What I find a bit weird is that the description
of Cwej in the book doesn't match up with the
picture on the cover or in the book.According
to his description he should look like a walking,
talking,golden teddy bear,but all the pictures
show him to be quite human.Then again the uniforms
are off as well.
I mean shouldn't Roz' look a little bit more banged in on the cover,after all it does describe
it has being fairly beat up.
Then again I only started in on reading it yesterday,so...:)

BTW:Nice trick with the alien nectar and insects
to divert the Landsknecte.

SPOILER FOR ORIGINAL SIN
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Cwej is restored before the end of the book.
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Minor spoilers...
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Yes, but he's still a bear when he and Roz arrest the Doctor on Purgatory, which is what the cover seems to be depicting. Put it down to artistic licence - or just a sensible precaution. If fans heard that new companions were going to be introduced in Original Sin, and saw a giant teddy bear on the cover, the screams of outrage would be deafening.

Unless, of course, the TARDIS just landed in the Hundred Acre Woods.....

I enjoyed this book, but... (nitpick time) I didn't like the Doctor's portrayal, he was way too buffonish to be the Seventh Doctor - sure the 7th Doctor did some gurning every now and then but he never pratfell about like this. Also, Pryce and his arguments did nothing for me, can we say 'Hannibal Lecter ripoff'?

Well, I've never seen Silence of the Lambs but I have to admit that I was a little disappointed at the Doctor's failure to come up with a single reason why murder is wrong (any takers?). I don't remember him being buffoonish though, unless you count drinking the boot-polish. And even if he was, surely that doesn't compare with his prat-to-end-all-prats performance in Time and the Rani?

Yeah, I thought it did compare, and in Time and the Rani he was suffering from post-regenerative trauma, and after season 24 the seventh Doctor had started to grow into a completely different character.

One of the NA's real successes - delightfully continuity-heavy, a fantastically detailed and real background of thirtieth-century Earth (well, it certainly FEELS more real than solar flares and space whales), and a sense of humour. Spoilt only slightly by its utter fixation with torture.

Not only is the front cover grossly inaccurate (Roz's armour not battered, Chris not beppled (not to mention ugly and middle-aged-looking), Doctor's right hand looking as if it's regrowing itself after being chopped off) but so's the blurb. 'Before they can even unpack' - they've nothing TO unpack! - 'they've been arrested' - no they haven't!

What the hell are the godawful internal pictures for? What is this, a Target novelisation?

'Fingers thrust deep into his eyes.' 'And plunged the knife into the boy's eye.' 'The blade cut right through its eye-stalks.' 'The spikes of pain where his eye-stalks were being dragged from their roots.' Even the DOCTOR gets threatened with having his eyes removed. And that's not even mentioning all the other types of torture - flaying, acid, heart-eating, burning alive, ripped to pieces, etc etc...if Andy Lane ever turns up at Tavern, I'm steering WELL clear of him.

'If there was one thing that Bernice had learned about during her time with the Doctor, it was death' - that's a bit unfair. She learned about death a LOT sooner, what with the Daleks invading and killing mummy, not to mention her spell in the military.

'And off-world: twenty-nine alien races file claims for reparation from the Imperial Court for damages during the Wars of Acquisition. We ask whether these alien scum should ever have been left alive to complain...' - love the news reports at the start of each chapter. Really add to the incredible sense of scale.

'The outside was supposed to be infinitely reconfigurable - at least, it had been until the Doctor sabotaged the chameleon circuit' - until he WHAT!

So Benny's thirty-three! (Yes, I'm still obsessively taking notes of her impossible-compared-to-Beige-Planet-Mars age.) And she feels 'Wasn't it time she did something with her life? Something more than rushing around after the Doctor?' - oh, I'm so sorry if SAVING THE UNIVERSE on a regular basis is suddenly BENEATH her...

Ah. THIS is where Torchwood: Meat got its not-particularly-good ideas from.

'Can you point me in his [the Adjudicator Secular's] direction?' - Chris is a sexist git! NO wonder he ended up ripping the faces off young women! (In Dead Romance, I mean, not here - people in this book tend to concentrate on ripping out eyeballs rather than faces.)

'The Doctor trailed off into silence. Mega. A word he had not thought about for some time. Quite deliberately.' - alright, is this referring to an incident in some previous book I've totally forgotten about?

