I thought the lack of explanation for the hot rock was in fitting with the novels themes of science/faith/the unexiplicable.

I felt that the Doctor was *too* much like his old self. I was expecting him to not even remember his name, let alone be aware that he has travelled extensively and automatically begin trying to solve the problem of... (ominous thunderclap) ...the burning.

However, by the end of the novel I guess I wasn't too miffed that Richards' had chosen the subtle approach.

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The only things I picked that were dramatically out of character for the Doctor were three scenes; the one where he shows a *complete* lack of reaction to the first scientists' death, the one where he becomes frightened and leaves the second scientist to his death, and the one where he kills Nepath.

Anything else, whilst out of character for the *eighth* doctor, I still felt fit in with earlier incarnations of the Doctor - which would make sense if he has lost his memory and identity.
Personally I liked the scene where he killed Nepath, mainly because I was getting worried that Richards' wouldn't have any balls to do anything dramatic to the Doctor whilst he had the chance to.

The ONLY things that were out of character were the Doctor ignoring a man's death, the Doctor abandoning a man to his death, and the Doctor committing cold-blooded murder? What more do you want!

As I said in The Pit section, the Doctors have got up to just about everything over the centuries - even destroying planets is all in a day's work - so of course you can explain away uncharacteristic behaviour by saying that it fits in with one incarnation or another. That doesn't mean I'll accept this excuse.

Oh, so the book's themes were science/faith/the inexplicable. I didn't pick up on that - the only message I got was 'If you've got a big fire you can put it out with water.' Actually, I can just see Justin Richards having a conversation with his editor:

EDITOR: Right, so it's your traditional alien-tries-to-destroy-Earth-for-no-apparent-reason storyline -

RICHARDS: Wait a minute! Who says it's an alien?

EDITOR: Ah! You mean it's an Earth-born menace, hibernating for millennia -

RICHARDS: I never said that!

EDITOR: Well, what IS it, then?

RICHARDS: How the hell should I know?

EDITOR: You're the author aren't you?

RICHARDS: Yeah, but this is a novel dealing with such deep concepts as science, faith, the inexplicable. It would SPOIL the underlying philosophy if I stooped to spelling out what this rock is, why it kills people, how it adopts their forms, whether it's alien or not, why it wants to take over and/or destroy the Earth, how it controls people through amulets, why it makes the TARDIS grow...*snips another four hours enumerating the plot-holes in The Burning*

At this point, most editors would tell the prospective author where to stuff himself, but as Justin Richards IS the editor, he got away with it.

As for the Doctor being too much like his old self - obviously I disagree, but I was deeply miffed to have missed out on all the INTERESTING aspects of an amnesiac exile. The last time we saw him, he was gibbering in a train, saying something about having to find the Doctor. Now he's remembered he IS the Doctor, has got himself a place to live, has presumably come to terms with interesting facts like having two hearts...and we miss all of it!

The point about the Doctor's characteristics fitting in with previous incarnations is ONLY applicable to this novel (and, assumedly, following novels in the 'Caught on Earth' story arc) *because* the Doctor has lost his identity. It's not an excuse, and judging by Richards' characterisation, it's a *cause* for the Doctor's 'out-of-characater' behaviour throughout this novel.

I find it suprising that you missed the themes of the novel as several long conversations about them took place between the Doctor and the two scientists, the Doctor and Stobbold, the Doctor and Nepath, and all of these characters together in the novel's early dinner scene - an amiable attempt to set up the rest of the novel.

I too would have been annoyed if there was *no* explanation for the rock, but the hints I *was* given - the mythology and talk of elemental forces, was enough to satisfy me (though obviously, and oddly, not enough to satisfy you) without cheating the novel's central themes.

I *was* annoyed though at the sudden jump in the Doctor's character from the end of the 'Ancestor Cell' to 'the Burning', like yourself I would've liked to see events picking up immedieatly from the Doctor's delluded state at the end of 'Ancestor Cell', but the fact that a few years have passed is enough to put me at ease, I suppose Richards' preffered to write a story and then develop the Doctor's character, rather than the other way round, as would've been the case if he had developed the Doctor from where we'd left off in the previous novel - a delluded and extremely amnesiatic Doctor would have a lot of trouble negotiating a full-blow story (look at 'Twin Dilemma', an awful storyline which plays second fiddle to the Doctor's regenerative trauma - amplify that by tenfold and this would've been the case for 'the Burning', had Richards' started his story immediately after 'Ancestor Cell').
I for one am glad of Richards' philosophy of 'story first, fan-pandering second'.

