THE C WORD

We'll get the naming & shaming out of the way first I think:

-In a bid to convince people that he has the "Changing Rooms" knack, Fitz recalls the architecture and soft furnishings of such past haunts as Mechta (Mr Cole's Parallel 59), Yquatine (as in The Fall Of) and the lair of the Council of Eight (Sometime Never...).

-Welwyn Borr, the planetary artiste from The Tomorrow Windows gets a namecheck; so do Jon Pertwee's favourites, the Draconians. At the weapon auction later in the book, two of the three bidders are clearly a Sontaran and a Kroton (although neither is named as such). Not sure about the third, who is humanoid and "festooned with dangling fronds" - it could even be Zephon from The Daleks' Masterplan with a description like that!

-Another insight into the Doctor's life while stuck on Earth during the twentieth century - he studied Ba Chai in Peking during the 1920s. Ba Chai is a variation of the more familiar Feng Shui, although I'm sure you all knew that...

-The TARDIS is out of action throughout the story, due to a lack of mercury in the fluid links. Some people never learn do they...

-The Doctor mentions that he can't see the colour violet, which was a plot point way back in Unnatural History - although he restored his ability to see it in that book, so it occurring here is rather bizarre. Maybe Stephen Cole still wishes he was editor for these books, and wanted to slip a continuity blunder past his successor. Or maybe it was just another mistake.

-The author's note at the end of the book claims that his motive for writing this book was to blow up fifty-odd of Jupiter's moons, solely so that when the fourth Doctor refers to Jupiter's thirteen moons in Revenge of the Cybermen, he is correct, rather than (as has been pointed out over the years) hideously wrong, wrong, wrong!! That's retcon devotion beyond the call of duty (aka, lunacy).

-And finally on the trivial front, not really continuity at all, but it's fun to point out that the Doctor apes the Monty Python Parrot Sketch on page 74, when he refers to Carme as "an ex-moon".

Anyway, moving on to more significant things, if this book belongs to any one character, then it's undoubtedly Fitz. Whilst the Doctor and Trix spend a large proportion of the book in each other's company, Fitz is stuck without them virtually all the way through. As well as giving him the opportunity to meet up with a character called Sook (who, perhaps inevitably, finds herself ultimately falling for the old Kreiner Charm - well, she's only human, bless her) this lack of a Doctor to fall back on gives Fitz the opportunity to, or forces him to, decide things for himself.

Particularly key is page 187, where Fitz has his 'Big Thought' - which is that when pressed for an answer on what to do about the impending crisis, one thing he doesn't think of is to defer to the Doctor. Not long after, having been briefly reunited with his friends, Fitz chooses to leave their relative safety and try to rescue Sook from a crashed vehicle in a water-sodden arena trampled by wild (wild? they're livid) animals. As the Doctor remarks to Trix, "It's his decision, and a brave one."

In his farewells to Sook at the end of the book (he leaves her a transcendentally dimensional bag to remember him by - what a romantic!) he hints that he might not be travelling with the Doctor for very much longer. "Just feeling a little unsettled, I suppose." Frankly, I'm as curious to find out what Fitz' ultimate fate is at the end of the EDA run, as I am to find out just how they restore Gallifrey and the Doctor's memory. And there's not long to wait now...