BASIC PLOT
The Doctor has been captured and put on trial by his own people - accused of their greatest crime: interfering with the affairs of other peoples and planets. He is sentenced to exile on Earth. That much is history. But now the truth can be told - the Doctor did not go straight into exile. First the Time Lords have a task for him. From the trenches of the Great War to the terrors of the French Revolution, the Second Doctor finds himself on a mission he does not want with a companion he does not like, his life threatened at every turn. Will the Doctor survive to serve his sentence? Or will this adventure prove to be his Waterloo?

DOCTOR
Second.

COMPANIONS
None.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
N/A.

The Doctor is given a Type 97 TARDIS, complete with functional chameleon circuit (pg 56) so the usual one is taking a holiday this month.

PREPARATORY READING
The War Games, Players, The Discontinuity Guide, The Five Doctors - oh, you know the drill.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 3 "In the High Court of the Time Lords a trial was coming to its end." We start with the end of The War Games and move on from there.

Pg 8 "He was the representative of the powerful Celestial Intervention Agency" The Deadly Assassin.

Pg 10 "The seemingly endless struggle with the ruthless alien War Lords" There follows a summary of The War Games.

Pg 11 "At the moment of victory, he had been visited by a manifestation of his future self." The Eight Doctors.

"It had happened once before, in a jungle on prehistoric Earth." The Eight Doctors again, by way of An Unearthly Child.

Pg 18 "Winning is everything - and nothing. Losing is nothing - and everything. All that matters is the Game." The Players' mantra, as recited in Players.

Pg 20 "'I'm a genius,' said the Doctor simply." The Seeds of Death.

Pg 23 "Citizen Robespierre has been executed." As we saw in The Reign of Terror.

Pg 25 "To take refuge with some of your disreputable Shobogan friends, perhaps?" First mentioned in The Deadly Assassin.

Pg 26 "That, Doctor, is a Time Ring" As seen in Genesis of the Daleks.

Pg 30 "The three of them had shared life and death adventures on the planet of the War Games." The War Games, unsurprisingly.

Pg 36 The Doctor "stole an obsolete Type 40 TARDIS and absconded, taking with him a young relative" Susan (An Unearthly Child through The Dalek Invasion of Earth).

Pg 37 "He stumbled across a scheme which involved the kidnapping of large numbers of citizens of Earth from different time zones." Another summary of The War Games follows.

Pgs 38-39 "He is currently on Earth, as it happens, checking that the Earth captives have been safely returned." The Doctor takes a brief detour to Earth, where he experiences the events as recounted in the middle section of Players, in just about the most contrived piece of continuity this side of War of the Daleks.

Pg 45 "Let me tell you about my experiences on Earth in 1915, the time of their First World War." A summary of that section of Players follows.

Pg 46 "For a full account of the Doctor's adventures in 1915, see Doctor Who: Players by Terrance Dicks." Although, to be fair, there's a pretty thorough summary here.

Pg 47 "Strand her on some pleasant little planet like Metebelis Three" Seen in The Green Death and Planet of the Spiders, mentioned a lot throughout the Pertwee era.

Pg 54 "The Doctor supposed it must be a new design of time-vector generator" The Wheel in Space.

Pg 56 "'Jumping Jehosaphat!' said the Doctor" briefly turning into his third incarnation, as seen in The Five Doctors.

Pg 67 "A game, thought the Doctor. A game with players..." Players, in case you hadn't guessed.

Pg 68 "'We were enemies once before,' said the Doctor. 'Yet you changed sides.'" Players.

Pg 72 "The unfortunate Count Praetorius?" Players.

Pg 107 "Hitler was very keen on it." Timewyrm: Exodus.

Pg 114 "You were my ally in 1915 when you helped my friends to escape" Players.

"Churchill against Hitler; Truman against Stalin." Players, Endgame.

Pg 149 "The legends of long-ago vampire wars, when they fought the Great Vampire's swarming hordes with bow-ships, had implanted an atavistic fear." State of Decay.

Pg 158 "It's a Raston Warrior Robot" But of course it is. From The Five Doctors.

Pg 170 "Sooner face a Cyberman or a Dalek any day." You know who they are.

Pg 171 "The Death Zone on Gallifrey." The Five Doctors, as are the references to Timescoops and aliens fighting on this page.

Pg 173 "The Doctor told astonishing tales of Daleks, Cybermen and other horrors, encountered during two adventurous incarnations." The Daleks et al, The Tenth Planet et al.

Pg 179 "It's called a sonic screwdriver." First seen in Fury From the Deep.

