I don't know why but I actually found this book a disappointment. I think I was expecting more of the main plot where the Doctor puts his plan into action but, to me, it almost seemed to be an afterthought.

I can understand Ace's confusion. After all, she's just been dumped back into time, after having been frozen for a few weeks, so it makes sense to me that she forgot about the TARDIS's translating ability. After all, the only time Sarah Jane noticed it is when she was hypnotized in "Masque of the Mandragora."

Orman seems convinced that the Doctor is a compulsive escaper, as he does the same thing in "Seeing I."

I liked the book. I thought this was the most character development Ace showed in a long time. Her disappointment when she realized the imposibility of changing the sexist views of ancient Egypt was realistic, as was her coming to terms with it.

Odd that we've never seen the Doctor's "neural cluster" weakness exploited anywhere else.

Pah. Nyssa spent four thousand years (or whatever) as a Mummy and she didn't let it scramble her brains. What's a few weeks of being frozen? And unlike Sarah, Ace learnt the hard way about the TARDIS's translation abilities - the end of Love and War implies that the TARDIS rather nastily stops translating for her the moment she leaves the Doctor (even though they're both still on the same planet). And she does wonder why she can understand ancient Egyptian - so why doesn't she come to the exceedingly obvious conclusion?

Nyssa was completely unaware of time passing, whereas Ace was not.

I can't answer your last question, other than to say that sometimes, what's obvious to you is not obvious to others.

it makes sense to me that she forgot about the TARDIS's translating ability. After all, the only time Sarah Jane noticed it is when she was hypnotized in "Masque of the Mandragora."

Whereas Rose Tyler, Mickey-the-idiot and Donna Noble - none of whom are exactly noted for their brains - were asking questions about aliens' and foreigners' apparent English-speaking propensities in no time. (Hell, Donna was asking questions even the DOCTOR had never thought of...)

'My proclivity for hurt/comfort was making itself known....I very quickly understood that watching [Davison] suffer was mysteriously, profoundly thrilling. (The opening chapters of Set Piece began life, at least in my mind, as the fulfilment of Davros' threat to kill the fifth Doctor slowly and painfully.)' - Kate Orman in Chicks Dig Time Lords.

Set Piece DWM prelude:

How exactly does this portrait of Robin Yeadon owning half of Sydney and relentlessly pining for Ace fit in with Happy Endings' portrayal of him happily shacked up in Britain with HER MUM?

'"You weren't her true love," said the little man. "How do you know?" "Because I killed him."' - didn't Jan burn himself alive after being possessed by the Hoothi? In what way was that the Doctor's fault?

'You were drawn together by crisis and hormones. I know you wouldn't stay together' - STILL not explaining WHY the Doctor kidnapped Ace at the end of Nightshade instead of letting her stay with Robin long enough for her hormones to cool down.

Odd that we've never seen the Doctor's "neural cluster" weakness exploited anywhere else.

Well, QUITE.

'There's a major ganglion here. A great nerve cluster, almost a tiny, separate brain. A manner of switching-box. It allows a Time Lord fine control over their own metabolism...' - And the whole point of introducing this was so that the Brig could punch the Master in said ganglion. But I don't recall THAT ever happening during the UNIT era...?

And it's not as if this is remotely vital to the plot (such as it is) of Set Piece...

'The Cortese was the last word in luxury' - why did the pool stink of chlorine then?

Police psychic probes had been made illegal WHEN? Mind probes were around in Frontier in Space when they'd obviously developed faster space-travel than THIS era, with its months-long hyperspace trips.

'He wouldn't eat when the food was drugged. He knew, somehow' - well, Seven has more effective tastebuds than Four, then.

'He never screams' - I'm sure he must have screamed SOMETIME. Probably when the lights went off in the pub in Battlefield, EVERYONE shrieked their heads off despite most of 'em being battle-hardened veterans who really ought to grasp the concept of power cuts.

So why assume you haven't kept the Doctor's effects when, in point of fact, 'We decided to keep this things in case there was anything important there', in the numbered storage area for prisoners' effects?

'How the hell was she supposed to do CPR on a man with two hearts?' - well, MARTHA manages just fine.

Well, at least it's a whole 38 pages before a lioness gets an arrow through her brain. And at least everyone gets to keep their eyeballs.

The TARDIS doesn't translate the written word?

