Downtime (novelisation)

Downtime
Based on:	Downtime
Main character(s):	Victoria, Sarah, the Brigadier
Main enemy:	Great Intelligence
Main setting:	London, 1984 and 1995 Tibet, 1995
Key crew
Publisher:	Virgin Books
Writer:	Marc Platt
Cover by:	Paul Campbell
Release details
Release number:	18
Release date:	18 January 1996
Format:	Paperback Book; 35 Chapters, 263 Pages
ISBN:	ISBN 0-426-20462-X
Virgin Missing Adventures
← Previous	Lords of the Storm
Next →	The Man in the Velvet Mask

You may be looking for the comic story of the same name or the home video original.

Downtime, by Marc Platt, was a novelisation of the independent film Downtime, released as the eighteenth book of the Virgin Missing Adventures line. It was the second of two novelisations published under the line; the other, The Ghosts of N-Space, was a novelisation of a BBC Radio Drama. This release was also the second spin-off based story to be released by Virgin Books. The other was the novel Shakedown, which was in part a novelisation/tie-in to Reeltime Pictures's Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans.

Publisher's summary

Across the room, in a high-backed leather chair, Victoria saw the old man from the reading room. His face was curiously young for someone so long dead.

In 1966, the Doctor defeated the Great Intelligence, but he knew it wasn't a final victory. And his companion Victoria, whose mind had once hosted the evil entity, might still fall prey to its power.

Now it seems that his fears are justified. In a Tibetan monastery, the monks display unearthly powers — UNIT are investigating. A new university has opened in London with a secret agenda that may threaten the whole country. Victoria, abandoned in an age very different from her own, and haunted by visions of a father she refuses to believe is dead, is slipping into despair and madness. But are the visions which plague her really hallucinations? Or has the Great Intelligence once again made Earth its target for invasion?

Plot

to be added

Characters

• Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
• Victoria Waterfield
• Sarah Jane Smith
• K9
• Kate Lethbridge-Stewart
• Gordon James Lethbridge-Stewart
• Daniel Hinton
• Ex-Flight Sergeant "Harrods" Haroldson
• Professor Edward Travers
• Captain Douglas Cavendish
• Brigadier Charles Crichton
• Christopher Rice
• Anthony
• Roxana Cywynski
• Abbot Thonmi
• Twickers
• Lawyer
• Third Doctor

Worldbuilding

• The third and fourth incarnations of the Doctor each visited Victoria, offering to take her travelling with them.
• Victoria's mother Edith Waterfield died on 23 November 1863.

Notes

• This story is the only Virgin Missing Adventures release in which the Doctor does not appear prominently, itself stemming from a production that was meant to focus almost exclusively on the Doctor's associates.
• The book features a foreword by Keith Barnfather, and also contains an eight-page photo section featuring stills from the film, which are reproduced in black-and-white.
• The Brigadier tells Sarah Jane Smith to quote the codes NN and QQ when she contacts UNIT H.Q., which are in real life the production codes for the television stories The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear respectively.
• This story continues the events of the television story The Web of Fear and concludes the "Yeti trilogy" which began with the television story The Abominable Snowmen.

Continuity

to be added

Deviations from the televised story

• Victoria's visit to Tibet is expanded upon.
• An original scene features Sarah confronting a Yeti in the zoo.
• A scene features a baby Yeti biting Margaret Thatcher.

External links

• Downtime at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• The Discontinuity Guide to: Downtime at The Whoniverse
• The Cloister Library: Downtime