Ever wondered what Kate Orman looks like? Here's where to go: http://www.zip.com.au/~korman/

I've seen those two! I'm almost certain of it, about a year ago - they were waiting for the bus at Macquarie Uni. What a spinout!

ROBERT in Timewyrm: Exodus thread: Seven wanted to die, judging by the Virgin NAs

Is that really the case? Sure, Room With No Doors is too bloody boring to remember clearly, but I have a vague feeling that the NAs say he KNEW he was going to die, and was actively dreading it...

*Checks Reference Guide* Aha:

'For his crimes, his seventh incarnation is doomed to be imprisoned within a cell inside his own head, just as his sixth self was walled up for fear of what he would become.'

So it doesn't exactly sound as if McCoy's LOOKING FORWARD to going splat...

DWM: 'In a sequence cut from The Room With No Doors, Wolsey...dreams of meeting three other cats in the TARDIS, black, white and red, representing the Three Gods of Gallifrey. They are joined by a mongrel tabby, who symbolises the rose-woman later to appear in Lungbarrow...'

Well, normally I can't get enough of darling Wolsey but in THIS case thank the (non-existent) Three Gods (actually weren't they goddesses?) of Gallifrey that this didn't happen. This sort of thing is bad enough when you're dealing with gods and rose-women (who the hell WAS she, by the way??) in person, never mind in dream-feline form.

Though of course Orman did retaliate by sticking a mystical cat in Seeing I...

Orman in DWM: 'I wrote this very, very fast, and was surprised when it turned out to be as popular as it did' - it's POPULAR? 'I was a Zen Buddhist for a year; now I'm a Pagan. Both religions have crucially informed my stuff' - well, judging by Room With No Doors, Zen Buddhism is SERIOUSLY boring.

'The space-time ship must have noticed his movement. Soft ripples of light moved across the ceiling, like reflections in fish tank. He smiled. The TARDIS could be pretty weird, but she took good care of her passengers' - since WHEN!

'He was wearing an oversized orange dressing gown with a little cat embroidered over the breast pocket' - Seven MURDERED Six and then WORE HIS DRESSING-GOWN? (Leaving aside this bizarre 'wearing pyjamas for show' thing.)

'The Doctor had been teaching him Zen archery for...gosh, a couple of years now' - he HAS?!

'"Kill me," said Aoi. The man looked down at him. "There is such a thing as the Hippocratic Oath you know," he said' - that applies to battles? Don't recall any of the Doctors mentioning it during the last thousand (or next thousand) years they spend killing people/monsters. And is he QUITE sure he actually qualified as a proper Doctor and TOOK that oath? And DID every Samurai defeated in a fair fight really demand to die?

'"Somewhere below us, I think," said Chris. "Down the mountainside." He turned to go back to the TARDIS' - blimey, the Doctor's got SO good at steering Sexy that Chris expects to use her to spare him a stroll?

'"Adjudicators believe in the Goddess. Justice. She makes sure that everyone gets what they deserve, even if it's only after they die." "But you don't feel sure of that." Chris shrugged. "It must happen after we die," he said. "Hardly anybody gets what they deserve in this world. What do you think?"' - Oh, so THAT'S what that Goddess is all about. If she's an Adjudicator...thing, how come Benny worships (or at least used to pay lip-service to) her centuries before the Adjudicators became really powerful? Why on Earth should Chris (of all people) assume that there's justice in some afterlife because there's none here? Should ADJUDICATORS really admit that their raison d'etre - justice in this life - is a total lost cause? And why the hell hasn't Chris discussed an afterlife with the Doctor, rather than asking some medieval Japanese nun? (Mind you, what with being an avatar of the Goddess/Eternal Time (or something - bloody NAs) Seven might not have given him the correct (i.e. atheist) answer.)

Chris gets told about the god that falls out of the sky and starts performing miracles and deduces that it's...A METEORITE?

God, Eleventh Doctor audio The Jade Pagoda is SUCH a rip-off of this, isn't it. Why the hell couldn't it have ripped off Christmas on a Rational Planet or something instead?

'You speak as though you know the hour and the place.' 'No. But I want to. I want to choose. If I've got to regenerate again, go through that miniature death one more time, I want it to be on my own terms.' 'You want it to mean something.' 'Yes. Everything I do is for a purpose. Too many people just die, die for no reason.' - Hmm. So actually treating regeneration as death wasn't introduced by New Who after all. And TALK about rubbing salt into the wound of McCoy's careless, pointless, STUPID death...

