OK, so I don't like this book. Have I ever mentioned how much I don't like this book? Oh. Yeah. Well, anyway...what I don't like EVEN MORE is the fashion for regulars dying and being replaced. I realise that as a Who fan I'm not really in a great position to complain about this sort of thing, but regeneration is DIFFERENT. And I'm not whinging about modern Companions' habit of dying a few times and being brought back to life (Falls the Shadow, Head Games, Autumn Mist, Dark Progeny, etc etc). It gets on my nerves, but it's not a big deal.

No, the REAL problem is how great chunks of our past are being whittled away piece by piece...detaching themselves like melting icebergs...you get the picture. We thought we were reading the NAs secure in the knowledge that the Doctor's Companion was the very same girl we'd seen on our screens back in the good old days when Who was ON our screens (only older and bitterer and twisteder). No such luck! The real Ace is worm-food, and the so-called 'Ace' of the book is just some interloper from an alternative universe who happens (through a mysterious, not to mention totally unexplained) process to have acquired her memories!

And you know that 'Fifth Doctor' person? Bet you thought he was actually the _same guy_ from Castrovalva to Caves of Androzani? Tee hee, suckers! Fooled you! The ACTUAL Doctor went and got his head chopped off (and eaten, let's not forget the eaten stuff) by some evil witches sometime after Planet of Fire! Luckily a super-being was on hand to create him a nice new identical body and dump his soul back in it, but...it's just not the same.

And then there's Peri. Bet all those fanboys who gazed admiringly at her body week after week _didn't even notice_ when that very body was absorbed by a sponge! Very careless of them. At least, if the sponge hadn't (fairly) promptly provided her with a new one, free of charge. And at least she got to keep her own brain.

Lawrence Miles is obviously to blame for this sort of thing, as he started it in Interference, replacing Fitz with, well, Fitz. But that was DIFFERENT. It didn't ruin any of our past, it just gave our future exciting new possibilities (Father Kriener's possibilies being sadly curtailed, along with an awful lot of other things, in The Ancestor Cell.) Anyway, Lawrence is a good enough writer to get away with murder (literally and repeatedly, in the case of the Doctor). Just because HE'S successfully done something doesn't mean that lesser authors should be permitted to, say, rip the Doctor's heart out, auction off his corpse or marry him off to an eighteenth-century prostitute.

Presumably the Doctor has some hi-tech Gallifreyan device that not only enables him to discover that Ace was pregnant mere hours after she slept with James Dean but also to pinpoint the sex of the microscopic fertilised egg in question...?

Yup. And one wonders how useful such a device would be, on Gallifrey of all places...

Of course, just because an egg's been fertilised doesn't mean it'll implant itself in the womb and start growing, or whatever eggs do. Maybe the Doctor was just lying? Accusing James Dean of murdering his own fertilised egg probably wouldn't have quite the same guilt factor (miraculously transforming Jimmy from murderer to noble self-sacrificer in one fell swoop) as accusing him of murdering (OK, helping to murder) his daughter...

We humans currently have devices that allow us to see a fertilized ovum; it's called a microscope. I have pictures from when my wife and I went through some (unsuccessful) in vitro attempts. The ovum had only split into 4 cells at the point the photo was taken. Admittedly, the picture was taken while the egg was still in a Petri dish, but I suspect it wouldn't be too big a leap for the Doctor to develop a device that would work inside a human.

Sometimes I really appreciate the full story details found here, as opposed to the implied stuff back in the reviews section of Outpost Gallifrey. For that, I want to thank Emily for talking me out of buying this book. I'm a big Seventh Doctor/Ace fan, and probably would have bought this novel, only to be as horrified at the results as Emily. Good grief, that stuff you've written, Emily, is insanity from the authors!
It reminds me of a plot from many years ago in the Spider-Man comic books where it was implied that a clone of him was the person we'd been reading about for something like 15 years, and not the real human. I freaked, and stopped reading the series, until it was resolved a year later and stated that it was always the real Spider-Man we'd been reading about. Now to find out that some hack writers want to rewrite the show's history from 1983 onwards...no, thanks! I don't want any part of it!
P.S.; 60-foot Ace??? You're kidding about that part, right?

