Interference: Book Two (The Hour of the Geek)

Roots: The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao (I. M. Foreman). There are references to the ITN Evening News, Trivial Pursuit, Frankenstein, Star Trek, The Nine O'Clock News, MTV, Channel 4, Aliens, Mini Metro, Volkswagen, Silk Cut, James Stewart, Hitchcock, The Professionals, Wile E. Coyote, ET, BBC2 and Seeing Eye, Robocop, Microsoft, Blazing Saddles, The Teletubbies, The Lord of the Rings ('"Well, I'm back" he said'), Cluedo, the Babylon 5 episode 'Grey 17 is Missing' (I. M. Foreman's travelling show once manifested as an extra floor on a twenty-third-century space station), The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, and Bjork's "Army of Me".

Dialogue Disasters: "He's back. And it's about time."

Dialogue Triumphs: "My Ogron's bigger than your Ogron."

In a nod to Destiny of the Daleks, Kode exclaims "Spack!"

Continuity: I. M. Foreman taught himself to catch bullets in his teeth, assuming it to be a trick anyone could learn. He is a former Gallifreyan monk, from before the Time Lords dissolved the monasteries: the religious orders on Gallifrey once had the same privileges as the Time Lords (including regeneration) and had access to time travel. The Doctor implies that K'Anpo was a member of the religious orders (see The Time Monster, Planet of the Spiders). The Time Lords once had biological defences that allowed them to overcome the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, but removed them to discourage people from crossing their own timelines. I. M. Foreman's travelling show works in a similar way to a TARDIS but is a mathematical process rather than a machine. It builds a new-patch of space-time on its target destination, which it then moves itself to: the process leaves dents in the space-time continuum, which draw other time travellers to them: Foreman's Yard (An Unearthly Child, Attack of the Cybermen, Remembrance of the Daleks) is one such dent, which the Doctor was drawn to whilst it was still forming: I. M. Foreman was thus one of the first renegades to leave Gallifrey and the Doctor has been unwittingly following in his footsteps ever since, to his indignation. Foreman was actually in the junkyard in 1964.

The travelling show has taken many different forms, including a wagon train, a derailed steam engine, and an extra floor on a twenty-third-century space station. I. M. Foreman left Gallifrey, which is close to the galactic core, long ago and has been gradually been working his way out through the galaxy in a spiral ever since, finally arriving on Dust. Mars was always his favourite planet. The various members of his travelling show are actually his other incarnations. Foreman is from an era when Gallifreyans absorbed DNA from their environments when they regenerated, incorporating into their next body: the Time Lords ironed out this problem long ago. The male, blind I. M. Foreman is the first incarnation: the subsequent incarnations are progressively more mutated as each regeneration incorporates more and more DNA and biodata, with the If "sweating" raw time and the AKA constantly in flux. His final incarnation is raw life energy: when it is unleashed on Dust, the Doctor uses the TARDIS to drag the travelling show into the Vortex, where it is swept back thousands of years to ancient Gallifrey, where it explodes, depositing I. M. Foreman's past incarnations: each regenerates into the next in line, and all twelve are discovered by the original I. M. Foreman before he left Gallifrey, thus completing the cycle. The Doctor persuades the final incarnation to use the biosphere manipulation system from the Remote ship it consumed to merge with Dust, transforming it into a green, vibrant planet and becoming Foreman's World. Magdelana Bishop willing gives I. M. Foreman her body to occupy, which is why Foreman becomes female by the time the Eighth Doctor visits.

The Dæmons (The Daemons) of the military grew wings from their shoulder blades, and gave themselves spatiodynamic bodies with swept-back horns and swan-like necks to allow them to glide through hyperspace with the minimum of effort: following a great war, many of them were killed. Faction Paradox prize their remains, using their skeletons as the basis for their warships. The warship sent to Dust is one of the surviving six and is built from a skeleton found on Dæmos after the planet had been infested by lesser species [post-2586: see Child of Time]. Cousin Llewis was recruited by the Faction from twentieth century Earth: at his suggestion, the Faction travelled back to the early 1980s and vandalised the Blue Peter garden. Mother Mathara left the fledging Remote colony on Anathema their receivers and other Faction technology including a biosphere-manipulation system. The Faction used a similar system in the Eleven-Day Empire. The Faction has agents amongst the Martian Ice Lords.