'Time won't have her Champion for much longer. Chris has to be ready' - Seven automatically assumes that Eight won't be worthy/willing to be Time's Champion? (McGann DOES describe himself as 'the Champion of Life and Time' in The Dying Days.) Yet Chris somehow WILL be? The git skins THREE Christine Summerfields!

'We'll be back within a day or so' - how? If the village is a day's journey away, that means *counts carefully on fingers* it'll take you TWO days to get there and back, and that's not including the time it'll take to deal with the new 'god' and of course the various warring factions who'll inevitably be drawn to the Doctor.

'He stayed with us for three months. He lived like a monk, cooking and working and attending sermons' - I'd love to dismiss this as one of those really stupid/crazy NA ideas, but post-Bells of Saint John...

'You never know what you're going to get' - you do if you've been through the Eighth Man Bound ritual. Which the Doctor obviously HAS.

'Regeneration is not so hard for other Time Lords as it has been for me, for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that they do it in medical facilities. Slowly. With assistance. It was never meant to be an emergency measure' - oh come off it, Rassilon would TOTALLY have foreseen there might be regeneration-related emergencies, he was fighting Giant Vampires! And no Time Lord I've ever seen (River, the General, Romana, K'Anpo etc) has regenerated slowly in medical facilities, and they STILL all have an easier time of it than Our Hero. And oh gods is this hinting at certain half-human LIES...?

Chris has seen the Doc badly tortured LOADS of times before in Kate Orman novels but doesn't ask why he didn't regenerate THEN?

'This is too strange. We must have achieved infinite improbability, or something' - oh for heaven's sake, can't you find a way to play down the absurdity of the Doctor just happening to bump into a twentieth-century guy he knows and a Victorian woman who's just invented a time-machine in sixteenth-century Japan instead of emphasising it?

'"I take it you have invented a similar device?" "No," admitted the Doctor, "I stole mine"' - since when has he been casually prepared to admit that? What's wrong with the word 'borrow'? And shouldn't he have worked out that it was vice-versa by now?

'The underground railroad has spread all over the planet; I've lost count of how many stranded aliens we've helped out' - yet none of you have noticed the existence of TRAP STREET?

Why does Joel TELL Chris that he's met the future Doctor who told him 'Second chances are rare. Be careful not to do something you'll regret later' - if Chris was a bit brighter it would have tipped him off that Joel has Evil (or at least Unbelievably Stupid) time-meddling plans right now.

'How long does it take the human race to develop vehicles which can journey through space?' - why is Penelope asking this now, when she's already been to the late twentieth century?

The Doctor can see in ultraviolet since WHEN!

'So much for Sherlock Holmes's idea hat the rose proved God' - Sherlock Holmes was STUPID enough to believe in GOD?

To be continued...

And DID every Samurai defeated in a fair fight really demand to die?

I am no expert, but I would think that a defeated Samurai demanding to be killed, instead of committing ritual suicide by his own hand, would bring great dishonor on his name.

But then if he's been disarmed by his opponent he can hardly be expected to disembowel himself with his bare hands...?

Well, he doesn't have to do it JUST THEN. He should accept the immediate dishonor of defeat and dispatch himself LATER, or regain his honor by successfully undertaking some other important mission.

Hmm. There really ought to be a Samurai Handbook for this sort of thing.

'After a few thousand years in the sterile air of the Capitol, your emotions simply withered away. In a lifetime a human would know fear and anger, love and pleasure, hate and joy. A Time Lord might feel apprehension, irritation, amusement, a certain uninterested curiosity. If anything stronger flared in their hearts, they were expected to silently quash it' - well, Andred wasn't. Nor were all those ambitious/treacherous people on the High Council. And hey, there seemed to be an awful lot of dancing-round-the-maypole for a supposedly emotion-free society.

'No wonder they hated him so much. Well, found him so distasteful' - jeez, don't take a couple of execution attempts so SERIOUSLY. Alright, we're all scarred for life by Trial of a Time Lord but they DID ask you to be President at the end of it, what MORE do you want?

'You said you'd had a lot of experience with deities.' 'None of it good. It's amazing how a spot of omniscience can make someone miserable company' - a LOT of experience WHEN, exactly? A couple of brief encounters with the White Guardian, a dream or two about the Goddess Time whose Champion you're supposed to be yet who you're happy to suddenly slag off...? (And is SEVEN really in a position to criticise other people's omniscience?)

