BASIC PLOT
On a blasted world, the Doctor and Susan find themselves in the middle of a war they cannot understand.

DOCTOR
First.

COMPANIONS
Susan.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pg 15 On the barren surface of Iwa, the future. (The materialisation circuit is still working at this point, so the TARDIS appears as a boulder.)

PREPARATORY READING
This story predates An Unearthly Child but has several resonances with the adventure to come.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 30/36 The Doctor adopts his title here, after being given a doctor's uniform to wear (he's simply referred to as "the old man" before this).

Pg 37 "I am a scientist and an engineer. A pioneer in both fields, you could say." The Doctor says he was once a pioneer among his own people in The Daleks.

Pg 43 "'Very quaint,' he observed. 'You even have a rudimentary fault locator.'" The TARDIS fault locator was first seen in The Daleks.

Pgs 44/59/129 Susan is given her name here, after Jill's mother.

Pg 49 "Webber had fetched a data extract" The Deadly Assassin.

Pg 53 "Humans were gullible, easily tamed and tricked, and the physical similarities were quite unpleasant. Yes, one coulkd hide there very well for a time, if needed." An Unearthly Child.

Pg 133 "'Perhaps one day the Ship will take us to their home.' She slipped her key into the lock hidden in the rock. 'To Earth.'" An Unearthly Child.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
None.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Jill, Webber, Juniper, Salih, Mosley, Olmec.

The Foxes.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

• Pg 39 "and so asked the dog god Xolotl - †you remember" Why is there a weird symbol here?

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

• It's a dog god thing.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pg 22 Foxes, aliens who resemble foxes in their physical form but who disassemble molecularly when they get worn out and can reassemble from ashes.

Pg 119 Man-jaguars (although these, along with all the animals, aren't real, but are instead Jill's representation of anger in her dreamscape)

Pg 124 Hunhua has a dead-man face, fish eyes, a monkey-mouth a slug for a tongueand maggoty lips (but again he's likely just a representation in the dreamscape).

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 16 Iwa.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
Frayed isn't bad, but it isn't especially great either. The story tries hard to overcome its macho tendencies and sometimes even succeeds. The proto-Doctor is fantastic when we see little touches of the character beginning to form, but the conceit of giving both him and Susan their names, from rather mundane sources at that, seems a little dubious. Unfortunately Frayed feels the need to wrap a plot around this and so we get lots of hardbitten mercenaries having gunfights with aliens instead of focussing more on the intriguing half-Doctor. Some worthy attempts, but not the fascinating character study it should have been. The foxes were cool, though.