No no, I swear, every word is God's Honest Truth. The alternative universe is on a different scale or something, hence the giant ants and the giant Ace. She gradually shrinks down to a reasonable size, though, just as she conveniently acquires all the late lamented Ace's memories (give or take a little confusion over the Gale/McShane surname) and, indeed, a belief that she IS the real Ace.

Just don't ask me to EXPLAIN any of this.

Given the nature of parallel universes, she's as "real" an Ace as the one who got shot in the head. What I have to wonder is, what does the 60 foot version of the Doctor think of his Ace suddenly disappearing into another universe?

It seems to me that, genetically, Dorothy Gale and Dorothy McShane couldn't look the same. Her mother's genes would have had virtually 90 % control over Ace's facial features and body type, and the father's hardly mattered.

Why is that?

Yeah, what's your point, Will? Dorothy's father could be the same in both dimensions; the difference could be who Dorothy's mom married (or remarried).

what I don't like EVEN MORE is the fashion for regulars dying and being replaced.

Though OBVIOUSLY if Rory happened to be replaced by a plastic Centurion during one of his numerous demises, that would be different, and PERFECTLY ALRIGHT. As would a replacement Tenth Doctor growing from his amputated hand. Or an older, embittered Amy being replaced by her younger self. Or Jackie and Jake being blessed with alternative-universe versions of their lost beloveds...

It just has to be done WELL, OK?

Tucker n'Perry DWM interview: 'We'd ended up with Ace apparently dead at the end of Prime Time which even I hadn't planned, but Justin said "I really like it, why don't you realy have her killed? Sort it out in the next one..." and that gave us a focus which previously Loving the Alien hadn't had.' 'It became the Doctor's main motivation, and improved the story.' - the HELL it did! Give me an unfocused unmotivated story instead of THIS any day!

Justin Richards really is responsible for Companion-slaughter on a MASSIVE scale, isn't he.

'Timewyrm: Genesys starts with the Doctor accidentally wiping Ace's memories whilst editing his own. He restores them very quickly, but they aren't exactly the same as before (Ace ends up with a memory of some events that happened to Mel). It is, therefore, tempting to place Loving the Alien immediately before Timewyrm: Genesys...the Doctor's memory-altering antics could be an attempt to give the new Ace the "correct" memories' - Shooty Dog Thing. Brilliant! (Of course, Loving the Alien is STILL in A LOT of trouble.)

Blimey. Have just read Illegal Alien so hope this has a REALLY good excuse for George Limb popping up and blowing Ace's brains out. Given that a) he's quite civilised, as far as pro-Nazi, pro-Cybermen evil masterminds go (he politely wishes Ace and the Doctor well, and is even prepared to keep the bargain he made with the Doctor, which is more than the Doctor is), and b) he's shredded through time and space.

We thought we were reading the NAs secure in the knowledge that the Doctor's Companion was the very same girl we'd seen on our screens back in the good old days when Who was ON our screens (only older and bitterer and twisteder). No such luck! The real Ace is worm-food, and the so-called 'Ace' of the book is just some interloper from an alternative universe who happens (through a mysterious, not to mention totally unexplained) process to have acquired her memories!

Actually a reread has me reassessing this - I think it's supposed to be the original Ace, miraculously and inexplicably resurrected with equally-inexplicably different memories/tastes...

And you know that 'Fifth Doctor' person? Bet you thought he was actually the _same guy_ from Castrovalva to Caves of Androzani? Tee hee, suckers! Fooled you! The ACTUAL Doctor went and got his head chopped off (and eaten, let's not forget the eaten stuff) by some evil witches sometime after Planet of Fire! Luckily a super-being was on hand to create him a nice new identical body and dump his soul back in it, but...it's just not the same.

OK, obviously I've gotta reassess THAT in view of Heaven Sent...

Justin Richards really is responsible for Companion-slaughter on a MASSIVE scale, isn't he.

Presumably why he pulled that Schrodinger's Companion thing in Sometime Never...

'Inside the ship, in the impossibly huge control room...' - sorry, have you replaced McCoy's Sexy-interior with the telemovie one a few years/centuries early? - 'Complex systems constantly monitored the internal configuration, keeping the structure contiguous where its passengers were residing, reconfiguring the rest of the ship as necessary' - oh-kay...if you say so...odd that if this is happening, all those stowaways Sexy never noticed from Patient Zero, The Abandoned, No Place Like Home etc etc didn't get squished over the centuries...