Ogron Lords are Ogrons fitted with time travel biodata by the Time Lords.

The Remote recreate their dead using remembrance tanks, which contain a suitable amount of biomass shaped by the memories of the dead person's friends. The Remote have transmitters implanted inside their Ogron servants. They originally planned to sell the skin of the Cold to change Earth's timeline, drawing a TARDIS to Earth so that they can use it to reach the actual Cold in the dimension in which it exists: they abort their plan to sell the skin when they discover that the Doctor's TARDIS is on Earth. They want to let the Cold into the universe because they believe it to be one of their loa. The Remote have a Zombie ship that used to be a Drahvidian battleskimmer (The Brain of Morbius), one of many that frequently crash on Anathema due to its interference with their systems.

Anathema is actually a vast, disc-shaped automated Time Lord warship built to destroy Earth. It was launched from a Time Lord base three billion years earlier and set on a course for Earth, so that it would go unnoticed by the Enemy. The Time Lords want to destroy Earth because it is a historical nexus point: its destruction would unravel the causal nexus, wiping out both the Time Lords and the Enemy, a mutual assured destruction tactic. The sides of the warship bear the Seal of Rassilon, which acts as an omniscate and has a negative effect on some of the species from outside the universe.

The Remote believe that, like the Vampires, the Cold comes from outside the universe, exists in a different dimensions, and wants to gain entry so that it can spread its word: in fact it is a Validium-based (see Silver Nemesis) weapons system and controlling intelligence that exists on the boundary between universes: if the weapon is detonated, the Cold is released, dragging everything around it into the other universe. The warship, with Anathema still on it, dematerialises and rematerialises in another region of space when Guest orders it not to detonate.

Time Lord years are the same length as Earth years. Time Lords have sixty-nine chromosomes, divided into twenty-three homogenous triads: the Doctor's DNA contains discrepancies.

The Doctor never mastered the Time Lord trick of internal chronometry, which allows a Time Lord to keep track of time down to the nanosecond without a timepiece. He once told Sarah that the TARDIS doesn't have a self-destruct system, but that he sometimes pretends that it has (see Attack of the Cybermen). He has replaced the Volkswagen Beetle with an S-reg Mini Metro and glued the VW badge to its bonnet (see Unnatural History). Whilst imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, he believes that he is going to die for the first time in a long while. He tries to read Wells' The Time Machine at least once in every regeneration.

As a result of the Faction's interference in causing the Eighth Doctor to appear to the Third and thus leading him to Dust, Magdelana shoots the Third Doctor on Dust, causing him to regenerate into the Fourth Doctor without ever visiting Metebelis III: in the process, he absorbs a Faction virus designed to rewrite biodata, intended to infect I. M. Foreman and this Foreman's World. The virus will take several regenerations to rewire his biodata, the effects not affecting him until his Eighth incarnation, when he will start to come around to the Faction's way of thinking: his shadow will disappear first, so Mother Mathara plans to give him a fake one so that he doesn't notice (see Unnatural History).

The Doctor claims that there is a Mark IV version of K9 [see Dimensions in Time, Storm in a Tikka (Short Trips and Side Steps), Search Out Space]. K9 Mark III can analyse complex biological signatures. The Doctor has never worked out that K9 has a sense of humour.

Compassion's real name is Laura Tobin. Along with Fitz, she was brought to Anathema just as it was being established. Her nickname, Compassion, was a response to Fitz making a comment about her personality. Compassion has been Remembered several times. It is implied that she remains on board the TARDIS with the Doctor and Fitz at the end.

Sam decides to stay on Earth in 1996, living in Sarah Jane's spare room for a while to help her with some projects: she plans on contacting her parents at a point after she originally left with the Doctor. She doesn't get the opportunity to say goodbye to Fitz.

