Interference (novel)

Interference
Doctor:	Eighth Doctor
Secondary Doctor:	Third Doctor
Companions:	Sam, Fitz, Sarah, Compassion
Series details
First release:	2 August 1999
Publisher:	BBC Books
BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures
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Next →	The Blue Angel
BBC Past Doctor Adventures
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Next →	City at World's End

You may be looking for the novel as it exists within the DWU.

Interference was a two-part Doctor Who story written by Lawrence Miles and published by BBC Books. It featured the Eighth Doctor, Fitz Kreiner, and Sam Jones alongside the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. Its two volumes, subtitled Shock Tactic and The Hour of the Geek, were both released on 2 August 1999.

Overview

As a multi-Doctor story, Interference's two volumes comprised the output of both BBC Books' Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures lines for August 1999. Since then, the two books have usually been counted as the 25th and 26th Eighth Doctor Adventures. As of 2021, Interference is the only two-part novel ever published as part of a Doctor Who range.

It was the final story for companion Sam Jones and the first for Compassion, beginning a character arc which lasted until The Shadows of Avalon in February 2000. The novel also featured one of the only prose-based regenerations of the Doctor.

Interference built on the concepts of Faction Paradox and the War in Heaven, both of which were introduced in author Lawrence Miles' previous Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Alien Bodies. It also introduced several elements, such as the Eleven-Day Empire and the Remote, which later played important roles in the Faction Paradox series.

While most multi-part stories with a single name, such as Big Finish's Human Resources or BBC Wales' The End of Time, are combined onto one page on this wiki, Interference's sheer size necessitates a different treatment. For this reason, while a pieced-together, linearised summary of Interference as a whole is given below, the publisher's summaries, "References" and "Continuity" lists, and external links for each individual volume can be found on their respective pages, Interference - Book One and Interference - Book Two.

Structure

Each book was split into two distinct but linked stories, "What Happened on Earth" and "What Happened on Dust", set during the Eighth and Third Doctor's lives respectively. "What Happened on Earth" comprised the majority of the narrative, over twice as long as "What Happened on Dust". Sarah Jane Smith and Fitz Kreiner were the only characters to appear in both.

"What Happened on Earth" encompassed twenty-four chapters, one coda, and twelve brief vignettes called "Travels with Fitz" after every second chapter. Part One of "What Happened on Earth" included Chapters 1-13, while Part Two contained Chapters 14-24 and the coda; the twelve "Travels with Fitz" scenes were split evenly between the two volumes. "What Happened on Dust" encompassed ten chapters, split evenly between Parts One and Two, and one ending coda.

The stories were joined by a six-part linking narrative called "Foreman's World", which featured just the Eighth Doctor and I.M. Foreman. The three sections in each book were named after the time of day they take place: in Book One, "Morning", "Afternoon", and "Evening on the First Day"; in Book Two, "Morning", "Afternoon", and "Evening on the Second Day". The two parts of "What Happened on Earth" were told between "Morning" and "Afternoon" on their respective days, while "What Happened on Dust" was placed between "Afternoon" and "Evening".

Plot

What Happened on Earth

Since Sam Jones' decision to leave the TARDIS, the Eighth Doctor has been trying to avoid her home time of late 1990s Earth, but he is summoned to 1996 by Coldicott via space-time telegraph when a group of aliens called the Remote contacted the United Nations to sell them weapons. After arriving on Earth, the TARDIS team splits up: the Eighth Doctor leaves to follow a lead, while Sam stays in London to meet the Remote and Fitz heads to Geneva to keep an eye on the United Nations and their troublesome new division UNISYC.