The TARDIS DOES translate the spoken word, even with a dying Doctor millennia away?

'But if anything nasty got into the wound, the little machines inside her would gobble it up, running around in her blood like teenage gangs, leaving Gallifreyan graffiti on the walls of her arteries: THE DOCTOR WAS HERE' - since WHEN!

'She wondered if the little machines in her body would let her get pregnant' - shouldn't she have wondered that EARLIER? Like when she was shagging her way across the universe? Presumably she had some sort of long-term contraceptive implant unrelated to any Doctor-provided nanogenes, so what's happened to it NOW? Why is she thinking 'There are some places you just don't put crocodile dung'?

'It doesn't bother me when he has the occasional affair. I even had one myself - that came as a shock to him, I think' - it was socially acceptable for Ancient Egyptian women to have affairs?

The Doctor mistakes KADIATU LETHBRIDGE-STEWART for RUBY DUVALL? Is he SO surrounded by WHITE PEOPLE that a black, six-and-a-half-foot genetically-engineered killing machine looks just like a mixed-race journalist?

'She could not have asked for a softer landing' - what, aside from the eating-bugs-to-stop-herself-starving-to-death bit of her arrival?

So Kadiatu has ripped permanent rifts in space-time, causing 'a really quite astonishing amount of damage to reality', which the Doctor presumably KNEW was gonna happen after looking at her equations ('Your equations are the scrawling of a little girl...And if I'd had any sense I'd have taken away your matches before you could burn yourself - or anyone else') so why did he let her go ahead? I realise this is a Transit rather than a Set Piece nit, but still, Set Piece sure calls a lot of ATTENTION to it.

'You had the chance to destroy my work as well.' 'I was curious' - THAT'S IT??? No point in spending hundreds of pages torturing the Doctor to make us feel bad for him if you're gonna reveal that he brought it all upon himself with his stupid CURIOSITY.

'Normally he only slept an hour or so in every forty-eight' - AT LAST! Someone has the guts to put a FIGURE on the Doctor's sleeping habits!

I suppose there's not much point in complaining that the PRIESTS OF SUTEKH have got Sutekh's character slightly wrong...

Draconians have jihads since WHEN! (Well, I suppose if Mr Smith says they've invented ASTROLOGY (Secrets of the Stars), and Tennant says they've got a Horned Beast (Satan Pit) and all their undead worshipful emperors are whizzing around in the sky (Paper Cuts) they might as well have a few jihads into the bargain...)

'If we move against the Pharaoh we could be starting that civil war' - well, DUH. How could Ace POSSIBLY not have realised THAT when lecturing people on how they should fight back against the Pharaoh to, er, avoid a civil war.

'You can't let him do this, he's wrecking everything' - how touching that Ace should be so devoted to the cause of polytheism.

'The more you interfere, the more you have to interfere. The treadmill that had kept the Doctor coming back to Earth' 'Round and round like a hamster in a cage' - actually...I LIKE this. Short and to the point. Much better than that Dimension Riders stuff about a 'rare stretch of immutable Time with a huge inertia'. If not quite as delightfully simple as New Who's 'He's always playing with Earth girls' explanation for Our Hero's Terra-fixation.

Alright! Ace had a father! Said father died when she was a kid! Having spent god-knows-how-many years/NAs/PDAs/audios/Old Who stories NOT THIKNING about this fact, can she PLEASE stop obsessing about it HERE...

'What would the Doctor do? Why, he would stop her, of course.' - and you didn't think of this BEFORE you kidnapped the Pharaoh?

And you ALSO didn't think that offing said Pharaoh COULD be part of the Web of Time...? (It's not like Ace is exactly an expert on the history of Ancient Egypt, but it's pretty obvious that Akhenaten's blasphemous ways do NOT stand the test of time.)

Still, never let it be said that this book didn't DEAL with the problem of Ace's motivation. 'Actually, I think I was a little out of my skull.' Oh well, that's alright then.

'Much of history is cast in concrete, but there are disequilibrium points - assassinate the wrong individual at the wrong moment, and history could unravel like a scarf' - interesting. Kinda the EXACT OPPOSITE of what New Who eventually came up with.

Not really GETTING the TARDIS/Ace love-in. 'The door opened for her, as she had known it would' 'They were like sisters now, ready to have their own new adventures' 'The TARDIS had materialized next to it, drawn to Ace by the same impulse that had made it chase her [rather than her Thief?!] to Ancient Egypt'...

