BASIC PLOT
A clandestine brotherhood and a bizarre alien race threaten all of Europe in late nineteenth century France. Just how far will the Doctor's companions go to save themselves and others?

DOCTOR
Seventh.

COMPANIONS
Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej.

Pg 11 Ace has a cameo in the prologue.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pgs 16/83 In a dark alley, Paris, November 1897.

Pg 245 In the catacombs of the Brotherhood.

Pg 259 In the middle of the bonefields.

Pg 271 On the surface of a neutron star.

PREPARATORY READING
Original Sin, Christmas on a Rational Planet.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 11 "A reading of six point two could mean anything from a young Osirian to a Capitalized Evil-From-The-Dawn-Of-Time." Pyramids of Mars, The Curse of Fenric.

Pgs 11-12 "Despite their clashes of personality she trusted the Doctor to sort out anything: act of God or hods; fire; flood; or ants in the picnic-basket of time." The latter may be a reference to the Ants from Set Piece.

Pg 12 "She had read the 500-year diary that he had pressed into her hands in their clumsy, hurried goodbyes." Set Piece.

"There was a clockwork figure in Le Quartier de l'Horloge she wanted to show Jason." Reference to the Jason clone Ace left with in Happy Endings.

"Chris thought it was a reaction to the cheerfulness of Bernice's reunion with her father, to the evident success of her marriage, as if the Doctor was the sad one on the stairs at the cosmic party." Return of the Living Dad, Happy Endings.

Pg 13 "He could no more bear not to than a human could switch on a respiratory bypass system or regenerate." Pyramids of Mars, the Tenth Planet et al.

Pg 16 "That's the most forceful invitation I think I've ever receive, aside from the Rani's ninety-fourth birthday party." Mark of the Rani et al.

Pg 22 "Look up Bernice's monograph about Altair IV sometime." Bernice first appeared in Love and War.

Pg 27 "Even if he found that she was not as real today as anything else int he world, he still would not know if last night had been real, or whether they had ended up - as he had once devotedly hoped they would - in bed, or only in another round of the eternal bickering he remembered about light and shade, art and life, red wine or white, Eiffel or Hausmann, the age of reason or some new sophistry or paradox of her pet cult." Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Pg 28 "He took one of Jo Grant's old hairpins out of his vest pocket and started to pick the lock on the gates." Jo was the third Doctor's companion (Terror of the Autons et al).

"The sonic screwdriver was no use for this pure mechanical work" This suggests that the seventh Doctor has a sonic screwdriver, which is likely a reference to his having had one in the Telemovie.

Pgs 31-32 "He was running out of old Gallifreyan loom-tenders' rhymes, and if he had to go on to Tibetan mantras or old Venusian lullabies he might as well leave it to Roz and Chris, and go lie down with an ice-pack." The looms were first mentioned in Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible. Tibetan mantras were recited in Planet of the Spiders. Venusian lullabies were sung in The Curse and Monster of Peladon.

Pg 32 "It was an unusual experience for someone as well-travelled as him to have an unusual experience, but this was worse than Centauri Colour-Opera." The Curse and Monster of Peladon.

"At the very start of this regeneration, when aphorisms and saws were running loose in his new head like tiny animals before the forest fire of his renewing Time Lord consciousness, he might have said that the long arm of coincidence had his name on it." Time and the Rani.

"Not an old enemy, not a Time Lord megalomaniac with a flash TARDIS and a habit of leaving minuscule bodies in jam-jars and lunch boxes, not even the Black Guardian; something worse." Terror of the Autons, The Armageddon Factor et al.

Pgs 32-33 "The noise reminded him of fairgrounds, and the Miniscopes that unethical species had once used to pin down their fellows like insects in a box." Carnival of Monsters.

Pg 33 "Not all the dry philosophies of Gallifrey had ever solved the question of whether Fate or free will ruled the cosmos." Possible reference to Inferno, where the latter was proven to exist, at the very least.

Pg 41 "Utterly unlike the formal portraiture or geometric landscapes that had hung, would hang, in the Baronial Estate on Io, and which were art's reaction to a millennium of image-storage technology and FX." We'll be visited the Baronial Estate on Io shortly in So Vile a Sin.

"Roz could not read French, but after a second the words twisted and resolved themselves into the neat script of her childhood African." The TARDIS translation circuits at work (The Masque of Mandragora et al).

Pg 51 "He took a flat leather wallet from his inside pocket and unfolded a vibropick-lock he had confiscated from an Undercity Delta-grade during a training exercise that had got real, real quick." Original Sin.