Sam is left purposeless after the Remote never appear and the Doctor fails to return. She begins investigating the Remote herself, leading her to COPEX, an international conference for torture devices where she finds the Remote Guest and Kode accompanying the businessman Alan Llewis and some Ogron bodyguards. Sam follows the group to a hotel, but she is caught by Sarah Jane Smith, who is herself investigating the Remote while undercover as "Sarah Bland". Sarah shares what she has found: the Remote have a weapon called the Cold that can remove its target from the universe. However, the Remote catch Sarah and Sam spying, then kidnap them for interrogation. The Remote Compassion puts a Remote receiver on Sam, which reminds Sam of when she took drugs in her parents' attic and had a fit of paranoia. Compassion tells her how the Remote derive all their principles from raw unfiltered media consumption.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has been senselessly accused of espionage and is being kept in a prison cell with a writer named Badar. They are repeatedly tortured. The Doctor struggles to focus on escape, unable to differentiate between his nightmares and reality. The Doctor tells Badar about his adventures, and Badar challenges him about why he refuses to intervene with humanity's greatest tragedies, even as he interferes with so many other planets. Badar is executed.

Even though Llewis has realised that he's in far over his head, he finishes the deal with Guest to distribute the Cold. Guest then brings Sarah and Sam to a warehouse for further interrogation, but Sarah tricks him into summoning K9. She escapes in the confusion, but not before Compassion sprays Sam with the Cold, and Sam disappears. Sarah tracks down Sam's home address in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Shoreditch, where Sam has just taken drugs in her parents' attic. Picking up signals from the world around her, Sam warns her friends not to open the door lest she see Sarah before their first meeting and cause a paradox. The Ogron Lost Boy, who has been planning to defect against his Remote employers, contacts Sarah and leads her to the Remote's TARDIS detection equipment, which Sarah will use to track the Doctor. Sarah also steals one of the surveillance units Guest sold to Llewis.

Sam emerges from the Cold in the Remote homecity of Anathema. Anathema is densely inundated with signals sent out from a central transmitter, and Sam starts piecing the images together into a story. She sees Rassilon and the ancient Gallifreyans fighting vampiric beings, the same screaming faces she had seen inside the Cold, and trapping them inside containment shells disguised as planets, though she knows the story must be influenced by Faction Paradox propaganda.

The Doctor's willpower is dampened by the brutal torture, and his mind keeps wandering to his worries about what Sam will do with her life after leaving the TARDIS, but he manages to use his own blood to write temporal equations on the floor of his cell. The mathematics removes his body from time and space, putting him in a temporary store room in the TARDIS where he hopes to collect his thoughts and devise a plan. However, his distraction while writing the equations has also brought Sarah to the room, and she gives him the surveillance device, which the Doctor doesn't know what to do with. Sarah's presence destabilised the equations, and the Doctor is returned to his cell.

In Part Two, Sarah returns home. Lost Boy explains that the Remote have tried selling the Cold to the United Nations, individual countries, and finally COPEX in an attempt to disturb Earth history, attract Time Lord attention, and steal a TARDIS. Aided by information from Jeremy, Sarah deduces that the Doctor was investigating the countries that bought the Cold, meaning he is trapped in Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Kode discovers Lost Boy's betrayal and captures him and Sarah. He forces them to use the TARDIS detection equipment to lead him to the Doctor's TARDIS in Riyadh, which he intends to capture for the Remote. They quickly subdue the guards who were left in the TARDIS, Kode begins to pick up signals from the Doctor's TARDIS, and rescuing the Doctor becomes his prime objective. Sarah, Lost Boy, and Kode track the surveillance device Sarah gave the Doctor, materialise the TARDIS in the prison cell, and incapacitate the guards that are beating the Doctor. Freed, the Doctor begins to recover in the TARDIS.

In Anathema, Sam comes to better understand Remote culture. She follows Compassion to the top of the transmitter, where Guest puts Sam inside a sphere of the Cold so he can analyse her thoughts and signals to assess what threat she poses. Sam sees the Time Lords' destruction of Ordifica, which her mind interprets as a BBC drama starring Sam and the Doctor fighting bug-eyed monsters; Sam's decisions in a series of ethical puzzles serve as tests for Guest and Compassion to understand Sam's principles. Guest concludes that Sam makes her moral decisions based on the aesthetics of the challenge: she is more willing to destroy a planet than a single baby. He summarises this as "aesthetics". At the same time, the Cold has absorbed Sam's principles and incorporated them into the Remote's media. Compassion realises this means that Guest is priming the Remote to sacrifice themselves for their principles, even if it leads to civil war, and she decides to leave the colony.