'Lights flickered on the hexagonal control column in response to a comment by one of its occupants that it was "bloody cold in here." The TARDIS raised the mean temperature in the pool area by eight degrees' - since WHEN! Poor Donna practically had to BEG the Doc to turn to stupid temperature up...

'They'd hidden on the moon watching as Neil Armstrong took his first steps' - and didn't notice four different Ten n'Marthas in the vicinity (Blink)?!

Ace has sex and 'she had never seen [the Doctor] so angry. He had practically dragged her back to the TARDIS and since then they had hardly spoken' - didn't we have this sort of thing (done MUCH better) a decade earlier in Love and War?

'He was tired and starting to feel his age, and at over 800 years old that wasn't a good thing' - over 800? He was 953 when he BECAME McCoy!

'When he had first found the body, when he had first dug the coffin out of the graveyard in the East End, the Doctor had accepted that another death lay at his feet. There was nothing he could do' - Oh-kay, I can't help but think of Face the Raven/Heaven Sent/Hell Bent. And Day of the Doctor. And Forest of the Dead. And Son of the Dragon. Etc etc...

In order to avert her destined death the Doctor considered dumping Ace 'a billion parsecs and a thousand years' from her death - but 'finding Mel had changed all that. Then he had realised that just abandoning her would kill her as surely as certainly as that gunshot' - er...why would it? Rather than finding ACE'S CORPSE?

And why do yet another u-turn and take her to when n'where she's due to die instead of, say, putting it off as long as possible, a la River Song's trip to the Singing Towers...

The Doctor doesn't feel the sweltering heat? (Not a nit just a reminder to self to keep an eye on this sort of thing.)

'He kept looking at her. Not directly, not obviously, but every time she looked in his direction his head snapped away sharply' - so pretty obviously, then...

'It's not exactly E.R' - *googles* yeah, that started in 1994, long after Ace left Earth...I mean, it's not impossible she forces the Doc to return her regularly to the future to binge-watch a TV programme (god knows I would) but still...

'Her one memory of hospital - she'd had her appendix out when she was ten' - so this is pre-The Harvest, then. Not that I'm (quite) stupid enough to pretend the novels n'audios occur in remotely the same universe...

'There shouldn't be too much trouble you can get into in 1950s' London' says the guy who KNOWS she's about to get her brains blown out.

To be continued...

So "Rags" or "Loving The Alien"?

There's no comparison.

I'd see Ace slaughtered and resurrected in a long-winded illogical annoying stupid manner a thousand times over before I'd touch Rags again...

'After months without a proper adventure' - MONTHS? I thought it was a couple of weeks!

Ace seems astonished it's not swinging like the 1960s - has she not been in the 1950s before?

'By the time the Doctor found it, it should be covered in monkey ••••, or better still, swallowed' - oh don't worry about the effects the Doc's bug might have on an ape's innards, then...

'When all this was over, when he knew once and for all that Ace was safe again, they'd have to take some time and enjoy [the 50s] properly' - ah look, yet another u-turn. The Doc takes Ace to her death confidently expecting to avert it because...er...he's got her bugged?!

McBride and Mullen instantly recognise the hasn't-aged-a-day Doctor after nineteen years? Compare n'contrast with, say, Colonel Felnikov's quite understandable failure to recognise an unaged Ace cos it was twenty years later...(Of course, if McCoy's still wearing THAT jumper, it would make it easier...)

'In less than twenty-four hours Ace is going to be dead, washed up in the river Thames, shot through the head by an unknown assailant, and I've delivered her right into his hands' - sure is a pity you did that isn't it, Doc? It's almost like you didn't think things through...

'The Doc sorted all that out' 'He didn't, though, did he?' - well, QUITE. And I can't believe McBride was stupid enough to claim he had, given it hadn't taken HIM more than a few days after said Doctor swanned off to discover all those Cybermen in the sewers...

'I want you to give this to Cody...And if - heaven forbid - anything untoward should happen to him' - since when has the Doc gone round saying 'Heaven forbid'?

'Forgive me for putting this trust in you - I know it isn't fair' - and since when has the Doc said THAT sort of thing either?

THE DOCTOR finds London traffic 'a terrifying experience'?

'He knew it was a trap, and yet what else could he do?' - not meekly walk himself and Ace into said trap? Just a thought.

