Who the hell thanks Jim Mortimer for PLOT CONSTRUCTION? (People with badly-plotted books. Obviously.)

There's THAT much hatred of Jews in 1919 Germany? I thought they were extremely well assimilated till Hitler came along?

So Benny has black hair. Fine. I just wish they'd make up their minds. Last Benny book I read (Where Angels Fear) it was dark brown. (Still, if they keep contradicting themselves about which CENTURY'S she's from...)

'It was typical of the Doctor, she thought, to pick a "cover" that was a lot more obvious than just materializing the TARDIS in a park at midnight and having a chat' - well, QUITE. The whole undercover pie-seller/factory worker/private investigators jumping forward a month in the TARDIS every day set-up is unnecessarily elaborate - even for the Seventh Doctor. Anyone would think it had more to do with the padding out of an incredibly thin plot...

So does Benny ever get those implants removed from her head? The scars aren't mentioned again that I remember.

'"What have I let them do to you, Benny?" he asked suddenly, then suddenly [sic] crumpled in his captors' arms, shouting in what seemed to be a near-insane fury with himself. "What have I done? What have I done?"' Hmm. Don't recall him getting THAT hysterical when he got her tortured by Nazis in Just War.

"How can you be late in a time machine?" - bloody hell. How long has Roz BEEN with the Doctor??? *Checks* OK, this is only her fourth book - still...she and Chris are incredibly thick about this whole time-travel thing. She expects heart transplants in 1919. He tells the police all about wormholes. And asks what an aeroplane is. (The police, for no readily apparent reason, eventually totally trust these nutcases and put their jobs on the line for them. It's one thing when this happens to the DOCTOR - there's just such authority in his voice...)

So why did the master-manipulator Doctor leave them so ill-prepared? (Paul Leonard obviously realises this is a problem, as he has them curse the inadequacy of the Doctor's briefing. Note to all authors: pointing out your own plot-holes doesn't let you off the hook, people!)

AND Roz doesn't seem to have heard of - let alone encountered - racism (or sexism) before. It takes a whole book of people ignoring her, calling her Chris's servant, treating her like dirt, and imitating monkeys before the penny drops. You'd think someone claiming descent from Nelson Mandela might possibly have heard of this whole 'racism' thing (especially someone from the thirtieth century where xenophobia was rife, going by Original Sin and The Mutants, anyway). Aaaand again the author tries to plug the gaping hole in his narrative by belatedly mentioning that yes, she knew about Mandela but hadn't thought to apply it to this time-period. (Sorry, isn't the woman supposed to be an INVESTIGATOR? Such a skilled one that her word as an Adjudicator is LAW to ENTIRE PLANETS?)

Oh, and speaking of 1919, shouldn't everyone be dying of flu about now? There's not a single mention of it.

Since when does Roz call Chris 'kid' all the time?

A FRENCHMAN thinks AMERICANS are liberal towards black people? In the 1910s? Frankly I doubt that SOUTH AFRICANS regarded the US as liberal at that time. And I remember reading something about Americans being seriously worried about how they'd keep their black troops in line after the World War ended, once they'd actually been TREATED LIKE HUMAN BEINGS in Paris...

Benny thinks the conditioning PROBABLY had a physical component? Well, DUH. Why d'you think they drilled into your skull, thicko!

Don't TELL the machine that you won't help it JUST when your arguments are getting through to it, Doctor!

So Manda thinks that children her age can't die? Don't be ridiculous. There were pretty high infant mortality rates in those days.

Wow. Out of the whole of London, Chris just happens to land the crashed plane right outside the factory. Again, this isn't the sort of coincidence that would bother me if the DOCTOR was involved...

The Recruiter wants inventions? Kidnap inventors in the first place then, you stupid git.

Chris decides to take the TARDIS back in time to rescue all the kidnapped kids before they're kidnapped? Why is the Doctor allowing this idiot anywhere NEAR his time machine?

