BASIC PLOT
Robotic servants of the most xenophobic race in existence have been released and are planning to assemble the Wicket Gate to free their masters from a Slow Time envelope.

DOCTOR
Fourth.

COMPANIONS
Romana II and K9.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pg 16 The Members' Enclosure of Lord's Cricket ground, present day.

Pg 31 On the cricket pitch of Lord's Cricket ground.

Pg 35 The Capitol, Gallifrey.

Pg 72 The Great Hall of Endless Debate, long ago.

Pg 87 On an asteroid orbiting Krikkit containing the Wicket Gate.

Pg 92 Luseveral, offscreen.

Pg 102 On Mareeve II, offscreen.

Pg 116 On Mareeve II again.

Pg 125 On a street in Fuggville, on Devalin.

Pg 129 On Bethselamin.

Pg 137 The heart of the Temple of Peace, Bethselamin.

Pg 166 A shuttle park on the asteroid of the Wicket Gate.

Pg 176 Krikkit.

Pg 228 The ruins of Avlovia, offscreen.

Pg 235 In the computer room of Avlovia, in the past.

Pg 240 The Avlovian computer room, over a decade later.

Pg 311 In a virtual reality in the dust cloud above Krikkit.

Pg 348 Westminster Green.

Pg 350 Lord's Cricket Ground again.

Pg 357 Luseveral again, offscreen.

Pg 358 Devalin again.

Pg 360 Mareeve II again.

Bethselamin again, offscreen.

PREPARATORY READING
None.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 13 "In her travels with the Doctor she had reassembled the Key to Time, thwarted Davros, and outclassed the Nimon." The Armageddon Factor, Destiny of the Daleks, The Horns of Nimon.

Pg 16 "The Ninth Sontaran Battle Brigade had remembered an urgent call they just had to make." The Time Warrior et al.

"The Kraals had muttered something about really having to knuckle down and write their Christmas thank-you letters." The Android Invasion.

Pg 18 "Maybe the space-time telegraph got its wires crossed." Revenge of the Cybermen et al.

Pg 19 "In the middle of dashing after a Rutan invasion, an old lady at a bus stop had shouted something at her, and she'd been itching for a chance to try it out herself." Horror of Fang Rock.

Pg 34 "A few, such as the Master, tried to take over as much of the universe as possible, but most settled in a quiet corner and devoted themselves to harmless hobbies, such as beekeeping or making a really nice cup of tea." Terror of the Autons et al; possibly Goronwy (Delta and the Bannermen); Professor Chronotis (Shada).

Pgs 34-35 "He did, in fact, very much enjoy making tea, but did it with so much collatoral damage that you could say the Doctor enjoyed making tea in the same way the Daleks enjoyed landing softly on a planet and saying hello." The first time we saw the Daleks to this was The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

Pg 35 "When Romana had first met the Doctor, she had only just graduated fromt he Time Lord Academy with a Triple First." The Ribos Operation.

"Also, she'd shown the Doctor that you could boil a kettle without burning anything down whatsoever; and gone to Paris; and stopped a few interstellar wars; and gone shopping; oh, and saved the Mandrels, and the Bandrils and the Quarks, and what were the floppy little things that went bloop? Them too." City of Death, Nightmare of Eden, Timelash, The Dominators.

Pg 37 "Romana, along with every other Time Lord, found it quite easy to forget that the Doctor was Lord High President of Gallifrey, Regulator of the Eye of Harmony, Keeper of the Great Seal of Rassilon and the Etcetera of Etcetera." The Deadly Assassin et al.

"During a previous visit, the Doctor had, quite by chance, killed off the only other candidate ina Presidential election. It had all been a part of an elaborate plot by the Master to steal a black hole hidden under the carpet in the Panopticon." The Deadly Assassin.

"Some wag had pointed out that, while the Doctor had been exiled on Earth, that planet had been invaded every week, so perhaps Gallifrey shouldn't expect any better. True to form, they'd been invaded twice in a fortnight." The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time.

Pg 39 "The process was called, inevitably, the Rassilon Erasure, although, actually, someone else had invented it. History has curiously forgotten them." Rassilon was first mentioned in The Deadly Assassin.

Pg 40 "Romana was asking if it was perhaps some kind of cunning plot by the Master." Terror of the Autons et al.