Story first?!! I wouldn't have minded, but WHAT story?????? This is the most inane piece of drivel I've been forced to read since Divided Loyalties. (OK, I might be exaggerating, but not by much. At least Divided Loyalties wasn't half so DREARY.) Where's the plot? Oh, it consists of using a reservoir to drown the flame-creatures (like we didn't see THAT coming a mile off, the minute someone announced 'we've just built a reservoir for no particular reason'). Where's the villain? Oh, it's a...er...bit of hot rock which might as well shriek 'Nozzing in ze vorld can schtop me now' for all the credibility it's got. Where is the hero? Sorry, he's off committing murder, but that's OK, after all he's lost his memory.

*Bangs head several times against nearest wall*

Looks like we might just have to agree to differ on this one...

Ok.
I must say though, that the only reason I am okay with the Doctor not playing his normal 'hero' role is because I know that by the end of the story arc everything will be okay and that it all boils down to a sense of scale, in a six book arc involving the Doctor rebuilding his character I'd be a little disappointed if it didn't involve some shocking un-doctorish things as he begins his long 120 year journey to re-discovering himself.
And some nitpicks (cause that's what we're all here for )
- resovoir: the reason it was built was so the town could have something to do. I can honestly say, as well, that I didn't realise it's importance to the plot until a few pages before it was mentioned as such.
- villain: not the rock, I felt this role was more fulfilled by Nepath.
- there was a plot. It may not be as complex or lengthy as 'Divided Loyalties' (I can't say because I haven't read that book) but it's still a plot and fulfills everything required of a plot. Anyhow, despite this, well-written prose is just as important, if not more, than a plot - and i'm sure Richards' beats Russell there. If you want to look at a book with little plot that is still quite, quite excellent, I cite 'Alien Bodies' as an example. Very little (in terms of events) actually happen in the core of the novel - and this is because Miles' is less action-orientated in terms of writing (for which I am thankful).
Basically, 'Alien Bodies' is about the Doctor stumbling upon an auction of his own dead body, an auction that degenerates into a Kroton hissy-fit, after which the Doctor scarpers with his body so that he can bury it. The rest is backstory. It is still, nevertheless, one of my favourite Doctor Who novels.

Sorry Luke, I've been meaning to get back to you for ages on this. Well, at least I've read plenty more EDAs in the meantime, so I have even more ammunition to beat The Burning over the head with.

That reservoir - it wasn't built to give the villagers something to do, it was supposedly built because it might just lead to them finding more stuff to mine. Quite how it was supposed to achieve this I can't remember, but it was always pretty plain it was a forlorn hope which the locals clung to because they had nothing else. But, quite apart from my natural scepticism vis a vis benevolent aristocracy, I don't believe ANYONE in their right mind would virtually bankrupt themself to give their local villagers false hope and something to do for a year.

Oh yeah, Nepath's the baddie, but only because that hot squigy rock stuff is so TOTALLY INCAPABLE of fulfilling its rightful position as World-Destroying Villain-in-Chief.

OK, so Alien Bodies doesn't have much plot. But the plot is DOES have is perfection - all tied together beautifully, unlike - sorry to be predictable - The Burning. And it has so many things apart from plot - glimpses into other worlds, other races, twists and shocks and humour and characterisation - plus, of course, rewriting the entire past and future of Doctor Who, enriching it for future generations (well, until The Ancestor Cell came along, anyway). Justin Richards was no doubt AIMING to emulate Alien Bodies' achievement of laying down the blueprint for future Who, but needless to say The Burning is not up to the job.