Why does Benny regard the destruction of Earth as 'impossible'? Doesn't she realise that history can be changed?

So one minute the Cloister Bell's going and the TARDIS is gonna materialise inside itself and everything is DOOMED! and the next minute the TARDIS just goes and fetches the Doctor like a bloody stick-fetching DOG or something. It simply doesn't have that sort of power/skill. And given what a total War Games rip-off it is, it's surprising how it manages to get everyone back to their own place n'time (AND provide rooms that shape themselves to each home-planet's atmosphere).

'The dark fetid air of the Ogron homeworld' - it didn't seem THAT dark and fetid in Frontier!

So what happens when the year of grace is up? If it took the machine 1,400 years to NOT notice its tactics are wrong, it'd take a lot more than a year for it to decide NOT to slaughter all the enemies it's programmed to slaughter.

Too many shootings, bombings, ripping kids' arms off, killing off of really nice characters (and children) in an attempt to convey gritty reality. Sadly having the TARDIS crew in certain-death situations again and again and again, and having them get out of 'em again and again and again has the opposite effect. And the entire Roz n'Chris subplot (well...it doesn't really have a plot...subTHING) is an utter waste of time.

The excuses for using children as soldiers are somewhat flimsy. As is the whole concept.

To be fair, the whole concept - an endless war where both sides are controlled by one entity to speed up development - IS made to work quite convincingly in Anachrophobia. But it's really boring even there.

and the next minute the TARDIS just goes and fetches the Doctor like a bloody stick-fetching DOG or something. It simply doesn't have that sort of power/skill.

Of course I realise NOW that Sexy TOTALLY has that sort of power/skill. But the fact remains she can't be bothered to use it.

Oh, and speaking of 1919, shouldn't everyone be dying of flu about now? There's not a single mention of it.

This is even more jarring now we KNOW what it's like to live through a pandemic.

Bookwyrm:

'"I'm the Doctor and you're my friend Manda. You're going to have to be my friend, because I seem to have mislaid all my other friends at the moment." That's creepy from the get-go, but considerably worsened given that, only a few pages ago, the (possibly) possessed) Doctor was torturing the self-same girl, and he's given her absolutely no reason whatsoever to trust him since. The fact that at no point does Manda say "But you tortured me, you bastard" actually makes it worse rather than better.' - Hmm. Yeah, fair point.

'The acknowledgements page includes a thanks to a Chris Lake who had apparently read the book, with Paul Leonard's italics, "twice". The shock that this seems to engender in the author is quite amusing. We suspect that the people who have read this book twice now number three: Chris Lake, Anthony Wilson and Robert Smith?' - *puts hand up in embarrassed manner*

'The magic Teddy Bears have to be able to teleport across half the universe, mind-wipe an entire population and create toys that are actually the business end of an mm'x synchronisis intradimensional energizer. It just about works. Until the complex memory-altering procedure is apparently accomplished with a metal drill' -

'Systematically, the interesting characters are either dropped or eliminated when they become inconvenient to the plot. The three children who are kidnapped at the start, and upon whom we are supposed to build our emotional centre around, are denied a return home and end up dead. Nothing much else happens except set-pieces. This is a) a very clever commentary on the horrors of war, b) hugely dramatically unsatisfying or c) indescribably lazy' - or possibly an accurate reflection of the fact no one would give a toss about said kids no matter how hard you tried?

'Loads of stuff that pops up early in the book - the strange requisitioning of equipment on Q'ell, for example - just gets quietly dropped when it appears Leonard has hoped we've forgotten about it' - to be fair, I DID forget about it. Like bringing-teddy-to-dinner-when-you're-sixteen, things in this book just...slide out of your brain.

'It's never clear whether the Doctor was really possessed by the Recruiter or not when he tortured a child. If he was, then how did he un-possess himself? If he wasn't, which is much more disturbing, then he tortured a child for effect' - I'm just assuming he quietly unpossessed himself, he's had plenty of practice.