BASIC PLOT
An age-old terror is about to be reborn. But why does Nyssa feel that her thoughts are no longer her own? Forced to confront his own worst fears, even the Doctor will be pushed to breaking point - and beyond.

DOCTOR
Fifth.

COMPANIONS
Nyssa and Tegan.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pg 21/25 In the shade of an enormous outcrop of rock, Akoshemon's moon, 2382.

PREPARATORY READING
None.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 1 Nyssa dreams of Traken.

"In his study sat a man with a dark beard and even darker eyes." The Master.

"And she saw that as if from a distance, the whole planet fading away into the awful blackness of space as if it had never existed." Logopolis.

Pg 9 Bunny is compared to an Ogron (Day of the Daleks et al).

Pg 11 "Soon after she had first blundered into that police box on the Barnett bypass, Tegan had despaired of ever seeing 1980s Earth again. But just when she had resigned herself to a life of wandering through time and space, the Doctor had accidentally left her behind at Heathrow airport in 1982." Logopolis, Time-Flight.

"And she had suffered recurring nightmares, often featuring snakes." Kinda, plus the fact that she still dreams about the Mara at the beginning of Snakedance.

"The simple truth was that she'd never felt more alive than when helping to defeat the Cybermen, or Terrileptils, or the Master, or Omega." Earthshock, The Visitation, Logopolis/Castrovalva/Time-Flight, Arc of Infinity.

Reference to Aunt Vanessa (Logopolis).

Pgs 11-12 "It seemed almost like destiny, running straight into the Doctor and Nyssa in Amsterdam." Arc of Infinity.

Pg 12 "I really must get around to finding another sonic screwdriver" The original was destroyed in The Visitation.

"I've got the distinct impression that the Time Lords were poking around in here during my last little visit to Gallifrey." Arc of Infinity.

Pg 13 "I certainly wouldn't put that past Maxil and his uniformed twits." Arc of Infinity.

"If those nincompoops have touched the fluid-link bypass..." The Daleks.

"A one-armed Earth Reptile, it's just like a one-armed human." The Earth Reptiles are the Silurians, renamed as such in the NAs.

"She had suffered the night-time heebie-jeebies on many occasions during her sojourn on Earth, mostly bad dreams featuring serpents and jungles and caves and the like, which she had simply put down to her experience on Deva Loka." Kinda.

Pg 21 "The fault locator won't identify the relevant subroutines for a repair program" The Daleks.

"All I have to do is tune my thought waves into the TARDIS artron signature, and..." Artron energy was first mentioned in The Deadly Assassin.

Pg 24 "Vega has produced more mining engineers and pot-holers than practically any other planet in the galaxy." Vega Jaal is of the same race as Vega Nexos, from the Monster of Peladon.

Pg 38 "The last time she could remember having a good old knees-up, as Aunt Vanessa would have called it, was at Cranleigh Hall in 1925." Black Orchid.

Pg 41 "There's a lot of folks out there looking for a way to get rich quick, and that includes the major operators like IMC and the Consortium." IMC first appeared in Colony in Space.

Pg 68 "Her cousin Colin had been a bit of a computer geek" Arc of Infinity.

Pg 69 "Sarcasm isn't your strong point, Nyssa" Paraphrase of one of the Doctor's opening lines from The Caves of Androzani.

Pg 88 "That kind of thing went out with Mechanoids, Doctor." The Chase.

Pg 89 "Almost instantly she remembered Adric's death, and with it came a pang of guilt." Earthshock.

Pg 115 "She had not experienced such a sense of confusion and loss since her father had been murdered and Traken destroyed." The Keeper of Traken/Logopolis.

Pg 118 "I've been in shootouts with Cybermen." Earthshock.

Pg 126 "Hell's teeth, Bunny, that arm cost a fortune." The expression "hell's teeth" was invented for the show, to give Tegan an Australian-sounding, but swearword-free expression.

Pg 130 "Another face, larger, fleshier, with unruly blond curls." The sixth Doctor.

"Through the blood another face appeared, older, thinner..." The seventh Doctor.

"Another face appeared, smeared in gore and screeching for mercy." The eighth Doctor.

Pg 145 "'What are you scared of?' 'Loads of things: snakes, for starters.'" Kinda.

