called Napoleon' - what a wonderful way of putting it, if only the Doctor had felt this way when talking about his old friend Boney when he was Pertwee...

'Everything strange and magical dropped out of the universe. The Watchmakers held creation in a hard grey fist and squeezed it dry' - that's rather unfair, there's plenty of magic in the Whoniverse, though admittedly there does seem to be MORE of it around these days after said Time Lords get themselves destroyed...again...

Rassilon's 'throne was made out of the crushed bones of things that looked suspiciously like gigantic bats' - can't have been THAT crushed then...

'How long since the time of the Watchmakers? - About three-and-a-half billion years, said the shadow' - great, ANOTHER figure to add to ten million (Trial) and a billion (End of Time)...

'On their homeworld, buried in the deepest archives, there are books that only the Highest of the High are ever allowed to read' - well that's not quite true, the Blood of the Time Lords audio makes it quite clear that the Time Lords keep their infinite library on one of Gallifrey's moons.

You can't give your chapter the title 'Obligatory Chapter Named After Pop Song'! (Well, obviously you CAN and DID, but...)

'Apparently, it was the Age of Reason that had let her break down the barriers between her little shadow-world and the rest of creation. Earth stood poised "between Cacophony and Reason", or something like that, and the accumulated fear and angst of the human race had acted like a kind of prayer, weakening the walls of her prison' - yeah, that makes sense except WHY EARTH BLOODY EARTH DON'T OTHER PLANETS HAVE AGES OF REASON WHY DOES NO ONE ASK WHY BLOODY EARTH -

- Oh.

'"I still don't get it," [Chris] said. "Why Earth?...There must have been other ages of reason on other planets, right?"...It wasn't the first time in his travels with the Doctor that Chris had wanted to ask that question...Some places, the Doctor once said, were special. Some places just attracted things. Like Loch Ness, which had been home to a thousand different monsters since the world was formed...But the Carnival Queen had just shrugged. In technicolour' - *sigh* well I s'pose a shrug is more than MOST Who stories give us on this subject...

To be continued...

'Your martial arts skills are considerable, though your left arm seems to be doing twice the work of your other extremities. I suspect the species which developed the moves you attempted possessed a fifth limb, or other such protrusion' - those Venusian nuns had a FIFTH ARM? Someone-who-isn't-me please reread Venusian Lullaby...

No need to reread Venusian Lullaby

From Tardis Fandom.

According to some accounts, and the Thirteenth Doctor, it was developed by Venusian nuns (TV: The Ghost Monument) on Venus, which meant it worked best with five arms and five legs, (PROSE: First Frontier) with the Doctor musing that he was one of the few two-armed beings to become truly adept with the martial art;

No need to reread Venusian Lullaby

Curses, my Cunning Plan to get someone ELSE to do the reread has been foiled....

it worked best with five arms and five legs, (PROSE: First Frontier)

Well, good old First Frontier. (The first and no doubt last time I have ever uttered such words.)

'The decades-long rituals of graduation' - I can't imagine the Doc would ever have put up with THAT so presumably he never graduated properly and isn't a fully-fledged Time Lord? Runcible kinda implies as much ('Oh, I say. Weren't you expelled or something? Some scandal?').

'Time Lords of those "newblood" Houses for whom a change of body is as trivial as a change of fashion, and who come straight from the loom with a secondary heart' - it's trying so hard to bind together everything from the NAs' loom-claims to Romana's Destiny regeneration to Man in the Velvet Mask's 'one heart, soon to meet its twin' but DAMMIT it's out of date. (Though I s'pose the Doctor's triumph in the Eighth Man Bound game can be explained by her/his retroactively unfair advantage in the regeneration department...?)

'The game is said to claim the lives of up to fifteen Academy students each macrosemester' - ah great, another measurement of time I have to try and work out, alongside rel, microspan, etc...

'If I don't give some form to this...madness...then I'll probably lose my mind. And, frankly, I've given the Valeyard enough escape opportunities as it is' - is THAT how the Valeyard...forms?

'He would never have been able to predict what his third body had looked like, for example, because he would never have been able to predict the unusual circumstances under which it had been obtained. Would he?' - I should think the Doc could easily have foreseen pissing off the Time Lords enough to merit a forced regeneration. And how much effect DO the circumstances of a regeneration have on your face, if you can acquire the same adorable Tom/Tennant-like face over and over again...?

