Finally finished this one after stalling near the end. Eh, it was alright. Started off pretty brilliantly but started to bore me by the end.

Who told you the Doctor and Karl were lovers? It seemed like something like that was being implied but it was never actually said or anything.

The violin stuff at the beginning was cool. The Tigers were mostly a letdown though.

It was just some "friends" of mine. You know the sort...will so generously lend you their entire collection of books and audios, will give you hours of happiness arguing about them, and will take a malicious pleasure in casually announcing that 'the Doctor and Karl are shagging like rabbits throughout this book' or 'Just you wait until the Doctor says "Shall we go to bed" to Mary' (Casualties of War) as they hand the precious volumes over, just to hear my squeals of anguish. And then they have the cheek to look surprised as I frantically leaf through the books trying to prove them wrong. Once I've acutually read the things, and am in a postion to point out that there's no shred of evidence to suggest that the Doctor and Karl were anything other than Just Good Friends, and that such a thought would never have crossed my mind had they not implanted such a concept, I was just informed that 'the emotional arc of the book makes no sense unless they were lovers.' Admittedly I can't think of a single reason why the Doctor smashed that violin, but if I was forced to come up with a list of explanations, sex would be right at the bottom of it.

sex sure would be right at the bottom of it - or was that pun unintended?

sorry everyone

Of course it was unintended! I am pure minded, just like my hero!

Why is simple, I-like-you-alot-but-I-wouldn't-sleep-with-you friendship between two men such an impossibility for those that want to imagine a homosexual relationship? Why can't the Doctor and Karl just be friends? The Doctor goes to extremes to rescue the man, but he's done this for both sexes for 39 years; what makes this so different? The Doctor would have done everything he could to rescue Ian, Steven, Ben, Jamie, the Brig, Harry, Adric, Turlough, etc., and he wouldn't have slept with them, so don't give me that gay theory. Kirk and Spock were just good friends, and so were the Doctor and Karl. 'Honk, honk', indeed!

It's all about subtext I guess.

'Just you wait until the Doctor says "Shall we go to bed" to Mary' (Casualties of War) as they hand the precious volumes over, just to hear my squeals of anguish

I don't know how some people can live with themselves...

Same old problems from these authors - a good basis for a story spoiled by attempts to weave a saccharine characterisation of the Doctor through it. As Luke so rightly said it was boring by the end.

I don't know how some people can live with themselves...

*Nods vigorous agreement* You must have your conscience remarkably well trained...

a good basis for a story spoiled by attempts to weave a saccharine characterisation of the Doctor through it

The Doctor was SACCHARINE? Did he not smash up an innocent violin? Did he not tell a planet's human population to go to hell and then walk out? Did he not (quite rightly, if unDoctorishly) side with the ickle moggies as they munched away on human flesh?

The interludes on the ship and the monastery which trowelled on the 'oh, what a tortured soul he is' routine were so full of Nutrasweet. Plus the usual motif of him making breakfast cropped up yet again. At least it wasn't sodding waffles this time.

Oh. Yeah. Forgot about the interludes. HOW many years did he spend in that monastery?

Still, you've got to get over this cooking allegy of yours. Doctor making breakfast should NOT automatically equal Vampire Science and therefore Grahamic screams of 'Die, Orman-Blum-Doctor, DIE!'

Kate Orman in I, Who 3: 'The Doctor and Karl are at it like rabbits every time the reader isn't looking. However, the precise nature of their relationship is deliberately left ambiguous, so that the reader can interpret it as A) a passionate but platonic friendship or B) unrequited love on the part of Karl. However, I know the location of all the missing sex scenes.'

I'm so glad I didn't read THAT till New Who had rather mellowed me on the idea that my Doctor might...um...er...OK, I'm STILL not exactly comfortable with the 'rabbits' thing...

Started off pretty brilliantly but started to bore me by the end.

Yeah, 'Anji walked alone through the city of tigers' is a FANTASTIC opening line, worthy of a Lawrence Miles NA or a Terrance Dicks Target novelisation (before he stopped putting in the effort...after one line) but it's all downhill from then on...

'The Doctor turned out to be able to play the violin, harpsichord, flute, transverse cello, harp, banjo, theremin and wobbleboard' - well, SOMEONE hasn't seen The Romans recently...(And what the hell's a transverse cello?)