'"So," a voice crooned smugly in the darkness, "you return again to our little planet, Doctor, with a new face and a new friend."' - oh for ****'s sake, Tobias Vaughn has taken ONE THOUSAND YEARS to notice the TARDIS landing on Earth...? This is WAY worse than Torchwood spending a century ignoring the bloke they were created to capture...'The fact that the Doctor's face had changed had been unexpected, but not completely beyond the realms of possibility.' - my GOD the cretin DOESN'T EVEN KNOW ABOUT REGENERATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And THEN Vaughn has the cheek to say 'You've no idea how refreshing it is to see a familiar face, Doctor'...by the end of the book he's saying 'I have searched every database, every video recording, every simularity, every holovid, every simcord for you. I know more about your adventures on Earth than you do, Doctor' - SINCE WHEN???????!!!!!!

'The opportunity to obtain the Doctor's time and space machine and rip it apart for its technological secrets was one that could not be missed' - you've been missing it for rather a long time, sunshine! (And what makes Vaughn so over-confident that he'd master this alien tech without the Doc's help?)

'Said he didn't own a ditz, and even if he did, why would he throw it off a walkway? Well, we knew what we'd seen, but it was our word against his.' - even if Adjudicators have fallen since their glory days of deciding the fate of planets (Colony in Space), surely the word of two of 'em would be accepted? Especially as there'd no doubt be records of the ditz-murdering scum buying petfood for his ditz before he tired of it?

And later we're informed that 'Eight hundred years of history lay behind the Adjudicators. They prided themselves on being incorruptible. They depended upon it: Adjudicators were the only means of dispensing unbiased, unarguable justice across the whole of human space. One whisper of corruption and the whole fragile edifice would come crumbling down'...

Since when has the Doctor sensed the TARDIS...or gone to pieces when it disappeared? And been able to 'sniff [it] with his mind'? Since when have 'TARDISes "lived" in the time vortex and only emerged into reality under protest and with much encouragement'?

How can the Doc not know what the words 'grassy knoll' mean? (Though it's a delightful in-joke that 'something important' was happening around 22nd November 1963...)

Wouldn't it be simpler to disable the flyer's theoretical booby-traps than trek to the edge of this area and then try sabotage? And how lucky that the Doctor and Benny are so close to said edge, given that each area is 300 km across.

Blimey. Isn't going to the planet Purgatory to look up the number on a Hith's tail a bit of an over-reaction? Why not at least TRY to find the Hith on Earth first? Bribe someone in the Undercity. Hack into the CCTV. See! Even I can think of ways of doing it!

Since when has the Doc been able to shift his genetic make-up enough to mimic somebody else? And why doesn't he just GET SOME PSYCHIC PAPER or something...? And where did he get the money and passports to book the flight in the first place?

'Time Lords don't get ashamed...We had our shame psycho-surgically removed a great many generations ago' - oh, surely he's exaggerating?!

'He hated robots. At least Daleks and Cybermen had emotions you could play on, although both races would have denied it emphatically, had they been asked. Robots, though...You could go through all your best routines with them and you wouldn't even raise a giggle' - more robophobia from our supposedly cosmopolitan Doctor!

'The lads' - why are the Landsknecht all male? And Cwej's dad is going on like the Adjudicators are too...

'"The penalty for anything on Landsknecht planets and vessels is death." "But we're not in the Landskneche!" Bernice cried. Beltempest smiled. "We'll stretch a point," he said.' - In what way is being on the Landsknecht's chief training/records planet count as not being in the Landskneche?

Time Lords don't have a scent? Aren't the EDAs always going on about McGann smelling of honey?

So the Doc and Benny are prepared to DIE in a futile attempt to save Smitts - who'd been hunting them - whilst happy to kill everyone ELSE who'd been hunting them an hour or two earlier?

'Icarus, the legendary character whose death was a result of badly applied science' - my GOD when will Who get its Greek myths right! It was hardly science's fault Icarus was an upperty brat who flew too close to the sun against his scientific dad's strict instructions!

'I disapprove of all empires, anywhere. And all federations, confederations, hegemonies, oligarchies, autarchies and whatever other weasel-words are used to disguise the fact that a small group of people have taken it into their heads to treat others as though their opinions weren't important' - blimey. The Doc never said that on Peladon...

'One or two of the dots seemed to move sideways by a fraction' - what, on a galaxy-sized map? HOW? WHY? And how come Beltempest can get instantaneous access to crime reports across the galaxy?