Pg 155 "Everything from the primitive dwelling places of prehistoric earth to the mysterious, radiation-soaked subterranean world of Solos and the spectacular golden catacombs of Voga." An Unearthly Child, The Mutants, Revenge of the Cybermen.

Pg 158 Reference to Ogrons.

Pg 160 References to Daleks, Cybermen and the Master.

"The Black Guardian is bound to catch up with me one day" The Armageddon Factor/Mawdryn Undead.

Pg 166"You once told me one shouldn't believe everything one reads." Uncertain reference.

Pg 171 "It fired specks of super-dense matter, sometimes called Dwarf Star Alloy." Warrior's Gate.

Reference to Daleks.

Pg 199 "Legends of powerful forces for good and evil that survived the Big Bang." These entities were first introduced in the NAs.

Pg 206 "He's got some sort of remote controlled device with him, and he can bring the TARDIS to us when we're safely away from the moon." Likely a reference to the Stattenheim remote control from The Two Doctors, although the Doctor is actually bluffing about its existence here.

Pg 210 "Adric's death was still the sharpest thorn in his memory" Earthshock.

Pg 242 "Like a snake, she thought." Kinda.

Pg 251 "Oh, my small, bright friend: are you all I have left?" Paraphrase of the Doctor's line from Castrovalva.

Pg 254 "Haven't you heard: we're indestructible." Terminus.

Pg 273 "All the people we met in the last couple of days, and who lost their lives, amount to little more than that - ' the Doctor clicked his fingers" The fourth Doctor does this at the end of Genesis of the Daleks.

Pg 274 "You're thinking of Adric again" Earthshock.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
A Vegan appears (The Monster of Peladon).

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
None survivng.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 11 "The simple truth was that she'd never felt more alive than when helping to defeat the Cybermen, or Terrileptils, or the Master, or Omega." Tegan is reminiscing about her time away from the TARDIS, but this precedes her encounter with Omega.
2. Pg 89 "'I think I can imagine how you feel,' she told Jim. 'I had a friend once... not a friend like Jim, but someone I knew pretty well...'" Jim is the person she's talking to, not the one who's just died (Nik).
3. The dating is all over the place:

   It's 2382, according to the back cover.

   Pg 81 "2319.01.12"

   Pg 93 "You've been asleep for over one hundred and sixty years."

   ...so it should be 2479.

   Pg 94 "Ravus Oldman may have been pushing two hundred and thirty, thought Tegan, but he was pretty spry for an old timer." That would make his date of birth c 2152 (and means he was 167 in 2319, before he went into stasis, so he must be pretty spry indeed!).

   Pg 183 "And for your information, Professor, you may be pushing three hundred years old, but you're not the only person here who doesn't look their age." Which means his date of birth is c 2082 (and he would have been 237 in 2319).

   Pg 187 [The Doctor says:] "You're extremely fit for two hundred and sixty-five." So his date of birth is c 2117 (and again he would have been 202 in 2319)

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

1. Tegan is thinking in general at this point.
2. Tegan gets tongue-tied when she has to discuss her emotions.
3. The Dark is affecting everyone's mind, making it hard for them to concentrate. Except for Tegan, who is simply bad at sums.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pg 24 A Vegan, hairy orange miners seen in The Monster of Peladon.

Pgs 101/134 The Bloodhunter. It's squat, dwarflike and the colour of an Earthworm, with a bulbous head and tangled tubes. It's hairless, roughly humanoid, with fingers that taper to bony points, a head that's barely more than a fleshy stump on round shoulders, a cluster of eyes and organs that look like dead snakes.

Pg 160 Bioluminescent worms that live in the rock.

Pg 163 Spiders that weave silvery cobwebs.

Pg 200/261 The Dark. An entity from before the Big Bang, its physical body was burnt, but its mind lived on and was able to reconstitute itself using the blood of humans. It has tentacles of shadow and a cavernous maw, but then settles into a new shape: a parody of the Doctor, with small, sinuous things crawling all over its flesh.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 22 Akoshemon's moon. It's 2382 according to the back cover.

Pg 104 The Adamantium.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
Fear of the Dark makes some odd choices. It kills off its characters in order of interest, it tries to subvert our expectations by making the Doctor untrustworthy and its ultimate villain is a goofy Lovecraftian manifestation of Peter Davison after a day of mud-wrestling. It tries hard to throw all sorts of horror at you but, while it's an adequate intellectual puzzle, it can't make you feel anything.