As regards the necessity of 'some shocking un-Doctorish things', just compare The Burning with its successors - spoilers for The Turing Test, Endgame and Father Time (but not Casualties of War because I can't remember any unDoctorish things, come to think of it, I can't remember much at all):
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OK. In The Turing Test the Doctor does something just as bad as his murder of Nepath - he kills an alien. Worse, he _burns it alive_. IN COLD BLOOD. And, just to make things about fifty million times more immoral than his killing in The Burning, he's not doing it to save the planet from destruction - he's doing it _because he wants to get away from Earth_. And - to crown it all - there's no guarantee, and indeed no INDICATION, that the alien he killed is the baddie.

So...BAD boy, Doctor! But NOT a bad book. Unlike in The Burning, where we get no insight into the the motivation for the Doctor's uncharacteristic actions, here the utter desperation which drove him to it is quite clear. He's been an exile - a stranger even to himself - for 50 years, his lost memory and his lost TARDIS are driving him nuts. That scene where he's sobbing on the floor after opening the TARDIS - screaming for some woman who'd left him and he somehow expected to be inside it - sums up his state of mind brilliantly.

Of course, The Turing Test's complete failure to explain what's going on is deeply irritating, but at least we know it involves two rival groups of aliens - it's well within the Doctor Who tradition, unlike The Burning's Mr Hot, Rocky n'Squigy.

Then there's Endgame. A bored and totally-uninterested-in-life Doctor is not one I remember coming across before (except briefly in The Eight Doctors) but it's exactly the attitude you'd expect after the Doc's spent so long stuck on b o r i n g old Earth with so few alien invasions to keep him amused. I love his response to seeing a friend of his attacked - Yawn, yawn, so what, none of my business, keep out of it - and then discovering that whilst he's been thinking this, he's actually been leaping to the rescue. Yes, there are discrepancies - the Doctor's ludicrously exaggerated kung-fu skills, not to mention him holding forth about the joys of kissing, but nothing major.

Father Time comes up with several hideously revolutionary ideas, but, with the exception of the Doctor's ponytail, never takes them beyond the bounds of plausibility. The Doctor as millionaire businessman is...ah...original, but it makes perfect sense. Most of the Doctor's life has consisted of marching into places, sorting them out in two days flat, and leaving - he's just doing it for companies and getting paid for it now. Quite understandable if he's spent a century in money-obsessed England, and has a daughter to support - AND gets a lovely puzzled look on his face at the mention of redundancies. The Doctor murdering several people without a flicker of remorse was surprising, but hey, he killed them with such Doctorish style - turning them into roses - that I found it easier to accept than his The Burning behaviour.

_That's_ what these amnesia books should be aiming at - not the Doctor inexplicably doing unDoctorish things because Justin Richards needs to pep his book up a bit (a lot, actually). Not killings which are totally out of character but the author can sneak in by the precedence of Vengeance on Varos or Two Doctors, or cowardice which he can attempt to justify by the past cowardice of Hartnell and Troughton. But behaviour which the Doctor had never dreamt of exhibiting before, but which you can just imagine him turning to after decades of exile and amnesia.

OK, so I'm making excuses for the other books whilst castigating The Burning. But that's because, well, The Burning is BAD and the other books are GOOD*.

*You realise that only in comparison with The Burning (or The Twin Dilemma or something) could Endgame ever be described as 'good'.

I got really tired of all the early chapters ending with the phrase "The Burning." I started to think this was an advert for athelete's foot...

How exactly did Betty survive? It made no sense whatsoever?

Okay, so the strange material can make shapes that meet the wishes of some people. So I assume that is why the goo was able to make the TARDIS get a little bigger. Yet at the end we find it's not really a permanent solution, what with Patience Nepath turning back in to stone. So what's going to happen to the material the TARDIS absorbed?

Why did it take so long for the Doctor to figure out that water would stop the fire creatures? Seems like a pretty obvious conclusion, especially when the Doctor himself brought up Aristotle's idea of the 4 elements.

Don't ask me about Betty's survival. It was probably a really desperate attempt to end the book with a feel-good glow of happiness to counteract the unrelenting dreariness of the rest of the book. Such a shame it doesn't work. Still, there's a nice scene between Betty and the Doctor in Father Time, even if she must have been implausibly ancient by then.

I still liked the Burning

Grrr!

OK, so we finally discovered what the s t u p i d squishy hot rock was...in Time Zero. HOW many years wait is that, exactly?