'Whoever had once lived on Hitchemus, they had left little behind but these piles of stone' - has the amnesiac cretin of a Doctor not noticed the TARDIS DATABANKS yet? Why doesn't he just look Hitchemus up? (And also...himself?)

'It hadn't been hard to persuade the Doctor to audition for the new concerto. Since then, they had been in constant rehearsals. When they weren't rehearsing, they were stoking up on sweet, hot coffee, and taking' - PROOF POSITIVE that the Doctor and Karl weren't...having sex!!

Also, Karl thinks of the Doctor as THE VIOLINIST not, say, MY LOVER.

TIDDLES? Humanity TOTALLY deserves to get wiped off the face of this planet.

'The Doctor never seemed to worry about money...It lent credence to the rumours that he was related to the aristocracy of some planet or other, but Karl didn't believe a word of it. The Doctor was something far more special and strange than a mere lost princeling' - Intelligent Tigers gets A LOT (viz, everything) wrong but MY GOD it accidentally puts its finger on what's wrong with The Timeless Children...twenty years early.

The Doc's hands are interchangeably ambidextrous since WHEN?

'We seek trouble. Or it seeks us. We save worlds possessed by terrible creatures. Terrible. We battle Promethean scientists whose minds and machines have gone haywire' - er, yeah, but...how do YOU know that? You're an amnesiac. Who's had, like, THREE BOOKS since you ended your century's exile rotting on Earth.

Karl thinks the Doc was 'Perhaps once a famous violinist'? Honestly, does this planet have no INTERNET on which he could...look the Doctor up?

'The hot chlorinated air of the pool area' - has The Future really not found a better way of inventing swimming pools without resorting to chlorine?

'The book is full of mysteries the world over, puzzles to follow up on, reasons not to go over the side' - *wince* My poor Doctor! Why did Fitz and Compassion just ABANDON him like that!

(Though if wasps attacking a train was of such a suicide-preventing importance to the Doc, why wasn't he more excited in Eaters of Wasps?)

'Besma knew how easy it was to read sentience into the actions of animals' - er, yeah, cos animals ARE, by definition, SENTIENT.

'Got to get a message out. Off planet' - sure, because the first thing THE DOCTOR does when faced with any difficulty is...cry to someone else for help...?

'"I want those hostages back," growled the Doctor. "Let's go and get them"' - yeah, McGann is the LAST Doctor to growl this sort of macho nonsense...I can picture Davison or JODIE! macho-posturing more easily...

The tigers can't hear the hovercar whereas the musicians can? Since when have pathetic humans had better ears than TIGERS?

'The tigers were in the city, or in the spaceport, or in their homes in the Bewilderness to the west. They had left no guards in case a lone spy walked south through the trees to the rim of the spaceport' - well that's pretty stupid of them.

'It was a primitive design, even for its time' - how would YOU know, amnesiac-Doc?

'"We're going to have to cold-start the systems before we can get the comms working." The Doctor drummed his fingers on a console. "How long?" "I normally just do programming for the tax office," sighed Shellshear. "Give us a couple of hours."' - Alright, I know I'm always harping on about the Doctor SUPPOSEDLY being an amnesiac but surely even an amnesiac Doctor would be able to bypass a few computers...?

'A tiger with a dart plunged deep in its eye, long red threads trailing down its face' - so glad you managed to combine the traditional Who Book Oochie-Torturing with the traditional Who Book Eye-Gouging...

If the tigers and kittens aren't actually tigers and kittens, why do they call themselves that?

The Doctor SLEEPS?

"Pull up a chair," said the Movement's new leader' - hardly new, Quick has been Movement leader for longer than its original leader was...

'They left the hovercar four kilometres south of the ruins' - why?

Anji AND THE DOCTOR need writing to be translated?

'Hoping the tigers couldn't smell them' - luckily the tigers seem to have terrible senses of smell as well as hearing despite, y'know, BEING TIGERS. And despite Longbody going round saying things like 'I can taste them. They've been here all right.'

Oh gods. The humans are going to launch an attack on the tigers but Fitz persuades them to...put on a concert first. THAT'S the entire book in a nutshell. Padding, padding and more padding.