'She couldn't remember how long it had been since she had been completely independent of the Doctor - usually she was either running alongside him or desperately searching for him. She felt truly relaxed for the first tine in years' - aren't you forgetting, say, Independence Day? When Ace announced she was taking a break from the Doc for a while? I'm used to the PDAs ignoring the NAs and audios and suchlike, but ignoring OTHER PDAs...?

Why doesn't the Doctor mention his pal Churchill to AVOID DISSECTION?

'At one point there had been a labyrinth on every street corner, even in the Panopticon' - sorry, WHAT...

'I must find that rocket' is the Doc's reaction on regaining consciousness, not, say, I MUST FIND ACE SHE'S ABOUT TO DIE?

Rita goes from 'She didn't know what she'd stumbled across' to 'She had no doubt now that she'd stumbled into some Russian spy cell' in the space of TWO SECONDS.

'He'd taken a terrifyingly irresponsible decision in coming here - deliberately acting with knowledge of future events in order to change those events' - oh, is THAT what he was trying to do? Cretin.

To be continued...

Vasser Dust is 'a waste bi-product of time travel. It has telepathic qualities' - funny we've never heard of it before or since, then...(Also I think you mean by-product...)

'The webs that bind the Multiverse' - DON'T MENTION THE WORD MULTIVERSE! It reminds me of Coming of the Terraphiles and I JUST CAN'T TAKE IT - 'the boundless nothingness of the vortex' - boundless nothingness? We see a different thrilling glimpse of SOMETHINGNESS with every new opening credits sequence! - 'where everything exists in potential' - since WHEN!

'It was inevitable she'd fall in love one day' - alright so you're ignoring her fourteen-thousand-fallings-in-love from the NAs (and who can blame you) but AGAIN, Independence Day is a PDA and Ace was totally in love in THAT. Like, to the extent she tried to ditch Sexy and the Doc to stay with the guy who SOLD HER INTO SLAVERY...

'She couldn't leave the Doctor - never' - see above re Independence Day...

'It struck him that he'd accepted the Doctor's claim - that Ace was going to be fatally shot - with barely a raised eyebrow. How did the Doctor know? It hadn't occurred to McBride to query his strange statement' - he does KNOW the Doc's a time-traveller, right?! You know, one who found a newspaper-from-the-future that he ACTUALLY SHOWED YOU.

The Doctor starts suffocating in the escape module awfully quickly, anyone would think he doesn't have a respiratory bypass system...

'The heads were shrieking and biting at each other. One of them had lost an eye' - *sigh* of course it had. Gotta do your eye-gouging duties...

'"The fault is mine, Cody," the little man said in a quiet, hollow voice. "I did a terrible thing bringing her here"' - oh, YA THINK!!!

'It scans for minute traces of Vasser Dust...Trans-dimensional contamination. Signs of reality-jumping' - oh. Maybe I sneered at the concept of Vasser Dust too soon. It OBVIOUSLY means that Void Stuff from Doomsday...

'I used to play a decent game of cricket...back when I was younger' - well, Seven is perfectly capable of playing cricket in Happy Endings...more's the pity...

'I am an alien. I come from a planet called Gallifrey in the galaxy Kasterborous' - in the WTF of Kasterborous, it's the CONSTELLATION you cretin! - '29,000 light years from here' - wait, that's not far enough away to be another galaxy, is it...?!

*Sigh* The baddies have the foresight to train their guards in anti-hypnotic techniques. Sadly they didn't have the foresight to train their guards to SEARCH THE SODDING DOCTOR (or, y'know...anyone else) before locking him up and, y'know, confiscate any DRUGS AND SCREWDRIVERS he happens to have about his person...

'"I know it's hard to take in," said the Doctor gently. "There are infinite numbers of us out there - of every one of us"' - well I guess the question of whether there was an Earth-neglecting Doctor SOMEWHERE in the Rise of the Cybermen universe has been settled...if only we could believe a word of Loving the Alien...

'"You're unspeakable, Limb," the Doctor hissed' - yeah, when it comes to a SLAUGHTERED COMPANION, it isn't exactly four-and-a-half-billion-years punching a diamond, is it.

'"Infantile," jeered the Doctor. "It's just a mode of transport"' - look, I get the Doc's a bit upset at Limb, what with him BLOWING ACE'S BRAINS OUT and all, but it's a tinsy-wincey bit hypocritical of him to criticise Limb for naming a mode of transport 'Betty' when HE CALLED HIS CAR BESSIE.