I felt that the Doctor was *too* much like his old self. I was expecting him to not even remember his name, let alone be aware that he has travelled extensively and automatically begin trying to solve the problem of... (ominous thunderclap) ...the burning.

Yeah, that DOES render the entire story-arc rather pointless. But then, just look at our beloved TennantDoc...he walked out of that TARDIS without a CLUE what kind of man he was...and he was utterly and totally our Doctor, to his fingertips.

I *was* annoyed though at the sudden jump in the Doctor's character from the end of the 'Ancestor Cell' to 'the Burning', like yourself I would've liked to see events picking up immedieatly from the Doctor's delluded state at the end of 'Ancestor Cell', but the fact that a few years have passed is enough to put me at ease, I suppose Richards' preffered to write a story and then develop the Doctor's character, rather than the other way round, as would've been the case if he had developed the Doctor from where we'd left off in the previous novel - a delluded and extremely amnesiatic Doctor would have a lot of trouble negotiating a full-blow story

He could at least have had a few flashbacks. Year of Intelligent Tigers had some good stuff about the Doctor's century stuck on Earth.

Okay, so the strange material can make shapes that meet the wishes of some people. So I assume that is why the goo was able to make the TARDIS get a little bigger. Yet at the end we find it's not really a permanent solution, what with Patience Nepath turning back in to stone. So what's going to happen to the material the TARDIS absorbed?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. *Tut tuts reproachfully*

Lawrence Miles in DWM: 'It always makes me laugh when people talk about "the Interference arc", because...there wasn't one, really. All I did was plot out the destiny of Compassion up until The Shadows of Avalon. The next thing I know, Romana's gone berserk, Gallifrey's blown up, and the history of the universe has been changed. I just felt like saying, "Well, don't look at me..." The only evil power I had over Stephen Cole was the power to drunkenly wander into the foyer of BBC Books and insist on turning the TARDIS into a gibbon, or whatever, until Stephen asked me to leave. And now Justin's the editor, I can't even apply drunken-gibbon pressure...' - so THAT'S what went so hideously wrong with The Burning (and, well, quite a lot of the rest of the Richards Editorship that endures to this very day). I've been wondering for, gods, is it really fourteen years? No drunken-gibbon pressure.

'A part of her felt the blistering heat as his fingers scorched their way through the skin, smelled the charred flesh, saw his thumbs closing on her eyes as her vision blurred in a heat-haze of the most excruciating pain' - *sigh* you WIPE THE DOCTOR'S MEMORY to start the novels from scratch and you instantly fall back on the good old eye-gouging tendencies...

A Victorian vicar accepts a necklace of a NAKED MAN as a present for his young daughter's birthday?!

'"I don't know what I'd do without you." "Neither do I. But maybe one day we shall find out." He smiled...It did not occur to him that she might not be joking' - the vicar expected his daughter to remain a spinster all her life to look after him? Doesn't he believe a woman should acquire a lord and master and go forth and multiply (whether she wants to or not)? Also, this is utterly at variance with him later thinking that 'She was growing up, he knew. She was a woman now, not a child. Some day - maybe some day soon - he would lose her.'

The Doctor and Stobbold are comparing fire and snow: 'One up, the other down. One hot, the other cold.' 'One destroying, the other creating?' - snow...CREATES things?

'Newton told us over a hundred years ago that this is not random at all' - 1643-1727 is a hell of a lot longer than over a hundred years ago. (Also, you should perhaps retain a subliminal memory from Circular Time that Newton was a raving lunatic.)

'What wrong with dowsing?' 'Ancient old wives' balderdash without a shred of scientific foundation or experimental value, not testable or verifiable in any way' - surely it's easily verifiable? As in, get a dowser-person with a dowsing-rod-thing to find you some sodding water?

'Have you no feelings, sir?' - no. The stuck-on-Earth Doc generally hasn't - before he adopts Miranda anyway, and his reaction to her departure and later death leave me seriously doubting he gives a •••• about his daughter either. And a Doctor with no feelings is no Doctor at all. Bloody stupid thing to do to Our Hero when we were all barely hanging on during The Sixteen Long And Barren Years Of Despair...