"Recently, however, and without wishing to dwell, he's started racing through his remaining regenerations at a rate of knots." This explains why we see Borusa in four different bodies in four consecutive stories (The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time, Arc of Infinity, The Five Doctors).

Pg 41 "(he was constantly being chased, shot, tortured, hurled into black holes, dropped through time storms, taken over, exterminated and lightly vexed)" The extermination is a reference to the Daleks.

"Firstly, there had been the time when a black hole had got loose in the Panopticon chamber. Then there was that period when Gallifrey had been invaded quite a lot." The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time.

Pg 42 "The Doctor is a complicated space-time event." Decalog 3: Continuity Errors.

Pg 46 "Somewhere on Gallifrey was an earlier version of the dog, together with an earlier version of Romana. Well, her predecessor as the Doctor's travelling companion - a rather formidable amazon clled Leela" The Invasion of Time.

"I have established a solid portal into the Amplified Panotropic Network." The Deadly Assassin et al. But see Continuity Cock-Ups.

Pg 47 "There was a worrying precedent - after all, there'd been that time the Master had temporarily made Gallifrey forget all about him." The Deadly Assassin.

"'In order to do that, we need to go into the Matrix.' The Doctor's face fell. 'Oh, that never ends well.'" The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time.

Pg 56 "Beyond it were many more, silos crammed with bombs, ordnance, neutron blasters, de-mat guns, matter-warpers and tissue compressors." A de-mat gun features in The Invasion of Time, while the Master uses a tissue compressor on several occasions, the first being Terror of the Autons.

Pg 62 "The Racnoss literally ate each other. The Jagaroth finally blew themselves up. The stone-hearted Kastrians crumbled." The Runaway Bride, City of Death, The Hand of Fear.

"Even the Great and Deathless Vampires died out." State of Decay.

"He met an old man dressed in white, standing under a white umbrella (to protect him from the acid rain). The old man was holding a cocktail in one hand and something else in the other." The White Guardian, The Ribos Operation.

"Very improbably, a dove flew past, making its startled, agonised way through the wait. [...] It flapped around, tapped its beak against the cocktail glass, and then settled on the wise old man's head." Enlightenment.

Pg 63 "'This is the Key to Time,' he announced. 'It brings balance to the universe.'" The Ribos Operation et al.

"As the Time Lords had no run out of interestingly aggressive races to kidnap and torment in a wet quarry, they'd had to come up with a new hobby of having a sit down and looking a bit smug." The Five Doctors.

Pg 66 "The Daleks killed with a sneer, the Cybermen killed silently, but the Krikkitment applauded each other." The Dead Planet et al; The Tenth Planet et al.

Pg 67 "There was even more humming amd hawing than usual in the vaulted halls of the Time Lord Panopticon, until eventually they admitted the sense of this." The Deadly Assassin.

Pg 76 "The War TARDISes had been designed in the Great and Terrible Wars Against the Vampire Mutations and, along with Bow Ships and Stake Drives, had proved jolly effective at driving out the very last menace of the Old Times." State of Decay.

Pg 77 "Vixos, Erle's World, the Awful Nutane Symbology, and, of course, Planet 5 have all been scrubbed from the Cosmos." Planet 5 was discovered to have been destroyed in Image of the Fendahl, and the story of that is told in The Taking of Planet 5.

Pg 102 "When we went hunting for the Key to Time we were lucky that we managed to snaffle the lot." Season 16.

Pg 121 "On balance, she'd had more laughs working in a Dalek slave mine." Destiny of the Daleks.

Pg 122 "'Bound to have a lot of security,' said Romana, looking dubiously at her sonic screwdriver.'" Romana had built her own sonic screwdriver in The Horns of Nimon.

"In her travels she had experienced mind control, evil clones, and even dispatched a robot double with the fashion sense of a cat lady." Unclear, The Stones of Blood, The Androids of Tara.

Pg 124 "Interglactic Assassin? Agent of the Black Guardian?" The Armageddon Factor.

Pg 131 "It can't be the Master. He's not fond of show tunes." Terror of the Autons et al.

Pg 132 "He got out his sonic screwdriver and waved it around the headstones." Fury From the Deep et al.

Pg 138 "We've decided you should rule out planet / be our scientific advisor / be fed to the great swamp monster." The Doctor was UNIT's scientific advisor, starting in Spearhead from Space.