Fitz was left on Anathema in 1779 by Mother Mathara, where he became one of the Remote, grew old, and died. He has been Remembered several times, eventually becoming Kode after two hundred years. He was thirty-three years old in 1800, having not seen the Doctor for four years. The Remote transceiver had a damaging effect on his DNA, rendering him sterile. Kode agrees to be Remembered by a modified remembrance tank controlled by the TARDIS, which rebuilds him into as close an approximation of the original Fitz as is possible. Before being Remembered for the first time, Fitz didn't actually die, but was taken from Anathema by Mother Mathara and became a full-time member of Faction Paradox, eventually becoming Father Kreiner: the Faction left a copy of his biodata in Anathema's remembrance tanks, which eventually became Kode. Father Kreiner was put in charge of one of the last remaining Remote colonies, was cut off from the rest of the Faction by the War, and eventually ends up on Dust c3796. Over the two-thousand years since he last saw the Doctor, he has become largely cybernetic and consumed by hatred for the Doctor: he intends to try and kill the Third Doctor when they meet on Dust, even though he knows the Doctor hasn't met him yet. He loses an arm to I. M. Foreman's unleashed thirteenth incarnation on Dust, which sucks the biodata out of it. He tries to grab hold of the travelling show when it leaves Dust, but is dragged into the Vortex instead: I. M. Foreman retrieves him and traps him in the Vortex in her bottle universe.

Sarah Jane has a prized collection of Puffin originals. She is still in touch with Jeremy Fitzoliver, whom she phones here (The Paradise of Death, The Ghost of N-Space). Jeremy has friends in the Home Office. He has worked in the Middle East. Sarah Jane still has a copy of the TARDIS key.

Carol Bell left UNIT in 1979 to pursue a business career [but see The Face of the Enemy].

The TARDIS library contains issues of House and TARDIS. There is a 1952 OS map of Berkshire stored in the TARDIS scanner [see The Visitation for more of this sort of thing]. Following the events here, there are still two Saudi Arabian soldiers wandering the corridors of the TARDIS.

Genetic Politics Beyond the Third Zone suggests that Marinus in the Voora Marinii group of planets is a sociological experiment engineered by Faction Paradox, which would explain the Voord's fetishistic dress sense and tendency to wear receivers on their heads (see The Keys of Marinus).

Links: Interference: Book Two. Alien Bodies, Unnatural History. An Unearthly Child (I. M. Foreman). For the Third Doctor, this story takes place between The Monster of Peladon and Robot, the Doctor having just left Quiescia, where he buried Laika (see Alien Bodies). The Eighth Doctor notes that the TARDIS has recently been visiting Earth a lot, mentioning Sixties London (Revolution Man), Scandinavia (Dominion), San Francisco (Unnatural History) and the Battle of the Bulge (Autumn Mist). He again recalls being imprisoned on Ha'olam (Seeing I). The Doctor has told Sam the truth about Jack the Ripper (Matrix, The Pit). There are references to Rassilon, Omega (The Three Doctors, Arc of Infinity), Chung Sen (The King of Terror), Stattenheim (The Mark of the Rani, The Two Doctors, First Frontier), Morestra (Zeta Major), the Master, Cybermen, Drashigs (Carnival of Monsters), and Bandrils (Timelash). The Doctor notes that he has met Vampires "and worse" from outside the universe (State of Decay, The Pit).

Location: Dust, c3796; Foreman's World, date unknown but some time after 3796; London, Newbury, Esher, Geneva, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, August 1996; Anathema, August 1996, 1799, 1800 and 1801; and the Justinian, 2596.

Future History: The Justinian is the ship that first carried colonists to Ordifica; it arrived in 2296, making Ordifica the oldest colony planet in its area of space. Circa 2596, Ordifica has three hundred million human inhabitants.

The world police bans religion during the 2050s. There are references to the Power Blocs of the 2080s (Warriors of the Deep). The Black Seed Movement is active in 2043.

Unrecorded Adventures: The Fourth Doctor bought Sarah Jane a stuffed owl in a jumble sale in Brighton in 1948. After he regenerated, he began redesigning the TARDIS key, leaving various different versions scattered around the TARDIS.

Zoe bought a James Stewart mask made from an intelligent memory polymer at the Grand Festival of Zymymus Midamor. She may have also bought a Kim Novak mask; both masks are still in the TARDIS.

The Doctor visits somewhere in April 1963 to replace the jacket he lost in Saudi Arabia.

The Bottom Line: "That doesn't make sense!" "Doesn't it? Well, never mind. It sounded good." After the rather slow Book One, Book Two provides an astonishing finale that plays with Doctor Who's continuity like nothing ever before. Miles' witty prose makes the novel fly by, as he provides audacious twists including the various fates of Fitz and the hugely controversial treatment of the Third Doctor: in retrospect, the only disappointment here is that the promisingly epic set up provided by Miles was abruptly torn to pieces by the embarrassing mess of The Ancestor Cell.

Discontinuity Guide by Paul Clarke

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