Pg 55 "Cute as a bepple, both of them." Original Sin.

Pg 83 "He calmed them, stroking their ears and trailing the strong from an old yo-yo he had found in his pockets in front of them." The Ark in Space.

Pg 85 "Squinting, the Doctor could make out the roundels of the default architecture under the block-transfer overlay but otherwise he might as well have been in the real Paris." Logopolis.

Pg 88 "The old girl's looking a bit green around the fluid links as it is." The Daleks.

Pg 91 "Spaceport Five: Undercity" We get a false memory of the period preceding Original Sin.

"Her trainer, Konstantin, would see she could handle a solo job." Mentioned in GodEngine.

Pg 92 "The Arcturan ambassador had hung half a preserved human carcass on his wall at an important social event" The Curse of Peladon.

"Most of the farmers seemed to be ITs." Indigenous Terrans, aka Silurians (Doctor Who and the Silurians et al).

"How bright could a species be that locked itself away in hibernation chambers to avoid a catastrophe and then mistimed their alarm-call by a million-plus years." Doctor Who and the Silurians.

Pg 94 "Then she gave the signal that released the Hexachromite-B gas." Warriors of the Deep.

Pg 95 "Bernice had made her sit through Von Doon's vid, insisting that it and Come The Trickster's HvLP had been the only honest accounts of the war on Heaven." Love and War.

Pg 98 "The Shadow Directory had records of many strange occurrences, from the Woodwicke Calamity of the previous century onwards" Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Pg 99 "Another mission. A vital one for the Adjudicator Secular." Original Sin.

Pg 100 "Some were needlemen, cyberized assassins who were brought to Earth by the Morok Nistra and abandoned when the Morok empire was overthrown as a result of Earth-funded insurgents. Some were Ogrons." The Space Museum, Day of the Daleks et al.

Pg 104 "Not without an armoured-up force of Bug-Hunt Specialists or the Doctor behind her." Dragonfire.

Pg 105 "You might say I'm only an Immortal barring accident." The War Games.

Pg 109 "That's why I trusted you. You're Le Docteur." Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Pg 112 "France is invaded twice by Germany, and a little farther on Paris is flattened by an Ice Warrior reprisal weapon. Shortly after that Europe is decimated by plagues unleashed by a race from the farthest reaches of this galaxy prior to global invasion." Transit, The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

Pg 115 "Then it had been used to generate ectoplasmic mannequins that killed. Nasty business." Similar the Autons in Spearhead from Space.

Pg 149 "It was the only animal ever to have tricked Tsuro, the Hare." The Also People.

Pg 151 "I've known Tsuro the hare for a long time." The Also People.

Pg 152 "He thought about wet fish and the Carnival Queen." Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Pgs 156-157 "The Doctor's fifth regenerated self had seemed pleasant and open when Chris had met him." Cold Fusion. But see Continuity Cock-Ups.

Pg 157 "Too old, too short, too fancy, too strange." The first four Doctors. "This boor must be the sixth persona of the mysterious time traveller." Harsh, but not inaccurate.

Pg 161 "Hardwired in, it had survived his brief flirtation with body-beppling, and had another five years on its warranty." Original Sin.

Pgs 168-169 "Mars, with its underground crypts and cold warriors, was below the western horizon. He could not make out Charon, Pluto's moon, or the more distant Mondas." GodEngine, The Tenth Planet.

Pg 169 "As for the cyberworld, it was decelerating on its way back into solar space." The Tenth Planet.

Pg 175 "Turn down the air-conditioning Susan, hmm?" Imitating the first Doctor, whose granddaughter Susan first appeared in An Unearthly Child.

Pg 180 "I was painted by Toulouse-Lautrec once. The real sitter was ill. A poster for some theatre or other. He said he liked my clothes sense." The fourth Doctor's look was inspired by a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.

Pg 181 "Memory could be chopped or edited or erased. [...] By her time it was simple. It had happened to her once." Roz's memory of Fenn Martle's death was edited in Original Sin.

Pgs 181-182 "Eventually the memories had come back anyway: her partner dying at her hand." Original Sin.

Pg 182 "First rule of spilling your guts: keep to the truth until it really matters, then lie like the third-time winner of the Cretan all-comers Mr Fibber competition, as Bernice had once put it." Love and War et al.

Pg 184 "Even the Carnival Queen had fitted into science somehow" Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Pg 185 "Even the stuff the Doctor did sometimes, the hair-raising things Chris had read in the TARDIS logs, like taking a lighthouse and a couple of diamond cuff-links and making a laser cannon, seemed like a friendly burlesque of the sciences." Horror of Fang Rock.