Waaait a minute, is the (amnesiac!) Doctor blathering on about THE SILVER TURK of all rubbish audios? Alright, so it wasn't actually set in Turkey but hey, a bit of confusion is understandable given THE AMNESIA.

'"If you must know," Nepath said, "It is a question of cash flow. You know the problem, I feel sure." "No, actually." The Doctor smiled at Nepath' - so how exactly DID the amnesiac lunatic acquire sufficient funds in the nineteenth century? He could hardly have sonicked the nearest cashpoint...

'There are forces at work, evil afoot. Death is approaching...There is evil here, all around us. Can't you sense it? Doesn't it eat into your bones, your very being?' - jeez, you should be COLIN BAKER to be this...pointlessly melodramatic. Also, the Doc's absolute rubbish at sensing evil, give or take a quick tingle in The War Machines when, to be fair, Daleks, War Machines and Chameleons were simultaneously up to no good...

The Doctor and Dobbs seem perfectly happy to sacrifice the housekeeper TO DIE in their place. So much for chivalry.

Why is the Doctor touching the burning-hot object again, straight after his fingers have been burnt by it?

'The lava, whatever it was, blocked his escape. It was between him and the door' - just jump over it moron.

To be continued...

How can one piece of hot rock restore so much of Sexy? It's not GALLIFREYAN hot rock or anything. It's just a stupid lump of hot rock spurting an unfeasible amount of alien lava.

'"So what have we discovered?" "That there is a line where the ground is warm. Too warm for the snow to settle?" The Doctor nodded. "But not just one line"' - er...you guys were explaining these facts to each other TWO PAGES AGO...

'"Found anything of interest?" It was evidently a rhetorical question' - er, WHY was it evidently a rhetorical question? Does the Eighth Doctor not believe BOOKS might contain VALUABLE INFORMATION? (Gods, I miss Tennant and his 'You want weapons? We're in a library. Books! Best weapons in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself'...)

'"What is done is done. 'Iacta alea est', though Caesar actually said it in Greek as I recall."' - I don't have a problem with Amnesiac Loser Doctor occasionally having memories surface (especially as they HAVE to do so for Sexy-driving purposes), I do have a problem with the Doctor, what, learning loads of Earth languages in order to tell who was speaking what instead of just relying on the TARDIS/his Time Lord gift.

'"You understand German, Doctor?" "Do I?" The Doctor glanced up, finger marking his place on the page. He seemed puzzled. "Yes," he said as he returned his attention to the print. "Yes, I suppose I do"' - the Doc's been stranded on Earth for HOW long by this stage? Has he not noticed he's...able to read other languages? And SHOULD he be so good when Sexy's in such a miserable pathetic state?

'Have a little faith. It can move mountains, you know' - since when has THE DOCTOR had such, well, faith in faith? Instead of being of a more Mark-Twain-like persuasion ('Faith is believing what you know ain't so')?

Oh FFS, the Doctor has to read foreign myths about water-gods fighting fire-gods to make him realise maybe he should fight the FIRE with some WATER?

'And if there's nothing else you can do, you can at least pray for them' - look, if the Doc's converted to Christianity during his exile, you might at least have the decency to say so outright (would actually be rather...interesting, especially when it finally dawned on him that HE was the Lonely God) instead of these weird god-bothering hints.

Gods, why is the Doc spending the entire book trekking back and forth from Nepath's to Stobbold's to the moorlands in an endless circle like this is that godawful Wheel of Ice?

'"And all for nothing. For a dream, an illusion. A cheat." Nepath was silent, frowning as he tried to work out the Doctor's meaning' - he knows perfectly well the Doctor's meaning is that his miraculously-back-from-the-dead sister isn't real.

'The explosives rigged within the backpack were nowhere near enough to make any impression on the solid masonry' - why the hell not? The empire on which the sun never set would surely have managed to create some fairly explosive explosives by now?

'"Who are you?" Stobbold asked..."That is something that I must find out for myself." "Is it...is it something you really want to know?" "Yes. Yes it is"' - well he's never shown MUCH sign of giving a •••• in the subsequent millions of EDAs...I seem to remember a vague attempt at memory-jogging in EarthWorld but that's about it...he specifically rejects his chance to get 'em back in Half-Life...