The Doctor takes the TARDIS to Shoreditch to fulfill a promise to Badar. Kode, whose personality now includes the new principle of sacrifice, threatens to kill himself unless the Doctor take him to Anathema immediately. After dropping off Sarah at her home, the Doctor grants Kode's request, simultaneously realising why his mannerisms seem so familiar. Meanwhile, Llewis and his employees visit the Remote's warehouse to pick up the Cold, but the Remote tell him that the deal is off and they are taking the Cold back to Anathema. He tries to fight them, but the Remote agents call a bomber to kamikaze the warehouse. At the last second, Llewis enters a transportation gateway to Anathema.

On Anathema, civil war has broken out, just as Compassion feared. She pulls Sam out of the Cold and they begin to escape in a fighter. Sam realises that the city is built on a giant warship, which Compassion explains was built by the Time Lords during the War in Heaven. The Time Lords sent it to destroy the Enemy's homeworld, Earth, as a last resort scenario. Before they can make their escape, however, Sam and Compassion are collected by Guest, who the Doctor has brought onto the TARDIS. Guest reveals that he has only been selling the skin of the Cold, as the actual Cold, a spirit kept inside the warship, can only be reached by TARDIS. Using Sam as his hostage, Guest forces the Doctor to bring him to the Cold, and Guest is absorbed into it.

However, the Doctor recognises that the Cold is not a spirit but a validium shield covering a rift that leads to another universe. When the warship is activated, it will open the rift and absorb Earth, which will then be destroyed by the monstrous creatures on the other side. The Doctor unsuccessfully tries to warn Guest to stop the Cold from activating, but Sam is able to do it, thanks to her knowledge of Remote culture, and the Cold remains dormant.

The Doctor pilots the warship to a safer place where the Remote can live in peace, although he takes Kode and Compassion into the TARDIS, since they have been changed too much by their time on Earth. He also drops Sam off on Earth, where she will stay with Sarah until she can return home without causing a paradox. Together they will continue their investigation into COPEX and the international weapons trade. The Doctor never tells how he fulfilled his promise to Badar by visiting Sam during her drug trip and convincing her to start a cultural revolution, giving her a direction for the rest of her life.

Lost deep in the corridors of the TARDIS, the two Arabian guards are still wandering.

Travels with Fitz

After the Doctor leaves Fitz in Geneva, UNISYC locks him in a building for his "own protection". His only entertainment for a week is annoying the guards, watching the television, and reading the miscellaneous paperback books. Suddenly, the guards are attacked by two humans, clad in black plastic respirators and smooth body armour, who had appeared through a rectangular window. One of the people sprays him with the Cold, and Fitz sees it growing eyes, opening its mouths, and eating him. He spends centuries drifting in and out of consciousness in the Cold before being rescued by Faction Paradox in 2593 on the planet Ordifica. There he is exposed to continuous Faction propaganda, and in 2594 he sceptically lets Mother Mathara initiate him into the lowest orders of the Faction and give a receiver. In 2596, Fitz is evacuated with Nathaniel Guest, Laura Tobin, and two thousand others in the Justinian just before the Time Lords destroy the planet.

In Part Two, the group of refugees is rehomed by Faction Paradox. While Fitz hopes they're going back to 20th century Earth so he can reunite with the Doctor, they actually travel to the year 1799, where they settle on Anathema on its two-century journey to Earth. Fitz is determined to return to the Doctor in 1996, but his exposure to the media through his receiver begins to transform him, changing his DNA so he becomes sterile. He knows his only options are to stay on the ship or join Faction Paradox when Mathara returns, but he rejects both of them; after examining the Remembrance Tanks the colonists are using to reproduce and checking how Tobin will remember him (as a "code-boy" who at least likes to spend time with his friends), Fitz becomes determined to commit suicide so that a remembered copy of himself can take his place while himself escapes in death before he can become too much like the other colonists. The penultimate vignette leaves him in 1801 standing on the edge of a building asking himself if he can really bring himself to jump.