"Most of the time it was uttered by something ghastly in a shiny uniform - either Sontarans or Bus Conductors." The Time Warrior et al.

Pg 151 "The Worshipful and Ancient law of Gallifrey was one of the more powerful Artefacts of Rassilon." We get a lengthy summary of Shada.

Pg 156 "The only person who'd ever escaped was the arch criminal Salyavin, and he refused to say how he did it, preferring instead to live in quiet retirement scaring the wits out of hapless undergraduates walking across the college lawns." Shada.

"The Doctor edged jauntily past a row of Sontarans. 'Beat you, cock,' he muttered, rapping on an Ice Lord's case." The Time Warrior et al, the Tom Baker introduction to the Shada VHS, The Seeds of Death et al.

"Then he paused in front of a frozen Krarg." Shada.

Pg 159 "He'd always loved a big, juicy red button." As he later will in The Christmas Invasion.

Pg 160 "Normally waking up in the TARDIS meant that he'd had one of his surprisingly rare fatal accidents and was going to have to spend the rest of the day getting used to a new body." The Doctor woke up in a new body inside the TARDIS in The Power of the Daleks and Spearhead from Space.

Pg 161 "The Doctor treated regenerating like putting on clothes - he just grabbed whatever came to hand and got on with it. Romana, however, was such a careful dresser" Destiny of the Daleks.

Pg 162 "He often felt they weren't a true travelling companion till he'd sent their android double over a cliff screaming 'Kill the Doctor!'" The last time we saw this was Androids of Tara, although this scenario is remarkably similar (but inverted) to The Stones of Blood.

"It gave spice to a morning when a companion turned up, all glassy-eyed, dull-toned, and suddenly terribly interested in going to look at an abandoned factory / waxworks museum / hardly-sinister-or-suspicious-clone-bank." Spearhead from Space is most relevant here.

Pg 163 "The controls are isomorphic, you know. They simply won't work for anyone else." Pyramids of Mars.

Pg 176 "He might even resort to card tricks, and they never went down well." Robot.

Pg 179 "But if it was towards a squadron of Daleks then perhaps not." You probably know who the Daleks are.

Pg 188 "She and the Doctor had been hunting down the Celestial Toymaker, who had taken over the Light Entertainment Department" The Celestial Toymaker.

Pg 200 "She imagined the Cyber Controller advancing on the Doctor with a teapot and some digestives." Tomb of the Cybermen et al.

"'Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,' the Doctor boomed with easy familiarity" The Horns of Nimon.

Pg 202 "The Doctor himself once spent a frantic afternoon inside his own head looking for a prawn." The Invisible Enemy.

Pg 229 "Rassilon didn't fancy anyone poking around in his own past." Rassilon was first seen in The Five Doctors.

Pg 255 "It's a mind probe." No. Not the mind probe. (The Five Doctors)

Pg 264 "Considering you had no experience behind you, your progress would make a Rutan greener with jealousy." Horror of Fang Rock.

Pg 273 "That look was normally step one in a sequence that led to a big red button and a cry of 'Nothing in the world can stop me now.'" The Underwater Menace.

Pg 276 "He'd once trundled around Davros, creator of the Daleks (that hadn't gone well) and then there'd been the time they'd gone to a supermarket looking for mercury for the fluid links" Destiny of the Daleks, The Dead Planet.

Pg 280 "You managed to breach the Transduction Barriers with that thing?" The Invasion of Time.

Pg 286 "Due to a horrendous diary conflict, the Post Office Tower's grim attempt at global domination and the Chameleon's plans to kidnap teenagers from Gatwick Airport had both clashed with the Daleks unleashing chaos from their time-travelling antiques shop." The War Machines, The Faceless Ones, Evil of the Daleks.

Pg 288 "The Doctor had taught her a few technical terms, and also that, no matter how tempting, you should never engage the handbrake when pursuing the Master down a bypass" Terror of the Autons et al.

Pg 291 "She'd once sat opposite the Doctor at a cheese and wine evening at Auderly House." Day of the Daleks.

"A curious man - was this really the mysterious alien who saved the Earth? - she'd found that even harder to believe when he'd driven off in a yellow car quite clearly stolen from a clown." Bessie (Doctor Who and the Silurians et al).

Pg 313 "You don't see Davros wheeling out a foot spa." Genesis of the Daleks et al.