This is merely the twenty-second century? Yet has invisible equipment and all?

'I've had lots of experience with alien languages' says the Doc - and how would he remember that?

'"Get away from her!" snapped the Doctor. "I won't have you eating people"' - gods I miss Eccy's 'It's a different morality •••• off if you don't like it' attitude towards putting human corpses to good use...

'The real test had been working out what you were supposed to do, and then completely failing to do it, as though you were an idiot' - yeah, what kind of moron of a cat-psychologist would let herself be fooled like this - for YEARS?

'The Doctor would just swoop in, change everyone's mind, disarm the bomb or whatever and save the day using a teaspoon and a couple of plastic bookends. Nah. That was a cartoon of the Doctor' - nope, that's totally THE DOCTOR. See Time Crash - 'Hey, I'm the Doctor. I can save the universe using a kettle and some string. And look at me, I'm wearing a vegetable...'

It doesn't occur to the tigers that the Doctor might just use a Node to treacherously warn the humans?

'Fitz limped the last quarter of a mile to the flats. Groaning, he staggering up the stairs and hammered on Anji's door' - MOBILE PHONES ARE YOUR FRIENDS, PEOPLE!

'He laughed again. "For once, I got to blow something up!"' - for the umpteenth time...how the hell does amnesiac-McGann remember whether or not he gets to blow things up? I'm pretty sure he blew up a reservoir in The Burning, i.e. post-amnesia.

'Did you know, Longbody, there are living creatures inside stars? In the gulping emptiness of space where only the leftover heat of the big bang warms their bodies above absolute zero? There's life in the Vortex itself, hungry, mathematical life' - seriously, what bit of the word AMNESIA is so difficult to grasp?

'I'm afraid I've never quite been able to get my head around the idea that being born again and again is something you should want to stop doing' - well, QUITE. So why are you trying to be a Buddhist, Doctor?

'It's not up to me to fix it' - since WHEN, Doc!

The Doctor doesn't tan?

'He gave Karl a look full of pleading: please, please don't die' - um, Karl isn't going to die. The discussion is over whether Karl is going to KILL.

'The Doctor was staring off into nothing. He was seeing all those possible worlds' - is this the first indication that the Doc really does see 'All that is, all that was, all that ever could be...all the time'? Or just him projecting potential futures based on the facts?

'What is the problem with Homo sapiens that everything has to end like the 1812 overture? Was some ghastly mistake in DNA replication made in your early evolution? Or is it just that your tiny porridge-like brains have trouble grasping solutions more complex than smashing things with rocks?' - SO Ecclestonian! So Capaldian! Didn't think McGann had it in him!

'Longbody and her friends scorn the schoolroom' - um, no they don't.

The Doctor's unburnt after being hit by a lightning bolt? Is he a Targaryen? Wasn't he complaining about lightning-burns in Smith and Jones?

'He laughed, brightly. "Save your own world for a change"' - has the Doc even SAVED enough worlds post-Ancestor Cell to REALISE that it's his vocation?

'Got to keep rolling on, that's us...The Doctor sometimes tells me, "Fitz, we're fated to find no resting place."' - He DOES? Since WHEN? I mean, for 99.9% of the Doctor's remembered existence he's been stuck on Earth on the Slow Path. Followed by, what, a week of planet-hopping then settling down to play the stupid violin for months on Hitchemus...

'The hot chlorinated air of the pool area' - has The Future really not found a better way of inventing swimming pools without resorting to chlorine?

Chlorine is cheap and does the job. Btw, did you know that the chlorine smell in swimming pools is NOT from the chlorine itself, but from the chemical reaction between said chlorine and the, hmmmm, urea "released" in the water by the people swimming in there?

'A tiger with a dart plunged deep in its eye, long red threads trailing down its face' - so glad you managed to combine the traditional Who Book Oochie-Torturing with the traditional Who Book Eye-Gouging...

*Rolls eyes*

Btw, did you know that the chlorine smell in swimming pools is NOT from the chlorine itself, but from the chemical reaction between said chlorine and the, hmmmm, urea "released" in the water by the people swimming in there?

People haven't learned not to pee in swimming pools in The Future?

*Rolls eyes*

How lucky we are to have two eyeballs to roll...