The Lansknechte give Pryce a TRIAL for torturing THEIR people to death on THEIR planet? WHY?

'Cwej as a child, wide-eyed and two-headed' - since when has Cwej had two heads??

'Thank the Gods of Hith that Captain Vap Oppat Pol was in a separate cubicle and had recently gone through the Change from female to male. The last thing they needed was an inadvertent coupling right here on the bridge...it would be so shameful that Daph would have to pay a scapegoat to kill itself for him.' - my god, a couple of casual lines and an alien culture is portrayed far more...alienly...that on-screen Who ever managed.

'"Yes," he said, surprising himself. "Yes, I am afraid of dying."' How can this possibly be a surprise? He was scared enough in Planet of the Spiders...

'The Doctor gazed down at it in surprise and dawning horror. Somehow, Pryce had managed to twist the metal of the beaker into a sharp-edged weapon' - gosh! And there I was thinking the MASS-MURDERER was just fiddling with that cup you gave him for FUN!

How - in the Doctor v Pryce ethical debate - can the Doc not think of a single reason why murder is wrong? How can he not mention the unbearable tortures Pryce inflicted when Pryce asks 'What does it matter if I shorten their lives that little bit further? What do I rob them of?'

'"And their names were Homeless Forsaken Betrayed And Alone and Powerless Friendless And Scattered Through Space," the Doctor said quietly. "How did you know?" Hater Of Humans was incredulous' - and so am I. How the hell would Hater Of Humans know what names the ship's crew took when he doesn't even know if they're alive or dead or traitors or whatever?

'It had a certain calmness about it, a rightness that reminded him of Florana and Metebelis in the good old days. The feeling of a planet at peace with itself. Now Florana was a dumping ground for the waste products of thirty-six races, Metebelis was a desert wasteland...' - blimey, cynical or WHAT!

'There was no hope for some people' - an unusually harsh judgement on the Doctor's part. Given that he invites Beltempest to Benny's wedding, and all.

How exactly does Vaughn transmit 'my mind - my personality, my essence' casually from robot to robot? Even in the year five billion they had trouble with that sort of technology.

'So long as we don't end up living here, we should be all right' - oh-kay, so the millions of people who went mad all LIVED on the secret alien ship in hyperspace first? I DON'T think so.

Why doesn't the Doc try bluffing a LOT sooner instead of getting hideously tortured?

'The controls were isomorphic, but only when he bothered setting them up that way' - nice attempt to reconcile Old Who's many contradictions on this issue - pity Eleven thought isomorphic was a ridiculous fairy-tale in Christmas Carol...

Churchill tried to pinch Benny's bottom?! But didn't try pinching Amy's?

ALL the Doctor's pockets are empty?! Is he an impostor or something??

'What was it about her that meant that her friends and acquaintances had to die?' Don't flatter yourself, Benny. It's nothing to do with YOU. Which bit of 'He has one constant companion: death' are you somehow just not getting?

ME in Novels: Eleventh Doctor: Coming of the Terraphiles section: I tend to regard Original Sin as a hard sci-fi political thriller...and not think so much about the patchwork planets and blue elephant men.

KATE: Weeelll... "hard sci-fi" implies deep immersion in one or more of the hard sciences and Original Sin doesn't have much of that.

'Hard' by Who standards, obviously. Lots of spaceships and robots and futuristic cities and suchlike.

I don't recall any political thrillage either.

A galactic empire got all-but toppled! I regard that as all thrillery and political-ish.

(Again, by Who standards, where such things usually involve someone wandering on-screen and announcing 'There's been a revolution on Gallifrey!' or the Doctor saying 'Make the foundation of your society a man who never would' or two gormless people saying 'What shall we do then?' 'I dunno' or acquiring Steven Taylor of all people as a mediator or being able to play some stupid blues music.)

No, the memorable stuff is the patchwork elephants (and not the pointlessly recurring villain

Alright, so the reveal of the pointlessly recurring villain wasn't exactly up there with the Master's appearance in Utopia...

the very silly debate about murder

Yeah, that WAS the worst attempt at a moral debate I've heard in my life.

nor anyone who might have wandered aboard the TARDIS during the course of the story - all these things were Not Memorable).

Oi! Rozikins and Chrisikins are EXTREMELY memorable! If only when she goes splat and he starts carving women's faces off so the Time Lords can destroy Earth...