'When someone intercepts a specific time line with the intention of altering known events this creates whole new chains of actualities. The vortex becomes overfilled. The realities become too dense' - anyone else feeling that Tucker n'Perry aren't the ones who should be (apparently) attempting to codify Who lore? I mean, no one's better at building a Big Ben to be demolished by a Space-Pig, but...

To be continued...

'I am an alien. I come from a planet called Gallifrey in the galaxy Kasterborous' - in the WTF of Kasterborous, it's the CONSTELLATION you cretin! - '29,000 light years from here' - wait, that's not far enough away to be another galaxy, is it...?!

No it's not.

*Sigh* Didn't we have ENOUGH on our plates worrying about whether Skaro's in the same galaxy as Earth without worrying about Gallifrey AS WELL?

*Checks*

TARDIS Wiki: Mutter's Spiral

Ah. Apparently a lot of things say it IS.

But Fugitive of the Judoon implies it isn't and dammit no one takes ONE WORD of Fugitive of the Judoon away from me...

The Doctor unleashes 'awesomely savage' apes on an army? Who does he think he IS, Troughton?

Since when has McBride (or anyone, ever) thought of THE DOCTOR as a 'little boy'?

'In many ways [the young major] reminded the Doctor of a young Lethbridge-Stewart. There was a level-headedness about him' - if there's anyone LESS level-headed than the Brig (Colonel. Whatever.) in Web of Fear I've yet to encounter 'em. (Well, OK, definitely Professor Zaroff and Soldeed. Probably Hindel.)

'If you shoot me now, then within hours the bombs will start falling and everything will be gone. Past, present, future. Gone. Not just in this dimension, but in millions of others' - er...why?

'McBride pulled a packet of Lucky Strikes out of his trenchcoat and lit one up. He took a deep lungful and shook his head. "And I thought these were going to kill me"' - did they KNOW that in the 1950s?

'McBride was under no illusions as to who was going to win that battle. The troops were well trained and well equipped, but they were no match for the augmented apes' - they've got machine guns for heaven's sake!

'The TARDIS was as impressive as McBride had remembered, the vast, gleaming control centre peppered with softly glowing indentations, with thousands of tiny lights, as if the Doctor was celebrating his own Christmas' - umm...?!

McBride 'was suddenly aware of how tired and hungry he was' - yet didn't bother ASKING FOR SOME FOOD or anything...

'I know I've got these extra-dimensional guys and cybernetic monkeys to get by, not to mention avoiding getting fried to a crisp by Crawhammer and his missiles, but it's a chance and I've got to take it' - *sigh* why is McBride DETERMINED to get himself killed in order to 'rescue' a mutilated guy who's desperate to die?

'This game had gone on long enough. It was time to take control, to put things right' - two hundred pages past time...

'The Doctor gave a deep sigh. He remembered another Christmas, many years ago, when he had stared out across another carbon copy of London, looked at another unfamiliar sky and watched helplessly as people struggled to survive by abandoning all their humanity' - did you just have the incredible cheek to reference Spare Parts whilst strenuously ignoring every other bit of spin-off media...?

'He had been helpless to save the people of Mondas...' - that's euphemistic, given that you actually handed the Cybermen a TEMPLATE for their creation...

The Doctor and Rita just...bump into each other in the alt-uni? Of all the coincidences in the Whoniverse, this is really jarring...

'The prim minister' - I don't usually bother with typos, but...

So shooting someone in the chest doesn't work cos, duh, Cyber-conversion so you...pump more bullets into their chest instead of, ooh, say...THEIR HEAD?? (It's the allegedly most brilliant human the Doctor's ever met doing this, FYI...)

'McBride pulled a packet of Lucky Strikes out of his trenchcoat and lit one up. He took a deep lungful and shook his head. "And I thought these were going to kill me"' - did they KNOW that in the 1950s?

The tobacco companies did, and they were doing their desperate best to keep that fact hidden from the public at large.

That's what I thought. McBride was a journalist so I s'pose he might have had info not available to the public but he was talking like it was common knowledge. Hell, he knows the Doc's a time-traveller, he could have asked for confirmation so he could break the story after the alt-uni invasion...