BASIC PLOT
Arriving on Axista Four the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie find the colony in a state of chaos. Who are the dog-like aliens who call themselves Tyrenians? What is the secret agenda of the sinister Federation Administraor Greene? And what really happened when the Colony Ship crash-landed on Axista Four one hundred years earlier?

DOCTOR
Second, with cameo appearances by the Seventh.

COMPANIONS
Jamie and Zoe, with cameo appearances by Ace.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pg 5 Inside the definitive Museum and Archive of the Tellurian Stain, the far future.

Pg 37 Inside the crashed spaceship, Axista Four, 2539.

Pg 271 Inside The Big Bang just before takeoff, c 2439.

PREPARATORY READING
None.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 6 "She thought he'd agreed to stop all that after that business at gabriel Chase" Ghost Light.

Pg 13 "On the cover were the words 'Five-Hundred-Year Diary'." The Power of the Daleks.

Pg 35 "That food machine has to go." The Daleks.

Pg 48 "If it were a Cyberman or Yeti he wouldn't stand a chance." Jamie met Cybermen in The Moonbase, Tomb of the Cybermen, The Wheel in Space and The Invasion. He met Yeti in The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear.

Pg 52 "There's something about the Tombs of Telos about them." Tomb of the Cybermen.

Pg 55 "For a moment Zoe thought that the Doctor had been wrong and it was a Cyberman, but a second glance told her that this wasn't one of the semi-organic monsters who had attempted to invade the Wheel." The Wheel in Space.

"Unlike the robot servitors she had known on the Wheel, this was a basically humanoid creature" The Wheel in Space.

Pg 70 "He remembered visiting something similar in his previous body, a rather unpleasant spot called Tombstone, he recalled with a shudder." The Gunfighters.

Pg 84 "But there was no railroad here (shame, thought the Doctor, who had a soft spot for steam trains)" Black Orchid.

Pg 102 "'An alien empire has been at war with us for the past seventy-five years.' 'Daleks?' This is presumably the decades-long Dalek war frequently mentioned in the NAs.

Pg 119 References to Daleks, Cybermen, Ice-Warriors and Sontarans.

Pg 130 "But this wasn't telos and the living creatures entombed here were much less dangerous than the Cybermen." Tomb of the Cybermen.

Pg 136 Reference to Daleks.

Pg 150 "She read about the background, the war against the Daleks, evil creatures she had heard about from the Doctor and Jamie but had never met." Zoe saw them in a projection of Evil of the Daleks at the end of The Wheel in Space.

Pg 191 Reference to Daleks.

Pg 199 "Like those Yeti things and the terrible Zodin." The Abominable Snowmen/The Web of Fear, The Five Doctors.

Pg 212 "In some ways the Tyrenians reminded him of his friend Lethbridge Stewart and his new UNIT organisation." The Invasion.

Pg 232 Reference to Daleks.

Pg 247 "Jamie remembered the time the Doctor had taken them to Ancient Rome." Uncertain reference.

Reference to Victoria.

Pg 254 Reference to Daleks.

Pg 267 "Earth Empire has a nice ring to it, don't you think?" The Earth Empire would go on to be a mainstay of the NAs, culminating in So Vile a Sin.

Pg 270 "Even computer memories can "cheat"." Reference to John Nathan-Turner's famous phrase.

Pg 271 The Five-Hundred-Year diary. (The Power of the Daleks)

Pg 277 "What was "the terrible Zodin"?" The Five Doctors.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
None.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Veena, Tam Kartryte, Billy Joe Kartryte, Val Freedom, Administrator Greene, Goyran, Hali, Max, Dee Willoughby, Kirann Ransom.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 76/162 Administrator Greene becomes Administrator Green for a while.
2. Pg 124 "Slowly the droids reduced the temperature in Zoe's unit" This seems like an odd way to revive someone from cryogenic suspension.
3. Pg 147 "It's the year two thousand five hundred and thirty four." It's actually 2539, as the back cover and page 23 make clear.

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

1. The Administrator has the unlikely name of Administrator Green Greene.
2. Someone accidentally gave the droids the wrong instructions.
3. The planet's rotation is slower than Earth's, so some colonsists count the passage of years in Earth years, some in Axista Four years.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pg 82 The Tyrenians. They're canine-like humanoids, although we discover later that they're not actually aliens.

Pg 82 The Alisorti, parasitic creatures who keep the Tyrenians alive and fed while in suspended animation. They die when reawakened.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 5 An ocean world with giant floating buildings, the far future.

Pg 23 Axista Four, 2539.

Pg 29 The Hannibal.

Pg 92 The Thor.

Plus various shuttlecraft and skimmers.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
A very workmanlike novel. The back-to-basics colony has some appeal, but the myriad other elements suffer from not nearly as much development. We're clearly supposed to care about characters like Max Ford and Hali, but so little is done with them that it's tough to remember who they even are from one scene to the next. The idea of the seventh Doctor directing events in the second Doctor's life has a lot of potential, but the realisation of that idea we get is so perfunctory as to be pointless. The seventh Doctor basically gives the second a data crystal with all the answers on it and the rest of the plot revolves around keeping him from activating it for as long as possible. A bit of a waste, all up.