Pg 314 "Why the number of times I've woken up strapped to the pilot's seat of a crashing starliner with no idea of how I got there..." Very similar to what will later happen in The Caves of Androzani.

"'I have been persuaded to stay,' admitted the computer." One of John Nathan-Turner's famous lines.

Pg 329 "I was just listening to the music of the spheres." David Tennant later starred in a special of this name.

Pg 337 "The rotters are few and far between. Your Daleks, Krikkitmen and Sontarans." The Dead Planet et al; The Time Warrior et al.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
Pg 40 Borusa, first seen in The Deadly Assassin. He's here given the first name Fuldanquin.

Pg 150 Professor Chronotis, from Shada.

Pg 361 The Black Guardian.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Pg 289 Margaret Thatcher.

Andvalmon, Mr Fugg, The Great Khan, Elder Narase, Hactar the sentient computer, a sentient War TARDIS.

Richfield and Wedgewood.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 46 "I have established a solid portal into the Amplified Panotropic Network." In The Deadly Assassin, it was called Amplified Panotropic Calculations. In The Invasion of Time, it was called the Amplified Panotropic Computer. In both cases, it was referred to as APC, not APN.
2. Pg 140 "People were always saying that about his own ship, but to find that the Krikkitmen had a similar craft with both intriguing, exciting and disappointing." How can three things count as 'both"?
3. Pg 183 "We are simply slightly different to you. There nothing wrong with that." Huh?
4. Pg 189 "Secondly, how hard it was to deliver lambs while undergoing marital difficulties." However, the previous page had Romana having produced a radio show about troubled cow owners. Baby cows are calves, not lambs.
5. Pg 235 "Ten years, sixteen months and two days later, a momentous event happened." Wouldn't that be eleven years, four months and two days?
6. Pg 301 "Still, all gods, need a heaven." Why is that second comma there?

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

1. The name changes as about as frequently as Borusa regenerates.
2. The Doctor originally thought it was both intriguing and exciting when he started the sentence, with disappointment only crashing in at the last moment.
3. Romana has been in England so long that she's taken to talking loudly and slowly in mock-pidgin to aliens. It's very annoying.
4. The cow owners also have sheep.
5. The Avlovian calendar has more than sixteen months in a year.
6. The Doctor is talking in sentence fragments because his mind is all over the place during this important universe-saving speech.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pgs 27-28 The Krikkit Men are robots dressed in cricketing uniforms, with no faces.

Pg 92 A leonine species.

Pg 96 An alien hound.

Pg 104 An alien bird.

Pg 131 Furry, bear-like aliens.

Pg 156 There are frozen Sontarans, Krargs and an Ice Lord on Shada.

Pg 178 The Krikkitas.

Pg 232 Hactar is a sentient computer.

Pg 233 The Avlovians are a jumbled of tentacles, claws and blue skin.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 9 Avlonia, long ago.

Pg 13 England, present day.

Pg 35 Gallifrey.

Pg 72 The Great Hall of Endless Debate, unnamed planet, long ago.

Pg 87 An asteroid orbiting Krikkit containing the Wicket Gate, present day.

Pg 92 Luseveral (it's unclear if this is the name of the entire planet or just a town, but no other identifier is given).

Pg 107 Mareeve II.

Pg 117 Devalin.

Pg 129 Bethselamin.

Pg 149 Cambridge.

Pg 155 Shada.

Pg 176 Krikkit.

Pg 228 The ruins of Avlovia.

Pg 231 Avlovia, in the past.

Pg 236 Avlovia, a decade later.

Pg 294 The Krikkit Men's pavilion timeship.

Pg 313 The Dust Cloud above Krikkit.

Pg 333 Inside a War TARDIS.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
This is one of the funniest Doctor Who books I've ever read. The first half especially is packed full of nonstop continuity jokes that are laugh-out-loud funny. Gallifrey in particular has never been this amusing. It has the same broad story as Adams' Life, the Universe and Everything, but the details of the quest are excellent, and Tom Baker has never been better served in print. The rapport between him and K9 is stupendous (and consistently hilarious). The latter half, where the plot gets down to business, is slightly less fun, despite being the half with more Douglas Adams input, but there's enough inventiveness to carry the day. The Thatcher cameo is slightly odd, but overall this is an amazing read. Highly recommended.