And surely the Vaughn that gets uploaded after being killed in The Invasion is just a copy of Vaughn's mind - the real Vaughn died right then and there in front of the second Doctor.

Well, I'll keep a sharp eye open the next time I watch The Invasion (not that this is likely to be any time soon, dead boring mutilated cartooned thing that it is). Though the dividing line between a copy and the real thing is blurred in the Whoniverse - was River in Name of the Doctor real?

This is a deep philosophical question, which has been argued over for ages without any clear conclusion.

My view is that if the upload remembers being Vaughn, and acts like he did immediately before being uploaded, for all practical purposes it is Vaughn. After all, if no one can tell the difference, not even Vaughn, what does it mean to say there is a difference?

Or, putting it another way, if the Master replaced you last Thursday with an android that looked exactly like you, down to the bone, acted exactly like you, and believed it was you, would it matter? If it does, logically you ought to be worried whether you're still the 'real' you, but going through life worrying about that doesn't seem very sensible to me.

This is a deep philosophical question, which has been argued over for ages without any clear conclusion.

Especially in Benny NA Down - where you're killed and replaced with an exact double whenever you're teleported - and the EDAs from Interference onwards...well, the only EDAs that actually bothered to worry about Fitz being a recreation, i.e. EarthWorld and Ancestor Cell.

if the Master replaced you last Thursday with an android that looked exactly like you, down to the bone, acted exactly like you, and believed it was you, would it matter?

It would matter to ME because, no doubt, the Master would have shrunk me to the size of an action-man doll whilst replacing me with my android double.

logically you ought to be worried whether you're still the 'real' you, but going through life worrying about that doesn't seem very sensible to me.

Stop fretting about how the REPLACEMENT would feel and start mourning the death of the original and best!

It would matter to ME because, no doubt, the Master would have shrunk me

But you wouldn't know that, nor would anyone human. Since no one knows, does it make any difference? It's basically the same question as whether a tree falling makes a noise if there's nobody around to hear it.

Stop fretting about how the REPLACEMENT would feel and start mourning the death of the original and best!

Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing whether you are the first Emily, or the nine hundred and first. Do you really expect me to mourn your nine hundred hypothetical predecessors, when I'm not even sure they ever existed?

It doesn't help that neither of us can be certain the other is human. Either of us might actually be a committee of five hundred civil servants, faking our online personas as part of a cunning plan, with an actor/actress playing us for any physical appearances.

If that were the case, there wouldn't be any original you to mourn.Care to prove it isn't?

For question like these, I use Occam's razor and go for the reality that requires the least number of assumptions, unless actual evidence to the contrary is presented.

Maybe i should go for Occam's electric shaver - the quickest and easiest solution.

It's basically the same question as whether a tree falling makes a noise if there's nobody around to hear it.

Sound is a physical property that can be demonstrated to exist independently of direct observation. This is an epistemological problem not an ontological one!

Sound is a physical property

Sound is a physical property, but noise isn't. One person's hideous noise can be another person's beautiful music, thus noise is at least partially subjective.

'No one lives on the ground. The air is too poisonous' - Ky in The Mutants. Unlikely as it seems, he watches a lot of Overlord TV and is a bit of an expert about the state of thirtieth-century Earth. So how come, in Original Sin, there are all these people living in Earth's Undercities...on the ground?

Audio adaptation:

It palls a bit in the second half (especially as it makes the hideous mistake of regurgitating the World's Worst Philosophical Debate) but a lot of it was highly enjoyable - so much so that my goldfish-memoried brain kept going round in circles ('My god why is this Big Finish so fun!...Oh yeah, cos they nicked it from one of the good NAs...Gosh, I'm actually ENJOYING this audio!...Oh. Right, yeah, I remember' etc etc.)

Though it's still annoyingly got an unbeppled Chris on the cover, Roz is still sounding annoyingly unauthoritative, and they certainly don't waste any time wheeling out BF's favourite cliché, 'You didn't have to kill him!'

So ALL fifty or sixty recent murders have been solved and - whilst the drastic rise in murder-numbers does raise suspicion - THAT doesn't?

Chris is 'Martel's replacement'? No he isn't! Roz was Martel's Squire. Chris is Roz's squire.

I can't BELIEVE they kept the 'And off-world: twenty-nine alien races file claims for reparation from the Imperial Court for damages during the Wars of Acquisition' bit and didn't bother with the next (best!) line: 'We ask whether these alien scum should ever have been left alive to complain...'