Finally, on Anathema in 1996, Kode is in a Remembrance Tank which the Doctor has modified with a connection to the TARDIS. The Doctor reassures Kode that the Tank will return him to how Fitz was, but that will mean wiping centuries of his memories and changing his physical features. Despite the Doctor's reassurances that Kode doesn't need to go through with the process, Kode insists, and Fitz's old memories start returning to him, including the initiation into Faction Paradox where, among the loa, a one-armed shadow – or rather, a shadow with a shriveled arm – showed Fitz his true destiny: "laying screaming in the dirt of a faraway planet as something huge and ancient started to eat him alive." But that memory vanishes, and Fitz wakes up.

What Happened on Dust

On the distant planet Dust in the 38th century, town defender Magdelana Bishop confronts two Remote riders that were sent to execute her and seize the town. The Remote have been taking over various settlements on Dust, and they crucify Bishop just as they did the two strange aliens that previously tried to stop them. However, before the execution, they are interrupted by the arrival of a strange man wearing a blindfold, whose presence puzzles the Remote. The man tries to frighten them by predicting an imminent eclipse, but the Remote know about astronomy and are therefore unimpressed; the man then explains that he is a Time Lord and he caused the eclipse with a stellar manipulator in orbit. The Remote verify his species and retreat, even as the man, I.M. Foreman, tells Magdelena that he was bluffing about the stellar manipulator.

Following the events of the prologue of Alien Bodies, the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith are on their way back to Earth in the TARDIS when the Doctor discovers a door that didn't used to exist. He opens it and walks down a new passageway that ends in a grey concrete wall smeared in a time equation, though it takes him a moment to realise there is a man laying in the centre of it, as if pinned to the wall. This man is his future self, the Eighth Doctor, who first apologises for the mistake in his equation before deducing that "some force" is tying together their time zones. He speculates that it might be Faction Paradox, then makes his past self promise not to let himself "get diverted" on his way to Earth. He then falls back asleep.

Returning to the console room, the Third Doctor finds it seeping with blood, with Sarah looking on horrified. The TARDIS abrubtly lands on Dust, and the Doctor steps out to read a poster for "I.M. Foreman's One-Species Nongenetically-Engineered Travelling Show". He quickly ducks away from Sarah, who waits for him at the TARDIS before giving up and going to find him at the show, which had been set up right outside the town wall.

The town residents are more excited than they'd ever been, and Magdelana, fearing a trap, is on high alert, so when the Doctor comes to her for help finding Sarah, she holds him in her office at gunpoint. Despite herself, she finds herself giving him more information about the town and the Remote; the Doctor theorises, based on his future self's warning, that some force has brought the show, the Remote, the two other offworlders, and himself to Dust. She makes him coffee, but when the Doctor tried gently psychoanalysing her based on her description of her childhood, she threw it in his face, scalding him and telling him not to make guesses about her. She reminds him that she is protecting the town, and she will protect it brutally, especially from any offworlders.

Meanwhile, the two Remote riders return to their town of Anathema II, built where their spaceship had crashed and named for the famous Remote city that disappeared two thousand years prior. The oldest Remote, the town's informal leader, launches probes that detect no fewer than thirteen Gallifreyan life forms just outside the town. He announces to the Remote that he has found a way for them to escape the planet, and they begin preparing for battle. He reflects on his collection of heads of all the Time Lords he's killed, noting that he wants to add the Doctor's head one day, but he knows that is never likely.

The show begins with I.M. Foreman's brief introduction for each of the acts and a demonstration of his own stigmata. Sarah visits a few of the acts and has a particularly disorienting visit with the If, who gives her some brief visions of her future: first a glimpse of a pub in 1999, where she sat with her husband and her best friend wondering if someone would join them; then a snippet of her best friend's speech at Sarah's funeral.

A sandstorm begins, and the Doctor and Magdelana arrive at the show just as the Remote ship emerges from the clouds and the Remote begin invading the show. Even though one soldier shoots I.M. Foreman in the head, the Doctor, Sarah, and Foreman safely escape into a wagon. Part One ends with the Mothers and Fathers of the Eleven-Day Empire agreeing to send a Faction Paradox warship to Dust.