'Everything went dark for a nanosecond or two. A minor side-effect of cross-dimensional engineering...his brain adjusting itself to the sudden change in environment, the same kind of "glitch" he noticed every time he walked in or out of the TARDIS' - he DOES?! What about his Strays?

'It reminded Chris of something from a pornographic magazine he'd once found stuffed behind a cupboard in one of the TARDIS's many guest rooms' - a WHAAAAAAAAAAAT! Who? WHO would do such a thing!

'The Stattenheim-Waldorf technique. They knew a thing or two about TARDIS configuration, Stattenheim and Waldorf. Which some might think was odd, seeing as they came from sixteenth-century Berlin' - oh...kay...?

'Some of the Indian tribes believed that if the eyes of a dead man were removed, the soul would be unable to find its way to the happy hunting grounds, or wherever it was they were supposed to go. Erskine had heard stories of colonists deliberately shooting out the eyes of native corpses, just to irritate the families of the departed' - well, if you've JUST GOT to fulfil your (presumably) statutory eye-gouging duties AGAIN, you might as well do so with a powerful anti-colonial message...

'Finally, the Earth died by fire, great arks carrying humanity's leftovers away to safety. There were black-skinned slaves on the ships, same as always. The slaves were one-eyed, rough-skinned, and extraterrestrial, but a slave was a slave was a slave was a slave' - not when it's a Monoid it bloody isn't. Treacherous ungrateful security-kitchen-loving SCUM.

We REALLY need to know more about Professor Hulot of Orleans, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Shadow Directory, caillou expert...

'It must have been strange for him, being accused of rationality in the first degree. After all, at least one major galactic power had wanted to get its cybernetic hands on him just because it thought was entirely irrational' - mainly because he thwarted their Evil Plans, though, surely?

'Do you know the things they put into your DNA, Doctor, when you were born from the loom? Killing lessons that would even put the Shadow Directory to shame, woven right into your genes. Every Watchmaker is a walking weapon, designed to kill off Cacophony wherever I show my face' - odd then that the Doctor's Mum wiped out the universe cos she found the Doc too...cacophonous. (Also that Time Lords weren't actually born from looms.)

'I AM NOT A WATCHMAKER' - interesting. What with 'Watchmaker' meaning 'Time Lord', looks like a Timeless Child memory asserting itself for a second?

If the TARDIS can employ the Interface as a mouthpiece, how come New Who has all that 'spacey-wacey we can't talk' stuff?

'Consider what the TARDIS represents. The ship is the ultimate expression of reason. Its heart is made of mathematics, its architecture the very model of order' - IS it though? Sexy's quite temperamental at the best of times. And that's certainly not what Lawrence's own Toy Story claimed. And Catcher's calling it 'Cacophony's Engine' in a minute, alright, so he's a raving lunatic, but he's got a point...

'Any personality the TARDIS might have developed has largely been modelled on your own. To put it bluntly, if you're an interfering old stoat, it's not surprising that the ship is as well' - hmm. Maybe the other way round...?

'The Doctor had slipped into a new suit, but it was identical to the old one. Chris didn't know where the replacement had appeared from. He hadn't watched the Doctor get changed, either; he reasoned that there were some things no human being should ever witness' - QUITE, so exactly why Happy Endings has the Doc standing round naked in a field (which come to think of it Chris presumably witnessed, what with it being a public ceremony, and all)...

Not quite as glorious as I remembered, mainly because I've come to take the brilliance of the prose and mind-blowingness of the concepts for granted so finally noticed the plot gets REALLY bogged down in running round a stupid town/wandering round TARDIS corridors and I'm also INCREDIBLY annoyed I can't spot half the every-Old-Who-story-ever being referenced but •••• have I mentioned THE PROSE and THE CONCEPTS...

'It reminded Chris of something from a pornographic magazine he'd once found stuffed behind a cupboard in one of the TARDIS's many guest rooms' - a WHAAAAAAAAAAAT! Who? WHO would do such a thing!

Vislor Turlough?

Foul slander!

*Pause*

Yeah, OK, it was Turlough, wasn't it...