Pg 187 "It would do no good to tell a Hith on a vengeance kick that its snotty race had lost the war against humanity because they were basically carpets with delusions of adequacy" Original Sin.

Pg 190 "You should have caught me a little while back when I had a better head for vintages." The Third Doctor (eg Day of the Daleks).

Pg 198 "Bernice's cheerful acceptance of freewheeling sexuality had always struck her as the childishness of someone raised in the age of historical decadence." All-Consuming Fire.

Pg 199 "Martle had been safe." Original Sin.

"Perhaps that was why she had shied away from the moments of intimacy she had shared with Chris." Return of the Living Dad.

Pg 202 "Less painful than a mind-probe; more organic." The Five Doctors.

Pg 203 "He redirected one of the needles to an interminable memory of tedium in England: helping Sergeant Benton whitewash the Nissen huts at the back of UNIT HQ during the slow weeks after Liz Shaw had left." Between Inferno and Terror of the Autons.

"Wasn't there a time when he had simply liked to stroll in a garden and smell the roses?" The Five Doctors, the novelisation of The Massacre and Timewyrm: Revelation.

Pg 207 "Not Helix energy; the stars are not right." The Masque of Mandragora.

"Great Intelligence? No, I'd expect to find a bunch of human zombies running around Paris paving the way" The Abominable Snowmen et al.

Pg 223 "If he'd been a suspect, she'd have had him deepscanned before he could say 'Oh no, not the mindprobe'." The Five Doctors.

Pg 226 "There was no past to exert time-pressure; nor any Blinovitch effect." Day of the Daleks.

Pg 231 "What would they use to hunt you down, I wonder? Chirurgeons?" Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Pg 260 "In comparison to the war the Sontaran-Rutan conflict was a squabble in a play-pen." The Time Warrior et al.

Pg 261 "Stand down, authority Raphael, Chirurgeon, Baby-Pierre-Baby-Tao," the Doctor snapped, hoping the codes from the time of the Woodwicke Calamity had not become defunct." Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Pg 262 "As I once remarked to my old teacher Borusa, it is a cardinal error to imagine that I am responsible for everything that goes wrong." Misquote from The Invasion of Time.

Pg 268 "To the Chirurgeon Generale." Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Pg 271 "They had a treaty with the Dyson Sphere builders after all, people who could house the entire population of Earth's Empire in their wardrobe space without noticing." The Also People.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
None.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Emil, Dominic, Clarissa, Grandmaster (last seen in the body of Pierre Duval), the Quoth.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 9 "Often, when his fellow workers were scurrying to the light at the end of their shifts, he would come here and watch the underground river." That's quite a feat, given that Pierre is blind.
2. Pg 106 "I can feel my loyalists changing side, Anton." Except that Brother Tomas is talking to August Mirakle, not Anton Jarre, who's presently with Chris and is his mortal enemy.
3. Pg 134 "Scraps and tufts of debris, the stuffing of raggety dolls and the shavings from wood-carvings turned and turned in the blue strobe-light." As any Amy Pond fan knows, it's "raggedy", not "raggety".
4. Pgs 156-157 "The Doctor's fifth regenerated self had seemed pleasant and open when Chris had met him." Except the fifth regeneration would be the sixth Doctor, not the fifth. The fifth Doctor even clearly says he's the fourth regeneration on screen in The Five Doctors.

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

1. This is the prologue, so perhaps he wasn't blind then.
2. It's a stressful time and Brother Tomas got confused. August kindly let it go.
3. The dolls are possess by an entirely independent alien influence, from the planet Ragget.
4. Chris is stressed and isn't particularly good at maths. Much like the author, one suspects.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES

Pg 23 The Quoth, microscopic creatures who exist in multiple dimensions.

Pg 106 Homonculi, clones created from human tissue.

Pg 260 A variety of mutations caused by humans infected by the Quoth.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 1 London, December 1845.

Pg 6 Paris, March 1884.

Pg 11 Paris, June 1995.

Pg 274 Paris, 1903.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
By the Grandmaster, this is a slog to get through. The writing isn't bad in each scene, but there's very little coherence. Events seem to flit about randomly, with little connective tissue between scenes, so it's really hard to keep track of anything. Or, worse, care. There's some good stuff here and there, as well as a couple of decent one liners and the occasional standout moment (such as the Doctor's fall on pages 141-142, which is spectacular). But it's incredibly dreary most of the time, and the smug style becomes irritating rather than clever. All the worst excesses of the misguided and poorly executed psi powers arc are right here. One you can safely skip.