In Part Two, the Faction warship arrives at a planet a few light-years from Dust. It had been colonized by humanity and infiltrated by the Faction before Earth fell and the colony was abandoned. To prevent the Time Lords from noticing the Faction's other activities during their inevitable investigation of Dust, the warship destroys every settlement on the planet.

In I.M. Foreman's wagon, he spits out the Remote bullet that he had been holding in his mouth since he caught it in his teeth, a trick he taught himself based on the common Earth show-stopper; Sarah informs him that when humans do it, it's just an illusion, which surprises him. The Doctor observes that the wagon is a "complex event" similar to his TARDIS, which Sarah summarises as "like a TARDIS, only not in a box." Foreman explains that he was a Gallifreyan priest before the High Council dissolved the monasteries, and that for millions of years his Traveling Show has been moving outwards along the spiral of the galaxy visiting civilised planets and showing the inhabitants the impossible to remind them of their potential. It was for a visit to London in 1964 that, over several years, the Traveling Show grew itself an urban junkyard to inhabit, a temporal anomaly that drew in the Doctor's TARDIS prior to the events of An Unearthly Child just as it had drawn the Remote and the Doctor's TARDIS to Dust.

Outside the wagon, the Remote invasion of the town is underway. Though Remote armour has changed in appearance since the 20th century, most of the Remote are still mostly human underneath. The only exception is the oldest member, who is so old and frayed that his armour is the only thing keeping him together: his flesh has grown into the cracks of the plating, and his receiver's wiring has fused into his spinal column. The receiver has been mostly dormant for centuries, but when it activates – for instance, upon detecting a nearby Time Lord - it fills him with adrenaline. He thinks back to his earliest memories: his first meeting with the Doctor; his first trip on the TARDIS; his first encounter with the Faction; and more importantly, his failure to commit suicide on Anathema, his decision to join Mother Mathara while a copy of his biodata stayed behind in the Remembrance Tanks,and his rise to the rank of Father in the Eleven-Day Empire, after which he was put in charge of one of the last Remote communities. Father Kreiner promises his soldiers that with the technology in Foreman's wagons, they will leave the planet that night.

Magdelana is hiding between two of the wagons, doing her best to avoid being noticed by the Remote soldiers. With her shotgun she briefly aims at the Remote leader before he moves out of the way; then she focuses on the Doctor, who has stepped out of I.M. Foreman's wagon and is strolling toward the soldiers. Magdelana has the overwhelming urge to pull the trigger, but she is distracted by Mohandas the Geek, who at that moment steps out of his wagon next to her.

Although the Doctor's plan is to introduce himself with a simple hello, Father Kreiner's receiver floods his body with adrenaline and he punches the Doctor in the face. Sarah listens as Kreiner apologises and the two start a conversation. When the Doctor comments that this visit to Dust is "wrong", Kreiner bitterly alludes to how the Doctor abandoned him and left him to wait for 2000 years, though rather than explaining it all, he would rather just kill him, even if the events haven't happened yet for the Doctor. The Doctor threatens to leave with the Traveling Show, but Kreiner reveals that the Remote are using their biosphere technology to lock it in place. High above them all, the Faction Paradox warship arrives in orbit to watch the events.

Frantic, Sarah consults I.M. Foreman, but he shushes her: through meditation, he is coordinating a plan with the other performers in the show (except for unstable Number Thirteen). The Doctor approaches his wagon with the Father's ultimatum: they surrender the Traveling Show and the Doctor's life in exchange for the lives of the townsfolk. However, the Doctor is distracted and disturbed by the revelation that the two crucified aliens were Ogron Lords, as the idea of the Time Lords using Ogron slaves is inconceivable to him. Despite not having a plan, I.M. Foreman proposes a solution.

Ten minutes later, the Doctor, Sarah, and I.M. Foreman exit the wagon as all the other freak show members (save Number Thirteen) emerge from theirs. In a long line they process to the town square, where Father Kreiner is waiting with the Remote and the hostage townspeople. I.M. Foreman dramatically reveals that the other members of his Traveling Show are actually his twelve future incarnations, all of whom he found in the wastelands of Gallifrey shortly after the Time Lords abolished the priesthood. Therefore, if Kreiner kills them all on Dust, it will create a formidable paradox.