'"Oh, come on!" said Joel cheerfully. "Think of the acclaim, even if there are still a few bugs in the ol' time machine!"' - it SERIOUSLY didn't occur to him until Penelope pointed it out that if A WOMAN HAD INVENTED A WORKING TIME MACHINE IN THE VICTORIAN ERA, people WOULD HAVE HEARD OF IT?

'The samurai's sword rose and came flashing down and broke into three pieces that spun away from the Doctor's back without ever having touched it' - still not quite sure how I feel about NA Seven's occasional display of magic powers but...probably not that happy.

'"Where do we go when we die?" The Doctor looked at him in astonishment. "What makes you think I know?"' - er, cos you're THE DOCTOR and after a thousand years should have considered this question for the two seconds necessary to come to the correct answer, viz, NOWHERE YOU IDIOT.

'After that, things really started to get interesting' - no they didn't.

'She was doing pretty well, thought Chris, for someone who'd chucked herself in the deep end of time travel. She hadn't died of future shock, or past shock, or freaked out or anything' - since when has Chris known anyone who died of future shock?

Chris hasn't visited his folks for more than a year now? When did he EVER visit them, post-Original Sin? Or even THINK about 'em, give or take that false memory the TARDIS infected him with in Christmas on a Rational Planet?

'Maybe the Doctor did look a little older. Not so much in human ways, new wrinkles and grey hairs' - come off it! Our Hero DOES age with wrinkles and grey hairs! (Hell, even CAPTAIN JACK does, which is just SILLY.)

So. Smith and Jones wasn't the first time the Doctor thought it was a fantastic idea to let a vampire drink all his blood...actually, didn't Orman use this idea again in Vampire Science?

The Doctor is sitting in the lotus position about an inch off the floor? Why can't he use his stupid magic tricks for something USEFUL?

'What does a Time Lord really know about death, about the consuming, gnawing fear of losing one's grip on life and falling off into the unknown?...Where others tremble on the brink of eternity, the Doctor goes bungee-jumping' - my favourite bit of the book and it's not even by Orman. Though it seems to forget that the Doctor CAN die.

'The Doctor called out. Penelope didn't think it was a very good impression of the samurai's voice' - HARTNELL can do a perfect imitation of the Toymaker's voice but master-manipulator McCoy has lost the knack?

'How does it feel? Do you feel good because you realize you're not going to die?' 'No. You feel awful, because you know you are going to die. Again' - so, regeneration=death isn't just a New Who concept, then.

'I blew up all those Martians without giving it a second thought, remember?' - Frankly, no, but if Chris DID commit mass-murder in GodEngine it's...nice that this is finally being addressed. (Well, mentioned in passing anyway.)

'Chris shouted several extremely filthy words. The only reason he was not instantly thrown out of the inn was that no one could understand them' - Sexy didn't translate? What a prude.

'Have you never considered, for example, why so few great painters were female?' 'I had always assumed it was because it was illegal to train women in painting' - it's WHAT! Since WHEN!

The Prompter of Confessions recovered after being thoroughly squashed by a cartwheel, but, once restored to almost full functionality, it expired just cos someone trod on it?

'I knew [perpetual imprisonment in the Room] was going to happen to me. Even before the dreams started, I knew. That's one reason I've held on for so long' - you think THIS is 'so long'? McCoy was 953 in Time and the Rani and 1000 in Set Piece, it's a PATHETICALLY short amount of time compared to, say, Hartnell or Matt's lifespans.

'He was afraid, afraid of going power mad. He was so scared of what he might become that he wouldn't do what needed to be done. He refused to plan, refused to anticipate...People were dying because I didn't know what I was doing' - hmmm. Literally anything could have happened between the end of Trial and the start of Time and the Rani, of course (leaving aside the contradictory and unconvincing novel and audio messes) but...Colin Baker didn't exactly depart his Trial looking like a man haunted and hamstrung by the prospect of becoming the Valeyard. He seemed just as plumply self-satisfied as ever.

To be continued...

'I've thought about the consequences, OK? I'm not going to "pervert" anything' - yeah, cos it's not like giving computers to sixteenth-century Samurai is gonna make ANY difference...

'At least she didn't smell' - SERIOUSLY? A Victorian explorer after weeks running round almost-medieval times?

'I used to be a gardener. If I ever get back to Kapteyn I'm going to spend a year just pulling worms out of the soil' - um, shouldn't gardeners leave the worms IN the soil...?

'You must have been tough as nails to have done this for over a thousand years' - what, Chris thinks the Doc left Gallifrey as a TODDLER?