'The Wars?' - Benny knows NOTHING about this quite important bit of humanity's future-history?

They didn't think to rename Provost-Marshal Beltempest after that Beltempest EDA?

'We just anticipated her sentence' - er, no you didn't, for one thing, WE weren't the ones who killed her and for another, you just SAID she'd get a mind-wipe and ten years slavery or something, not death.

'So we're gentry now' is Benny's reaction to their new, stolen, IDs as a Duke and Duchess. Er, no, they're NOBILITY, gentry's the step below.

'Adjudicators have no authority on Purgatory, we make our own laws' - I thought the entire POINT about Adjudicators was their ability to stroll onto any Earth Empire planet and override its local laws?

That guard is persuaded awfully easily that the Doctor and Benny are Provost-Majors who were TOTALLY being hunted to death just to test the guards, honest.

Sorry, Roz (and Chris) just AGREE to take Benny and let the Doctor go re the MURDER CASE that they're BOTH implicated in...hell, they don't even ASK him about it...

So the Doctor responds to the speech about the powerful having a duty to help the less powerful whether they like it or not by claiming he's recently heard that sort of thing from the DALEKS? If it was the Cybermen I might believe it (they genuinely think they're being helpful by removing those pesky 'emotion' things) but Daleks don't need to invent some wishy-washy ideology to justify their oppression of inferior species.

Benny deduces that the bot has met the Doctor before cos it knew the TARDIS was important. Couldn't it just have spotted Sexy materialising? That should be enough to pique anyone's interest.

No one's invented a reliable mind-wipe yet?

'It's a good thing Chris is quick on the draw' Benny and Roz helpfully explain to each other in the middle of a fire-fight.

Pryce responds to the Doctor's pathetic 'Killing's wrong except when it's right' argument by saying 'That's what I said when they put me on trial' - I thought HIS argument was that killing is ALWAYS right?

'Moral codes are just formalised opinions' - since when has that been ANY Doctor's philosophy?

'You. Of course' - I'm sorry, there's no OF COURSE about TOBIAS VAUGHN popping up in the thirtieth century.

So everyone just assumes that fake-Beltempest petitioning the Empress will result in independence for the Hith homeworld?

Benny hadn't realised that riots have their own momentum and expected them to just get switched off?

So the Empire will fall more gracefully and its replacement will grow out of stability? The Doctor SO hasn't read that Decalog: Generations book...

Anyone ever notice any hint of recognition when the Seventh Doctor meets Chris n'Roz (well, Roz anyway, as Chris was body-beppled to look like a teddy-bear at the time)? Cos according to Cold Fusion he had several memorable encounters with 'em both when he was Five* and also according to Cold Fusion he remembered everything about said encounters even after a couple of regenerations.

*The Fifth Doctor I mean, not five years old.

Anyone ever notice any hint of recognition when the Seventh Doctor meets Chris n'Roz

Since I've never read this novel, nor will I likely to in the near future (namely because I don't have it), I would have to say no.

Well, if you ever ARE looking to read a few Who-books-that-are-actually-quite-good, stick this one on the list.

Bookwyrm:

'With control of every robot, planet-wide, Vaughn's cunning method of hunting for the Doctor is to personally look, at random, every couple of hours, all over the world, through one robot at a time, hoping to spot the TARDIS out of the corner of his eye. No wonder it took him a thousand years. Why not just tell all the robots that if they spot a blue police box, they should let him knows?' - well, yeah, but maybe he just wasn't in any hurry...? He subconsciously realised that a confrontation with the Doctor wouldn't end well for him...?

'Speaking of brains, at the end of the book, Vaughn's - which for a thousand years has yearned for human touch, emotion, the taste of strawberries, the feel of a woman's skin - is installed by the Doctor to be the central computer of Chris's mum's microwave. We think its supposed to be funny, but it's actually horrendous and demonstrates a lack of compassion on the part of the Doctor that is way, way out of character, simply for a cheap laugh' - IS it out of character? It's no more than Vaughn - you know, the guy who sold Earth to the Cybermen - deserves, and every good Doctor has a few 'No second chances' kinda moments.

Time Lords don't have a scent? Aren't the EDAs always going on about McGann smelling of honey?

Casualties of War agrees - 'She caught the scent of a strangely odourless man' - even if the Seasons of Fear audio claims Eight smells of honey...