How come Benny knows all about Sutekh but Ace doesn't? She's spent YEARS with the Doctor, surely that particular adventure has come up in conversation?

'He must have been the deluxe model' - THAT'S all the explanation we get for the fact Ace's Ant-built robot made a brilliant priest/suitor/human being whereas the one the Doctor was stuck with was blatantly sub-human? (I mean, even ASIDE from being a CHILD which is the very definition of 'blatantly sub-human'...)

How come Benny has massive language difficulties up to the moment she SEES the TARDIS which has been there for centuries...?

'Someone had to look after Earth, to match the Doctor's ability to drop in whenever he pleased...For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Doctor had poked and prodded the human race until it had hit back. With her' - interesting alternative to, well, TORCHWOOD. Which I've been thinking about a lot during this book, what with the whole punching-holes-in-the-cosmos-through-which-bad-things-arrive, the-Rift-that-needs-to-be-guarded-by-an-ex-Companion stuff. It's not just the works of Lawrence Miles that New Who/Torchwood has plundered like an Ant in a Ship, is it.

'If Ship succeeds...the barriers that separate one moment from the next will come crashing down. All places, all times squashed together like a cosmic blancmange' - blimey, we have THIS to thank for The Wedding of River Song?

Well, THANKS, Kate. I BLOODY LOVE The Wedding of River Song.

'The Doctor was sitting in lotus position, meditating...It took her a moment to realize that he was hovering an inch or two off the floor' - it's nothing compared to Just War's...liberties, but I don't quite see the POINT of such magical powers.

'What goes bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud? A Time Lord committing suicide (Graffito, Prydonian Academy)' - you do realise that guns on Gallifrey don't actually go 'bang'...? (Still, now we know where the inspiration for Full Fathom Five comes from. This is actually a REALLY IMPORTANT BOOK. Even if it IS a bit boring.)

'Perhaps she hesitated because she'd personally killed exactly three hundred and ninety-nine sentient individuals. One more would make it four hundred' - how the hell could ANY soldier keep such an accurate account of their kills?

Oh gods, not Jan AGAIN. Look, Cornell and Orman were basically the axis around which the NAs formed, it's quite right that they should scratch each other's backs, I'm just the tiniest bit sick of contradiction after contradiction about whether or not Ace loved that stupid Traveller. Cos other writers kinda DRASTICALLY DISAGREE on this issue.

'Even before Death had come to life as the first creature fell on the first world, she had existed, as essential and as intolerable as her younger sister' - I thought the NAs established that the goddesses Pain, Death and Time were mere Eternals, jumped-up by the worship of Time Lords? NOT eternal goddesses after all?

Why on earth would Ace decide to blow the Doctor's brains out instead of a) trying to release him from the vines, or b) deciding this is all part of his Cunning Plan?

The Doctor's blood is a 'deep orange-red' since WHEN!

As far as torch-passing from Old Who to Novel/Audio Companion goes, 'Watch your butt, Summerfield. It's a tough universe' is TOTALLY CRINGE-MAKING.

What about all the OTHER Rifts?

Look...the Doctor's-constant-escaping thing was done better in Seeing I, the Companion-stranded-on-an-alien-world-forever thing was done better in Seeing I (DESPITE it being Sam Jones who no one gives a toss about), the whole Time/Pain/Death goddess thing has NEVER really worked for the NAs (and consequently has been quietly ignored by all the other media (give or take that godawful Master audio)) which has usually been so happy to cannibalise the NAs...still, it's not BAD other than not knowing what to do with the Doctor (other than torture him, of course) OR with Benny.

Plus it drifts into all that REALLY BORING dream-stuff. Which even the CHARACTERS start complaining about - '"I hate dreams," Benny said. "I hate this Jungian stuff Symbols and stuff. I detest every kind of virtual reality."' (Amusing in view of what the Completely Useless Encyclopedia had to say on the subject of the New Adventure VR-obsession...)

So, no mention of Nefertiti that might contradict/bizarrely support what 'Dinosaurs on a Spaceship' has to say on the matter?

So, no mention of Nefertiti that might contradict/bizarrely support what 'Dinosaurs on a Spaceship' has to say on the matter?