'If he has a redeeming feature, it's that he always knows what to do' - who does Penelope think she IS, judging the Doctor like that on their brief acquaintance? (Leaving aside the fact that for the duration of said acquaintanceship he's been running round like a headless chicken.)

'Good. Chris has gone on his way. All I need to do is stay out of the way until he's been a hero. Then I make a dramatic return from the dead' - it SERIOUSLY didn't occur to the Doctor that his friend of many years might actually bloody BURY his supposed corpse instead of just leaving it lying around to rot? (Actually cremation would have been an even better idea, what with whole empires out there who'd rip this world apart for just one cell. Allegedly.)

Though honestly, has Chris not heard of Time Lord comas?

The Doctor's jacket is heavy cos it's full of objects? It never occurred to me that they WEIGHED anything, I mean, what with the pockets being dimensionally transcendental or something...

'No luck. I fall back. Too much weight resting on me for me to shift it. I can't even gasp for breath. Body calling up every last scrap of stored oxygen...Now would be a good time to go mad...' - Look, it's only a SHALLOW grave, why is the Doc kicking up such a FUSS?

Listening to a sodding stream results in YEARS AND YEARS of the Doctor's built-up fear drifting away??

'Half a cat is better than none' - as a chapter title that is both disconcerting and almost certainly not true.

'It seemed like a good idea at the time, you know?' - Er, no, if you're padding out your book with oodles of Joel you really ought to provide a better motivation for his pathetic attempt to change history than THAT.

Did the Doctor get magically cured of having an arrow right through him when I wasn't looking? Why doesn't he seem to be in any pain?

'Sorry about burying you. We couldn't carry you' - well actually, you COULD have done, especially as you had a cart.

The Doctor left the demon woman's musket with the warlord?

'The skinny Kapteynian was naked, his feathers slick and sticky' - what, and the OTHER Kapteynians are clothed over their feathers?

'They were all looking at the warlord - all the monks, the time travellers, the aliens. He had come all this way, fought so hard, lost an army for nothing' - hardly for nothing, he's conquered all his rival warlord's lands. Plus he COULD have captured the superpowered alien as he'd planned, why on earth did he just take the Doctor's word for it that he'd be useless outside the pod?

'He hoped she was in Heaven, or Nirvana, or wherever, with Liz and Roz and (maybe) Kat'lanna and everybody they'd lost' - who the hell is Kat'lanna and shouldn't Chris have grown out of these absurd beliefs by now?

Joel manipulates the Doctor THAT blatantly? A bit of trembling and wailing about being trapped forever?

'"It was wrong of me to try to force him into a mould," the Doctor said. "I think I mistook his faith and optimism for naivety"' - yeah, it's not like you've been LIVING WITH CHRIS for years or anything...

'Just listening to the grinding sound of the TARDIS landing as though it was music, letting his head become completely empty and be filled by that old, familiar, meaningless sound' - MEANINGLESS?! It's the sound of the universe!

'"Don't worry," said the Doctor [to Chris]. "If anything ever happens to you, I'll make sure your family is all right"' - since WHEN!

Bookwyrm:

'In a book that is a meditation of the acceptance of death, the horrors of war and post-traumatic stress disorder, some of the chapter titles seem to be wilfully taking the ••••...the silliest by far is "Yes, but it is Kannon?"...Kannon is the Japanese God of Mercy, so you can't help but feel that Orman set the whole thing in sixteenth-century Japan just to set the joke up' - ah, how I...won't miss the NAs' 'witty' chapter-titles. (Not that they're gone forever - see Torchwood: Almost Perfect.)

'[Liz] "insisted I take half [of the antidote] and carry the rest to safety...Then she asked me to kill her...[Liz] hated me because I couldn't kill her. And then Imorkal did it anyway"...Except that's not what happened at all' - you're telling me! Liz is alive and well on UNIT's moonbase! - 'Liz did have two doses, but gave them to Chris and Jason immediately. She was then kept alive and in agony precisely because they categorically didn't have any more antidote to analyse...it was Agent Yellow that killed Liz, not Imorka' - the Time Lords are...retroactively meddling with Chris's memories...Or something...?

TV show trumps novels.

Liz didn't die, end of story.

Hear, hear!

Especially when a tenth of Earth's population were supposed to die alongside her. In 2003.

(Of course, that might explain why Eccy thought Earth's population was a mere five billion in World War Three...)

Anyway, septuagenarian Liz bouncing around on a secret Moonbase (SJA) is WAY more plausible than taking a Silurian lover before dissolving in acid (the novels) or becoming a Primord (the audios).

OK, a bit more plausible...well, PREFERABLE anyway.