BASIC PLOT
Harry is dead. Having left him abandoned and alone in pre-war Britain, the Doctor and Sarah try to solve the mystery of his death. But the only witness is in a lunatic asylum, driven mad by what he has seen. He tells of murder and mutilation, of living trees and long-dead legends, of wolfmen and war... And of a mysterious stranger known only as the Doctor.

DOCTOR
Fourth and Eighth.

COMPANIONS
Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan.

Pg 242 Brief cameo by the Brigadier.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pg 3 A Somerset wood, November 27, 1936.

Pg 6 A Somerset wood, December 11, 1936.

Pg 226 A Somerset wood, November 28, 1936.

Pg 240 Near the court of King Arthur.

Pg 241 Scotland, present day.

Pg 242 Near the court of King Arthur.

Scotland, present day.

PREPARATORY READING
The ending ties into Timeless and Sometime Never..., but they aren't essential.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 3 "They'd been answering a distress call and the ship should have taken them to where they were needed." Revenge of the Cybermen/Terror of the Zygons.

Pgs 3-4 "'You were off somewhere - getting that -' she pointed at the jaunty tam o'shanter" As worn by the Doctor in Terror of the Zygons.

Pg 4 "Hopefully there would be a roaring fire waiting for them when they found wherever it was that the Brigadier was having his crisis." Terror of the Zygons.

Pg 11 "Perhaps it had slipped the Doctor's mind that Harry didn't have one of those time ring jobbies to take him back to the TARDIS." Genesis of the Daleks/Revenge of the Cybermen.

Pg 21 "He'd just come back from a place called Skaro, he said, did the Doctor know it at all? No, the Doctor had (politely) never heard of it. Cairo, yes, Skaro, no." Genesis of the Daleks. The eighth Doctor's amnesia originated in The Ancestor Cell and this adventure slots into the Caught on Earth arc between Casualties of War and The Turing Test. The Skaro/Cairo confusion might be a reference to Lungbarrow, where the seventh Doctor also gets the two confused.

Pgs 54-55 "And this box was plain, it had no panels, no slanted roof, no light on top, no POLICE 'PUBLIC CALL BOX' or 'Police Telephone Free For Use of Public Advice and Assistance Available Immediately Officer and Cars Respond to Urgent Calls Pull to Open'." The TARDIS is still a plain blue box, as it has been since The Burning.

Pg 55 "You have a fascinating tale of men whose body parts are replaced by machinery" The Cybermen.

Pgs 55-56 "I can see the relevance of the giant clockwork soldiers, an interesting metaphor on the men in war who follow orders blindly, but cannot, I'm afraid, work out the significance of the walking cacti or the monsters you describe as being like 'huge clumps of spaghetti'. And then for no reason that I can see, you decide to set all this in the lost city of Atlantis." The Mind Robber, Meglos, The Claws of Axos, The Underwater Menace/The Daemons/The Time Monster/Fallen Gods.

Pg 58 "Morgan le Fay, or Morgana, or Morgaine?" A Morgaine from a different universe appeared in Battlefield.

Pg 69 "he couldn't go back to a universe of uncertainty and evil, a universe where there were murders and werewolves and metal monsters and torture and insect creatures and giant robots" Revenge of the Cybermen, Genesis of the Daleks/The Sontaran Experiment, The Ark in Space, Robot.

Pg 79 "He'd tracked her down, through forged credentials, much bluffing, and a favour from a fat man called Lord Rowlands." Terror of the Autons.

Pg 111 "She lived in a world where friends seemed dead and then rose again with a new face, or walked out of explosions unsinged, or crawled from under an avalanche with barely a scratch." Planet of the Spiders/Robot, uncertain references.

Pg 142 "Well, myself and my two friends - one of whom is also called the Doctor, and is an alien - landed here in our time and space machine, having defeated the plans of a race of evil metal cyber-robots in the far future. We were supposed to be on our way back to the late twentieth century where we were due to help my current employer, a high-up in a secret army organisation which fights alien threats" Revenge of the Cybermen, Terror of the Zygons.

Pg 157 "It wasn't as if George was a Cyberman or a Sontaran, something evil and monstrous like that." Revenge of the Cybermen, The Sontaran Experiment.

Pg 183 "To a certain extent he rather enjoyed adventure - although if the TARDIS had got him back to his own time and place, he couldn't see him stepping back inside it voluntarily; not like Sarah, who had known exactly what she was getting into but had still chosen to take a trip around the universe" Terror of the Zygons, Robot.

Pg 200 "Harry, who had thought the Doctor a good man, a man as noble as his own Doctor, could not even begin to comprehend what there must be in the Doctor's past to account for this." The Ancestor Cell

Pg 243 "Harry Sullivan left UNIT and went on to do hush-hush work for NATO" Mawdryn Undead/Harry Sullivan's War.

The various references to Harry's possible deaths here are a reference to page 154 of Sometime Never...

Pg 245 "A man burst out in front of him through the door of a bookshop, and made him stop in his tracks - a very strange looking man, with an oversized top hat on his brown curls, a thin moustache, and most bizarrely of all, an eyepatch. 'Hello reality, you are cleared to land!' the man yelled." This is the scene from pages 54-55 of Timeless.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
None.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Emmeline Neuberger, Godric, George Stanton, the Dryad, Ernest Trelawny.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

• Pgs 54-55 "And this box was plain, it had no panels, no slanted roof, no light on top, no POLICE 'PUBLIC CALL BOX' or 'Police Telephone Free For Use of Public Advice and Assistance Available Immediately Officer and Cars Respond to Urgent Calls Pull to Open'." The door panel actually refers to "Officers" (plural).

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

• Harry is misremembering slightly.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pg 7 A Dryad, a tree spirit who captures men and keeps them inside trees for years. They appear to be beautiful women wearing green, but afterwards the men can't remember any of the experience. But they're not really alien.

Werewolves, although again they're not really alien.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 9 Somerset, November 1936.

Pg 9 Somerset, December 1936.

Pg 242 King Arthur's time.

Pg 244 Shaftsbury Avenue, London, October 1938.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
An odd book, but not unpleasantly so. Wolfsbane forsakes explanations for timeless fantasy, invoking werewolves, dryads, King Arthur's court and the reincarnations of Morgaine and Mordred without a word of scientific justification. Which is a hard sell in the Doctor Who universe, but if you can accept that, the end result is rather charming. Pairing Harry with the amnesiac eighth Doctor works extremely well. The structure means that the outcome is casually revealed halfway through the novel, mainly so that chapters can be arranged to contain parallel action (two sets of gravedigging, for example). So it's an odd one, all right, but the ties to the ongoing eighth Doctor arc make it seem more important than it probably is.