While this doesn't frighten Kreiner, who has plenty of experience with paradox, I.M. Foreman further explains that Number Thirteen has the form of raw life energy, and it's been locked up in the wagon, growing and consuming biodata, since the very beginning. At that moment, on the outskirts of town, the Traveling Show unleashes Number Thirteen, who immediately forces itself onto the Remote ship and absorbs all its crew. It then crumples the ship in midair and decides to fall onto the square, absorbing all the people standing in it.

The Doctor and Sarah run away before Number Thirteen engulfs the square, and Father Kreiner tries to follow them but pauses at the screams of his Remote soldiers. A single tendril lashes out and catches his arm by accident; the armour pumps sedatives into his body to dull the pain, but his arm and its armour look shrink-wrapped, tiny, and weak, as if the monster sucked his biodata from the limb.

Meanwhile, the Doctor flies the TARDIS over the square to where I.M. Foreman and his other eleven non-final incarnations are surrounded by Number Thirteen, who is leaving them for last. The Doctor quickly links the TARDIS to the Traveling Show, which adopts the TARDIS's form and function and rescues the incarnations of Foreman. Father Kreiner, believing this second TARDIS to be the Eighth Doctor's, uses the last of the armour's power to cut through Number Thirteen and latch onto the TARDIS as it enters the Vortex, but he is roughly half a second too late. As the Traveling Show is unburdened by the restrictions usually placed on TARDISes, the Doctor sends it to Gallifrey's ancient past, where it explodes, leaving its passengers to regenerate together in a fashion so traumatic that their memories are all lost. Hours later, the original I.M. Foreman wanders over a nearby crag and goes to help them.

As a final errand, the Doctor returns the TARDIS to Dust and confronts Number Thirteen, reminding it about I.M. Foreman's goals and the Remote biosphere-manipulation machinery it now contains. At the Doctor's suggestion, it merges with Dust, flowing into every plant and animal on the planet.

As the Doctor walks back to the TARDIS, Magdelana Bishop confronts him with her shotgun. He confirms her logic that where one time traveller visits, others tend to appear, and such an event happened on Dust that day; he then reassures her that the Remote and I.M. Foreman have been "buried" and that he is on his way to leave. Magdelana stops him, however, and reiterates her duty to protect the town: she can't take the chance of more time travellers arriving, so she needs to make sure every trace of the Doctor is buried as well. With that, she shoots him in the chest and leaves him in the street to die.

In the ending Coda, Sarah finds the Doctor and cradles his head as he slowly dies and regeneration begins. His intended final words are, "A tear, Sarah Jane?" but before he slips away he adds, "This is wrong."

Mother Mathara watches from the Faction warship in orbit. Cousin Llewis ruminates that they have failed their mission of infecting I.M. Foreman with a biodata virus during regeneration so Foreman's World could become a new Faction homeworld. Instead, the virus latched onto the Third Doctor, beginning a process in his biodata that would, by his eighth incarnation, convert him to the Faction's perspective. An early symptom of this will be the disappearance of his shadow (which occurred for the Eighth Doctor in Unnatural History), though Mathara notes that the Faction can fit him with a fake one.

Her job complete, Magdelana Bishop discards her "first assigned defender" badge.

Foreman's World

The Eighth Doctor, suspicious that his adventure on Earth was connected in some important way with his visit to Dust, arrives one morning on Foreman's World to consult with I.M. Foreman, in the hopes that she can refresh his memory and notice something he hasn't. The Doctor is fascinated with her universe-in-a-bottle, finding a little version of his prior self inside it, but they leave it on a hill so he can tell her what happened on Earth.

He doesn't tire of talking until the sun has almost set, at which point Foreman asks him some questions about his shadow, which has apparently reappeared but seems sickly, vague, and thin. She then decides it is her turn to tell her story about what happened on Dust. After night has fallen, Foreman stops talking so the two can finish their dinner, and she tells the Doctor her theory about why the Time Lords are the way they are. Book One ends as she asks him if he wants to spend the night there with her.

