BASIC PLOT
Victoria Waterfield searches for clues that her father might still be alive, while the Brigadier has family problems of his own. But the Great Intelligence is preparing to invade Earth again and this time the Doctor's not there to stop it.

DOCTOR
The second and third Doctor make cameo appearances, at the beginning and end respectively.

COMPANIONS
Victoria Waterfield, the Brigadier, Sarah, K9 (Mark III) and a brief cameo by Jamie in the prologue.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
None, although the prologue contains a continuation of the end of The Web of Fear, complete with TARDIS dematerialisation.

PREPARATORY READING
This is a sequel to The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear, but also follows up Evil of the Daleks and Fury from the Deep.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pgs 2-5 This is a continuation of the end of The Web of Fear.

Pg 4 "I haven't forgotten that when we first met the Intelligence in Tibet, it took over your mind and used you as its pawn." The Abominable Snowmen.

Pg 5 "Edward Waterfield, Victorian scientist, unjustly martyred by his cruel Dalek oppressors, would not approve of the 1960s miniskirt" Evil of the Daleks, Tomb of the Cybermen.

Pg 6 The 'London Event' refers to the events of The Web of Fear.

Pg 8 "Shoreditch. The winter of sixty-three." Remembrance of the Daleks.

Pgs 8-9 "And the Yanks have at least two classified craft stashed away on secret airfields in Arizona." Not a continuity reference, but we later see this in The Devil Goblins from Neptune. The second craft might be a Tzun craft, from First Frontier.

Pg 9 "We've been sending probes further and further out into space. Hardly surprising that we've been noticed." The Brigadier repeats this reasoning to Liz Shaw in Spearhead from Space.

"This one dates back to twelfth century Romania" The Ancient Haemovore.

"There are stories going back to the Pharoahs" The Daleks' Masterplan.

Pg 10 "It reminded him of an aunt of Fiona's." Fiona was the Brigadier's first wife, whom he divorced in The Scales of Injustice (although that was published later than this).

Pgs 12-13 Frank and Maggie are the Harrises, the family who adopted Victoria in Fury from the Deep.

Pg 23 "Of course, thought Victoria, that's the story Maxtible put round." Evil of the Daleks.

Pg 24 "Next to her father's name, a witness had carelessly scrawled the name 'Keith Perry'. Perry appeared in the first two episodes of Evil of the Daleks.

Pg 31"The Yet-teh, aka Yeti Traversii, is more bear-like and particularly timid." Reference to the real Yeti Travers saw at the end of The Abominable Snowmen.

Pg 41 "She had wept because the Great Intelligence, whose death was causing so much violence on the mountain, had been inside her body too." The Abominable Snowmen.

Pg 92 "The veteran TV presenter Harold Chorley of Yours Chorley had been delighted to see her again, but couldn't remember her name properly, let alone what story he had been covering a quarter of a century ago." The Web of Fear.

Pgs 92-93 "A male, aged approximately 50 years, height five foot nine, with long dark brown hair and eccentric dress [...] It matched her memory of one of several gentlemen that her best friend had once introduced her to." The Second Doctor, The Five Doctors.

Pg 102 "'ARNOLD, George Albert - Staff Sergeant (DECEASED)' or 'EVANS, Gwyn Ivor - Private'" The Web of Fear.

"His old maths master at Brendon" Mawdryn Undead.

Pg 115 "For some reason he had been certain he was in Cromer." The Three Doctors.

Pg 117 "He could deal with aliens, dinosaurs even the British public schoolboy" Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Mawdryn Undead.

Pg 134 "Away from the horror and the cruelty of the Daleks who imprisoned her there." Evil of the Daleks.

Pg 137 Reference to RSM Benton.

Pg 164 "Cybermen, Daemons... Yeti" The Invasion, The Daemons, The Web of Fear.

Pg 165 "...so UNIT got blamed for blowing up the church." This is a reference to the screening of The Daemons, where the production team got letters complaining about them blowing up a historic church, when it had just been a model. Cameron Dixon: This is referred to as "the Aldbourne incident," oddly named after the real village in which the episode was filmed, rather than the fictional village in which it was set.

Pg 169 "Ask for Brigadier Crichton and quote them the following codes: NN and QQ." These are the story codes for the Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear, respectively.

Pgs 175-176 "That shrink woman that they sent him to after his breakdown at the school had told him as much." Mawdryn Undead.

Pg 201 "I had a daughter once. What happened to her?" Anne Travers appeared in The Web of Fear and we saw her fate in Millennial Rites.

"Acrid smoke from a burning Dalek city and ash like coarse grit blowing in Skaro's wind." Evil of the Daleks.

Pg 213 "And a girl doing a sort of exotic belly dance?" Planet of the Spiders.

Pg 256 "You know, I remember once going through the TARDIS wardrobe and I found this dress, long and white and old-fashioned, and he said it had belonged to Victoria." Pyramids of Mars. Pg 258 "I'd rather have a pint." The Daemons.

Pg 260 "An eccentric man with an incredible scarf." The fourth Doctor.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
Edward Waterfield (Evil of the Daleks).

Gilmore (Remembrance of the Daleks).

Thomni (one of the priests from The Abominable Snowmen).

Edward Travers (The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear).

Brigadier Crichton (The Five Doctors).

Bambera (Battlefield).

The Yeti and the Great Intelligence.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Kate and Gordy Lethbridge-Stewart (the Brigadier's daughter from his first marriage and grandson).

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

• Pg 183 "The London Event of sixty-eight." The Web of Fear is explicitly dated to 1968, despite the fact that in that story, Travers said that the 1935 events of The Abominable Snowmen took place over forty years ago.

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

• Since Sarah is present, UNIT don't want to reveal too much, so they deliberately fudge the date as part of their secrecy act.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
The Yeti and the Great Intelligence.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Oxford, 1857.

London (reprising the end of The Web of Fear).

The Alexander Club on Great Portland St, post Web of Fear (page 6).

Yorkshire, 13 May 1984.

London, 1984.

Det-sen monastary, in a dreamscape (page 26).

Tibet, August 18th 1984 (page 53).

Geneva, 1994.

Kate's houseboat, 1994.

New World University, 1994.

The Astral plane.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
There's some worthy stuff in Downtime, but it's as dull as dishwater in places. Chapter 1 is 40 pages of interminable boredom, while later chapters are all less than five pages, reflecting the book's unevenness. With no Doctor and no single protagonist (the action is split between Victoria, Sarah and the Brigadier) this is slow going indeed, helped in no way by being a novelisation of a fairly boring spinoff video. On the other hand, some of the continuity is really clever and there's a lot of filling in the gaps as we get to see the lives lived around the events we're used to.