Well, it was great overall.
Except...Tobias Vaughn? Sure, he was a great villain in The Invasion but it takes a major contrivance to have him turn up a thousand years later. Even worse, having him responsible for other events from TV stories. Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Naturally, I don't know what people of the 30th century are going to choose for a fad, but "body-bepple?" My own body might be a bit of a mess, but I think I'll stick with it.
Emily, on the other hand, would take on some feline features, probably.

I realise the New Adventures came before the Eighth Doctor Adventures, but it's still disturbing that a major character happens to have the same name as a book I really didn't enjoy very much.
And speaking of Beltempest (or whatever his real name is), he makes a great villain in the first half of the book, only to have him become an ally. And amazingly, he doesn't get killed.

According to page 65 the TARDIS has a defence function that causes it to disappear when attacked. I can think of lots of times that might have come in handy.

Vaughn claims to have kept Earth safe from alien invasions for a thousand years. I guess the Dalek Invasion got past his notice somehow.

He also claims that he located the TARDIS by sending his attention skipping from one bot to another looking for it. This would be sort of like a security guard in an office building who had just come back from his rounds checking the feed from one security camera after another to find where he had left his coffee cup. Meaning, it probably would not work. Maybe this is why it took a thousand years for him to find the Doctor.

The absurdity of having Tobias appear in this book makes me wonder if Harrison Chase will show up in another book and try to kill the Doctor with a giant Venus fly trap!

Emily, on the other hand, would take on some feline features, probably.

I AM NOT WORTHY!

According to page 65 the TARDIS has a defence function that causes it to disappear when attacked. I can think of lots of times that might have come in handy.

And there ARE lots of times the HADS kick in - Hostile Action Displacement System.

Vaughn claims to have kept Earth safe from alien invasions for a thousand years. I guess the Dalek Invasion got past his notice somehow.

Make that DOZENS of Dalek Invasions.

The absurdity of having Tobias appear in this book makes me wonder if Harrison Chase will show up in another book and try to kill the Doctor with a giant Venus fly trap!

We NEED to read/see/hear this!

"And there ARE lots of times the HADS kick in"

Ah, so it has been mentioned before. Even in The Krotons, I see. Surprised I missed that.
But he seems to forget it most times.

I think we get the occasional explanation of out of order/switched on/switched off which is more consistency than we get for, say, Sexy's state of temporal grace, isomorphic controls etc...

What's your next...treat? Punishment? Duty?

Punishment? Only a few books have seemed like punishment so far. As for duty, what happens if I don't fulfil it?

I have started reading a Seventh Doctor PDA, Storm Harvest. I'm only a couple chapters in. So far it's a typical monster-battling-base-when-Doctor-and-Companion-are-trying-to-have-a-holiday adventure.

Only a few books have seemed like punishment so far.

SO NOT FAIR.

As for duty, what happens if I don't fulfil it?

You get the echoingly empty Nitcentral threads on your conscience.

I have started reading a Seventh Doctor PDA, Storm Harvest. I'm only a couple chapters in. So far it's a typical monster-battling-base-when-Doctor-and-Companion-are-trying-to-have-a-holiday adventure.

Yeah, well, don't hold your breath on that changing anytime soon...

Well, base under siege stories can be good. Troughton had quite a variety of them.

Base under siege stories certainly CAN be good. Pity none of Troughton's were.

Well, except Web of Fear obviously. But the OTHER fifty million of 'em...

Not only is the front cover grossly inaccurate (Roz's armour not battered, Chris not beppled (not to mention ugly and middle-aged-looking), Doctor's right hand looking as if it's regrowing itself after being chopped off)

Oh, and the relative heights of Chris n'Roz are also completely out, he's only got an inch or two on her whereas in the text in all the Roz n'Chris books and Original Sin's interior illustrations she's really short and he's really tall...

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed at the Doctor's failure to come up with a single reason why murder is wrong

I'm not the only one...The Carnival Queen in Christmas on a Rational Planet:

'Even the Doctor could never think of a rational reason why murder is wrong. Try asking him about Zebulon Pryce some time. See how long it takes him to change the subject.'

Always embarrassing when the OTHER WRITERS/all-powerful beings from the dawn of time criticise the godawfulness of your claims...

Time Lords don't have a scent? Aren't the EDAs always going on about McGann smelling of honey?

Casualties of War agrees - 'She caught the scent of a strangely odourless man'

On the other hand, Monsters of Gokroth has Seven disguising his scent with Wolfsbane in order to hunt a predator...