Lawrence Miles' Faction Paradox short story Toy Story is set in the Doctor's TARDIS during the night, while the Doctor is elsewhere on the planet "going through the motions".

At the start of Book Two, I.M. Foreman and the Doctor wake up on the hillside. After the two watch clouds together for a while, the Doctor theorises that the TARDIS was behaving so erratically during Sam's last few adventures because it wanted to prepare for what was about to happen. He then finishes telling Foreman what happened on Earth, concluding by reiterating his suspicions that something had changed, and that it was somehow connected to him, the Remote, and his time spent in the prison.

Foreman presents the Doctor a riddle about a goose in a bottle, then finishes her story about what happened on Dust. The Doctor ruminates on the identity of the Remote's leader, saying he seems familiar in hindsight and that the answer feels obvious but his mind doesn't want him to work it out. This has been bothering him since his adventure on Earth, and he asks Foreman if, since she swallowed up the leader, she has access to the memories. She recognises this as the Doctor's true motive for the visit. However, she reveals to the Doctor that she did not consume the leader: he was actually sucked into the Time Vortex, and while she was making her bottle universe, she trapped him inside its Time Vortex.

The Doctor, disappointed, asks Foreman some questions about her World, then has a brief conversation with Magdelana Bishop, whose body Foreman has been consensually possessing. Foreman finally reveals the answer to the goose riddle and kisses him goodbye as he leaves in his TARDIS. I.M. Foreman returns to the hill to discover that her bottle universe has been stolen, likely by the High Council. This does not bother her much.

This leads into the events of Lawrence Miles' New Adventures novel Dead Romance, while the Eighth Doctor's adventures with Fitz and Compassion continue in The Blue Angel.

Characters

What Happened on Earth

• Eighth Doctor
• Sam Jones
• Sarah Jane Smith
• Guest
• Compassion
• Kode
• Badar
• Lost Boy
• K9
• Jeremy
• Alan Llewis
• Coldicott

Travels with Fitz

• Fitz Kreiner
• Mathara
• Nathaniel Guest
• Laura Tobin

What Happened on Dust

• Third Doctor
• Sarah Jane Smith
• Magdelana Bishop
• I.M. Foreman
• Father Kreiner

Volumes

#	Title	Author	Released
1	Book One (Shock Tactic)	Lawrence Miles	2 August 1999
2	Book Two (The Hour of the Geek)

Notes

• The prose in "What Happened on Earth" shifted between conventional narrative and teleplay/scene breakdown. Miles later experimented with similar formats as author of The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and as editor of Of the City of the Saved....
• The November 1998 working draft shown to Kate Orman and Jon Blum did not include the Third Doctor.
• Sarah's alias "Sarah Bland" was a reference to the pseudonym "Robin Bland" used by Robert Holmes for his rewrite of Terrance Dicks' script for The Brain of Morbius.
• It is left unclear how much time has passed between the "What Happened on Earth" and "Foreman's World" sections of the book. For instance, when I.M. Foreman asks the Eighth Doctor what happened to Compassion, he says, "That's not important now. If I told you what happened next, we’d be here all week." Although Miles' short story Toy Story confirmed that Compassion and Fitz were in the TARDIS during the Doctor's visit with Foreman, it is still left ambiguous as to how much time has passed or how Compassion came to join the TARDIS team. Some fans have placed the Eighth Doctor's adventures with Charley Pollard in the Big Finish Main Range into this gap in the timeline.
• According to an interview Lawrence Miles gave in 2003, the two books of Interference sold more than anything he had written previously.
• Miles planned to continue the "fractured biodata" plotline from this novel in Valentine's Day, but the story was rejected by BBC Books editor Justin Richards. Elements of Valentine's Day were later incorporated into Miles' 2001 Eighth Doctor novel The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.

Cover gallery

The covers were designed by Black Sheep so that, when placed next to each other in different orders, they would show the complete faces of the two Doctors in Interference, as portrayed by Jon Pertwee and Paul McGann.

• 

  Book One (Shock Tactic)

• 

  Book Two (The Hour of the Geek)

External links

• Interference at the Faction Paradox wiki