In The Blood
by Jenny T. Colgan


Publisher: BBC
ISBN: 1 78594 110 8

     

    BASIC PLOT
    All over the world, people are giving vent to their hatred and everywhere behaving with incredible cruelty. Even Donna has found that her friend Hettie, with her seemingly perfect life and fancy house, has unfriended her. And now, all over the world, internet trolls are dying... From the streets of London to the web cafes of South Korea and the deepest darkest forests of Rio, can the Doctor and Donna find the cause of this unhappiness before it's too late?

    DOCTOR
    Tenth.

    COMPANIONS
    Donna Noble.

    MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
    Pg 41 Chiswick, present day (offscreen).

    Pg 281 Outside the ice castle, Brazil.

    Pg 283 Inside the ice castle, Brazil.

    PREPARATORY READING
    You need to be familiar with the Big Finish audio Time Reaver, although nowhere in the publicity or the text is this obvious. Amusingly, although this is a sequel to the audio, the latter was accidentally released four days later.

    CONTINUITY REFERENCES
    Pg 7 "I don't like Nerys. The rest of them are all right." The Runaway Bride.

    "OK, right, the nine best things about Lee were..." Forest of the Dead.

    Pg 19 "When she'd lost Lee - well, it was heartbreaking; whether he'd been real or not, he had felt so real to her." Forest of the Dead.

    Pgs 29-30 "'You'd need a leather jacket.' The Doctor winced." Reference to the ninth Doctor and his costume.

    Pg 35 "The Doctor held up the sonic smugly." The sonic screwdriver. Well, we assume; it could be the sonic beer glass for all we know, because this is what happens when you use an adjective as a noun. Now I think I'll go drink a Diet.

    Pg 42 "Trust me, if I don't listen to the Shadow Proclamation, I'm not very likely to take on board what Hammersmith and Fulham local Authority have to say about it." The Stolen Earth et al.

    Pg 91 "'Are you aware of a Clive Finch from England?' The Doctor shook his head." Rose.

    Pg 94 "Although Clive Finch suggested that isn't how you operate." Rose.

    Pg 95 "She was dressed immaculately, very high-end white designer gear, in which she fitted perfectly; with a bag with a huge branded logo; shoes that cost more than Donna had sent on her wedding dress, which was just as well, she thought, in retrospect." The Runaway Bride.

    Pg 124 "If she could heal after Lee... Well. At least the Doctor would never meet that troublesome woman again. She couldn't bear him sad. They would both recover from the Library, she knew, in time." Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. And the Doctor does indeed meet River Song again, next in Time of the Angels.

    Pg 217 "She wished she'd asked the Doctor for the psychic paper." The End of the World et al.

    Pg 257 "The last time he'd seen Gully, the gangster was attempting to blast off from Calibris, the travel interchange planet, where he'd been running a drugs ring." The Big Finish audio Time Reaver.

    Pg 258 "'Oh, they had my measure on Calibris after that,' said Gully crossly." Time Reaver.

    Pg 259 "It was four months. Four months of burning up in an explosion Doctor." Time Reaver.

    Pg 267 "'Do you know what it felt like?' said Gully to the Doctor. 'After your little protege harpooned me? In the ship that was burning?'" Time Reaver.

    Pg 299 "It's called a chameleon arch." Human Nature/The Family of Blood.

    "What if I go all strange like you? What if I start talking gibberish and getting interested in... geometry..." This is exactly what will happen with the DoctorDonna in Journey's End.

    Pg 301 "I'm not useful. Not like some flight attendant! Not like some stewardess or some medical doctor, or Rose." Tegan, Martha, Rose.

    Pg 307 "'Right through the centre of the Earth? Where it's all, like hot and stuff?' 'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'Simple mining project really. Simple for other civilisations, not this one.'" Inferno, The Hungry Earth.

    Pg 320 "Could have done with it on Skaro" The Daleks et al.

    Pg 321 "Does it work on wood?" Silence in the Library.

    OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
    Silvia and Wilf.

    Gully, the villain from Time Reaver, appears here.

    NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
    Hettie and Cam.

    CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

    1. Back cover: "From the streets of London to the web cafes of South Korea and the deepest darkest forests of Rio, can the Doctor and Donna find the cause of this unhappiness before it's too late?" Except that Rio is a city and doesn't have forests. The Doctor and Donna explicitly take a train from Rio into the jungle, but it takes some time.
    2. Pg 121 "Just by dialling with your anger online, working on your better self, trying to eliminate your faults and listening to your conscience..." Say what? Who dials with their anger?
    3. Pg 137 "But the train driver's reaction was worse: he head twisted right round, he inadvertently took his hand off the dead man's handle, just as his foot instinctively pressed harder on the accelerator in fright." This is a complete misunderstanding of how the dead man's handle works on a train. If the driver takes his hand of the dead man's handle, the train will begin to slow, regardless of any other action. He can put his foot on the accelerator all he likes, but if he's not holding the handle, the train will stop, not accelerate off the rails as it proceeds to do here. (The dead man's handle is precisely to stop trains careening out of control if the driver dies with his foot on the accelerator!)
    4. Furthermore, accidentally touching the accelerator isn't enough to make the train keep accelerating, just as it isn't if you brush it with your foot in your car. The only way the entire ensuing set piece could happen is if the driver had kept hold of the dead man's handle the entire time and kept his foot on the accelerator, neither of which occur.
    5. Pg 141 "'I mean, it, get your hands off me!' said Donna in a tone of voice that would have given most people pause." Why does Donna pause between "mean" and "it"?
    6. Pg 164 "'But can you stop torture or hurting other people?' she shouted after him as he lightly reached the end of the log." Donna means "stop torturing or hurting other people" here.
    7. Pg 275 "'Just press the blue button!' the Doctor was screaming. 'Blue button! Big blue button i have told you a million time!'" Why doesn't the Doctor capitalise "I"?

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

    1. The city of Rio likes to believe it's larger than it is. Much like the geography knowledge of the writer of back cover blurbs, one suspects.
    2. The Doctor's knowledge of the internet is stuck in the dial-up era.
    3. Somebody messed up when designing this train.
    4. They really, really messed up.
    5. Donna's tone also gives her pause.
    6. She'd also like him to stop torture in general, thanks.
    7. The Doctor becomes very humble when he's stressed.

    FEATURED ALIEN RACES
    Pg 71 Rempaths, tiny organisms transported through the blood but transmitted through the internet. They feed off anger.

    Pgs 158/178 A Cadmian, with yellow eyes, hard skin and partly made of sound.

    Pg 256 Gully is a cephalopod with poisoned tentacles and translucent skin.

    FEATURED LOCATIONS
    Pg 13 Chiswick, present day.

    Pg 47 On board a plane.

    Pg 67 Seoul.

    Pg 118 The Doctor and Donna take a plane, although we don't see it.

    Pg 119 Brazil.

    Pg 211 Another plane.

    Pg 332 Australia.

    IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
    This is all over the map, both literally and figuratively. Some of the comedy is very funny. Other parts beggar belief, such as the idea that the Doctor can't access his TARDIS because hipsters are using it to serve coffee, meaning he has to take planes and trains around the world. The failed logic behind the dead man's handle ruins the central set piece, and the generally high number of errors does actual damage to the book. (How exactly does a virus that's carried in the blood get transmitted through the internet? No really, I'd genuinely like to know.) And making it a sequel to something without telling us what should be a high crime against Doctor Who literature. (Seriously, not even a footnote?) But the Doctor and Donna are well characterised, which helps. Fief is fun, and the global nature of the book justifies the page count. A bit of a mish-mash, all up.