Pg 181 "When he looked back the clock was gone as well." A TARDIS disguised as a clock occurred in The Deadly Assassin and The Keeper of Traken.

Pg 211 We take a journey to an alternate future, because there really weren't enough of them in the last few years of the BBC novels.

Pg 221 "They called themselves the War Lords, and they, too, were aided by a renegade from my own people." There follows another summary of The War Games, because we haven't had one for a while.

Pg 232 "Psychic paper - gets you in anywhere." The End of the World.

Pg 244 "Once we used to set other races to slaughtering each other for our amusement." The Five Doctors.

Pg 274 "The mop of jet-black hair now showed fine streaks of grey. It had clearly been a gruelling assignment." Explaining the Second Doctor's older appearance in The Two Doctors.

Pg 280 "No, no, not the mind probe" Like an old friend. The Five Doctors.

"We'll give you a Stattenheim remote control as well' The Two Doctors.

"'Oh there won't be any rough stuff on your next mission, Doctor. Purely diplomatic. Still, Jamie, by all means if we can find him. We'll have to adjust his memory.' 'And account for whoever he thinks is missing. Let him believe we've dropped off Victoria somewhere for some reason. She want to learn, oh I don't know... Graphology!'" The Two Doctors. But see Continuity Cock-Ups.

Pg 281 "Is old Dastari still their head of projects?" The Two Doctors.

"I hear they've got an excellent chef..." The Two Doctors.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
Pg 30 Lady Jennifer Buckingham and Lieutenant Jeremy Carstairs, from The War Games (and Players).

Pg 64 The Countess, seen previously in Players and Endgame.

Pg 66 Napoleon, seen briefly in The Reign of Terror, The Sands of Time and Emotional Chemistry. Despite all those, this is easily his biggest role in Doctor Who.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
The Duke of Wellington, Prince Talleyrand, Colonel Grant, Valmont, Sardon, Luco.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 95 "But was she being lead astray by the Doctor's incorrigible frivolity?" I wonder if she was also being led astray? Incidentally, the number of people who can't tell the difference between lead the metal, lead the present tense and led the past tense in the editorial department of Who (stretching right back to Love and War at least) is terrifying.
2. Pg 135 "'It's an honour to meet you.' 'Charmed,' said Talleyrand, and they exchanged bows." The Doctor meets Talleyrand here - but they already met on page 118 ("The Doctor and Talleyrand exchanged bows.").
3. Pg 280 "'Oh there won't be any rough stuff on your next mission, Doctor. Purely diplomatic. Still, Jamie, by all means if we can find him. We'll have to adjust his memory.' 'And account for whoever he thinks is missing. Let him believe we've dropped off Victoria somewhere for some reason. She want to learn, oh I don't know... Graphology!'" Except that Victoria visited her aunt while studying graphology in Birthright.
4. Pg 281 "We've already registered readings of point four on the Bocker scale." I wonder if this is related to the Bocca scale? (The Two Doctors novelisation, page 19).

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

1. The Type 97 is a wonderful machine- functioning chameleon circuit, a new time-vector generator and a guidance system that works - but its translation circuits are shot.
2. There was a little-known custom in the post-revolutionary years to pretend to meet people you've already met a second time. It didn't last long.
3. To make the fiction seem more believable, the Time Lords actually sent Victoria to study graphology.
4. Professors Bocca and Bocker were rival Time Lord scientists who invented two entirely different scales for measurements of time activity.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pg 18 The Players, naturally.

Pg 148 A vampire, just because.

Pg 158 A Raston Warrior Robot, but of course.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 6 Gallifrey.

Pg 29 No Man's Land, November 18, 1915 (pg 31).

Pg 52 Fort Carre, August 9, 1794 (pg 50).

Pg 78 Downing St, 1805 (pg 77).

Pg 94 Paris, 1805 (pg 154).

Pg 193 Paris, July 1815.

Pg 211 Paris, 1865 (in an alternate future, where Napoleon won).

Pg 229 Brussels, June 1815.

Pg 249 Waterloo, 1815.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
Light and fluffy. But you knew that. It's as though Terrance Dicks was aware that this was probably his last chance to indulge himself, so he wrote the ultimate Terrance Dicks novel. It's got it all: sequels or prequels to most of his other novels, continuity overdosing on The War Games, the Players, a haughty Time Lady reduced to a screaming assistant, the Raston Warrior Robot, you name it. Indeed, you get the feeling throughout that Terrance desperately wanted to call it "War Game" only that would be going too far, even for him. But - and it's a big "but", we admit - once you accept all that, it's as joyous as one last walk in the comfiest slippers imaginable, when you know this is the last time you'll do so. Rather charming, in its own way.