Not that I noticed. (Not that TARDIS Wikia noticed either, I've just checked.) Which is a bit of a weird omission, if Nefertiti was Akhenaten's wife - after all, she's the famous one and Historical Who ALWAYS homes in on the famous one. (Well, maybe she'd eloped with the Doctor/Riddell by then.)

Though come to think of it, the fact Akhenaten rather impressively manages to talk himself free after being kidnapped by Ace blatantly contradicts Dinosaurs' claims that he's 'The male equivalent of a sleeping potion.'

'Normally he only slept an hour or so in every forty-eight' - AT LAST! Someone has the guts to put a FIGURE on the Doctor's sleeping habits!

Unfortunately now contradicted by Capaldi's claim that Time Lords only snooze after regenerations or really big lunches...

Maybe has a really big lunch every 48 hours?

He's the master-manipulator - he wouldn't have time. He's a vegetarian - he wouldn't want to. And he's just stopped being Colin Baker - he'd never risk getting like THAT again.

Unfortunately now contradicted by Capaldi's claim that Time Lords only snooze after regenerations or really big lunches...

Maybe Cspaldi's idea of what constitutes a big lunch isn't the same as ours. Maybe he considers a small jacket potato and half a dozen chips to be a gargantuan feast, one only a real glutton would devour in one sitting.

Seven could eat a meal like that every 48 hours and still have more than enough time left over to spin his schemes.

Maybe Cspaldi's idea of what constitutes a big lunch isn't the same as ours. Maybe he considers a small jacket potato and half a dozen chips to be a gargantuan feast, one only a real glutton would devour in one sitting.

You'd've got clean away with saying that of any OTHER Doctor, but Capaldi is the one who EATS all the time. The one who actually claims that turning up to foil alien invasions with snacks is a sign of professionalism.

Alright! Ace had a father! Said father died when she was a kid! Having spent god-knows-how-many years/NAs/PDAs/audios/Old Who stories NOT THIKNING about this fact, can she PLEASE stop obsessing about it HERE...

Though on second thoughts, just keep on saying that, wipe The Rapture out of Whoniversal history by sheer repetition...please...

Bookwyrm:

Ace 'joins a feminist collective and then uses her abilities to fight for equality. I adore the fact that a tomboy psychotic killer, star of a series of books aimed primarily at young geeky guys, ends up fighting for feminist causes' - not for long, the Commune will be toast in days and she'll go shack up with some Count in a fake-marriage. Or something.

'Having shagged her way through space-fleet and killed Daleks for a living...Just two books ago, in Parasite, [Ace] decided to leave the Doctor because she hated him' - yeah, but there was Warlock between said books. Lasting a year. With cats and everything. 'That's not the Ace of Set Piece, Here, dumped in the Sahara, she acts naively and without thought whilst mooning about the "Professor" coming to rescue her' - who DOESN'T spend their lives mooning about the Doctor coming to rescue them! - 'in order to make Ace sympathetic again, Orman presses an almighty reset button...Glossing over the worst excesses of New Ace...has its benefits' - you can bloody say THAT again - 'but it still disregards the journey that she's been on' - I dunno if you can call THAT mess a 'journey'. RIP, New Ace.

I would have to rank this one as my second favorite of the NAs ("Love and War" being the first). Oddly, Ace leaves the Doctor in both of them!
A great sendoff for Ace, ranking up there with the best of the onscreen departures.

Very odd typo near the top of page 232 though!

I would have to rank this one as my second favorite of the NAs ("Love and War" being the first). Oddly, Ace leaves the Doctor in both of them!
A great sendoff for Ace, ranking up there with the best of the onscreen departures.

That's exactly how I WANTED to feel about this, but...just didn't. Twice.

Very odd typo near the top of page 232 though!

Ooh, what?

(Am lockdowning away from my Who collection, dammit.)

"Ooh, what?

(Am lockdowning away from my Who collection, dammit)"

The word "killed" appears by itself on one line, in a very out-of-context way. One paragraph later and it appears, apparently correctly, at the end of a short paragraph. I'm guessing the typesetter added the paragraph too soon, and then deleted all but one word of it.

Ace's stupidity in not realising that the TARDIS must be around for her to understand ancient Egyptian.

Especially embarrassing after she made the self-same mistake in The Angel of Scutari (albeit with Russian instead of Egyptian)...