Eternity Weeps
by Jim Mortimore


Publisher: Virgin
ISBN: 0 426 20497 2

     

    BASIC PLOT
    Benny and Jason discover married life isn't as solid as they'd hoped. Trying to prevent a terrible catastrophe, they contact the Doctor and Chris, but discover the hard way that the road to hell is paved with good intentions...

    DOCTOR
    Seventh.

    COMPANIONS
    Benny, Jason, Chris Cwej and Liz Shaw (who dies here).

    MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
    Pg 110 We don't see it, but the TARDIS landed at Dogubayizit, Turkey, 2003.

    Pg 171 On top of the Oktemberyan hill, Turkey.

    Pg 174 A spherical chamber inside the moon.

    PREPARATORY READING
    A working knowledge of Blood Heat and So Vile a Sin would be helpful.

    CONTINUITY REFERENCES
    Pg 3 "The Venus where they used to remember things by eating each other's brains." Venusian Lullaby.

    Pg 26 "It's not my fault Dad did... things to me" As detailed in Death and Diplomacy.

    "The Doctor told me it would help to tell everything. You know, write it all down in a book. [...] He said it always worked for him." We saw the Doctor's diaries in The Power of the Daleks and The Telemovie.

    Pg 49 "I once saw a boat carrying seventeen tons of trade goods come broadside on to the current while navigating a bend and capsize." and page 52 "I've seen Egyptians use -" It's uncertain what adventure this is referring to. It's not Set Piece.

    Pg 51 "Despite this I was finding the old joy of being somewhere I didn't know awakening in me for the first time in ages. For the first time since the wedding in fact." Happy Endings.

    Pg 85 "The rings the Doctor had given us clinked together." The Doctor gave them these as a wedding present in Happy Endings.

    Pg 115 "I thought about my experiences on Deneb" Deneb is referenced in The Ultimate Adventure.

    Pg 118 "She was dead before I knew she was in danger. You know she was, you came to the funeral." So Vile A Sin, but see Continuity Cock-Ups

    Pgs 134-135 "I remembered a dying world overrun by dinosaurs, humanity all but extinct." Blood Heat.

    Pg 135 Reference to the Brigadier.

    Pg 141 "Tell Imorkal I love him." This ties in to Liz's fate at the end of The Scales of Injustice, where she was devoting her life to working with the emergent Silurians.

    Pg 153 Reference to Roz.

    Pg 165 Reference to Roz.

    Pg 167 Reference to Roz.

    Pg 171 "Daddy no please not again no" Death and Diplomacy.

    "I fell away with a scream. The race fear." The race fear of Silurians was seen in Doctor Who and the Silurians and Blood Heat.

    "I screamed. The Earth screamed. The Stranger locked into orbit. They slept and we awoke. Beneath a shining moon, we awoke." Doctor Who and the Silurians.

    Pg 172 "A thunderclap of air lifted the chopper and threw us into the air, just enough to clear the control console as we hurtled through the rugby-goalpost-sized doors into the Ship, burst through the even larger door in the inner wall at a height of thirty feet and crashed sideways into a swimming pool the size of a lake filled with crash foam." The widening of the doors was seen in Venusian Lullaby (and by implication in Season 7) and the swimming pool was seen in The Invasion of Time and a number of NAs (it's once again deleted on page 173).

    Pg 173 "I pulled Chris past a couple of palm trees into a vestibule." The poolside palm trees from The Invasion of Time have presumably been restored along with the pool itself.

    Pg 174 "We found out only moments later as the cloister bell began to ring." Logopolis, Castrovalva, Enlightenment and any number of NAs (including Timewyrm: Genesys).

    Pg 185 Reference to UNIT.

    Pg 186 References to the Brigadier and UNIT.

    Pg 188 Reference to Roz.

    Pg 215 Reference to Roz.

    Pg 227 Reference to Roz.

    Pg 231 Reference to Roz.

    Pg 232 "I saw a boy run from his own family" Death and Diplomacy.

    OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
    Imorkal is presumably intended to be this universe's version of the Imorkal seen in Blood Heat.

    NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
    Dilaver's uncle.

    CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

    1. Pg 7 "You've had enough emotional bullshit for one honeymoon and you're off to Turkey to find Noah's Ark" It's suggested that Benny and Jason are still on their honeymoon shortly before this book starts, but in Return of the Living Dad (page 11), Benny had spent months since her wedding on an archaological dig pursuing her PhD.
    2. Pg 118 "She was dead before I knew she was in danger. You know she was, you came to the funeral." However, on page 301 of So Vile A Sin, Benny states in her diary that she and Jason weren't at the funeral.
    3. The Cthalctose are described as three metres wide on page 3, but the Astronomer Royal is six hundred metres wide on page 201. Fair enough, he's meant to be larger than the rest, but this is pushing it. And how Jason is able to "see" a being wider than the distance to the Earth's horizon is hard to understand.
    4. Most of the human race (about 600 million people) is wiped out here, including whole countries, but this doesn't seem to have much noticeable effect on subsequent novels.
    5. Turkey is completely obliterated here, but seemed to be quite inhabitable in Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

    PLUGGING THE HOLES [Fan-wank theorizing of how to fix continuity cock-ups]

    1. It's a very long honeymoon, involving the pursuit of higher education. This may have contributed to Jason's sour mood.
    2. The mistake is technically So Vile A Sin's, since that was published after this book. However, Chris is hallucinating throughout, with constant visions of Roz, so he might be misremembering or thinking he's addressing someone else and Jason doesn't bother to correct him.
    3. Jason is using human metres on page 3, but Cthalctose metres on page 201.
    4. This may be the catastrophe that preceded Cat's Cradle: Warhead
    5. The Doctor's Agent Scarlet may have had restorative properties we didn't know about, neutralising much of the radiation as well as Agent Yellow, making the areas quickly reinhabitable.

    FEATURED ALIEN RACES
    Pgs 3/201 The Cthalctose, three-metre wide, crystal-armoured sea anemones (but see Continuity cock-ups). They have twenty mouths, intricate bioluminescent patterns and float in and through tea-coloured acid.

    Pg 156 Imorkal is an Earth Reptile.

    Pgs 197/200 A Cthalctose ProviderVehicle. It looks like a cross between a shark, a squid and a space cruiser and transports people by swallowing them.

    Pg 206 Sea urchins.

    FEATURED LOCATIONS
    Pg 3 16 Alpha Leonis One, six billion years ago.

    Pg 7 Dogubayizit and surroundings, Turkey, 2003.

    Pg 133 Inside the moon, 2003.

    Pg 196 The Wood Between the Worlds (which is a metaphor, but is the nearest description we get), timeframe uncertain.

    IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
    In equal parts astonishing and frustrating, Eternity Weeps is a book that prefigures the Benny NAs, disposes with the Doctor Who logo, wipes out most of the human race and features the Doctor as a force of nature. Despite having two lines in the entire first half of the book, this is nevertheless one of his best portrayals ever. There are whole chapters that literally leave you panting for breath, they're so tightly written, but there are no characters to speak of. And Liz's death isn't nearly as outrageous on rereading. You can see Mortimore's genius peeking out here, only he hasn't quite got a handle on it yet. Definitely recommended, though.