The Eight Doctors (novel)
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Publisher's Summary
Recuperating after the trauma of his recent regeneration, the Doctor falls foul of a final booby trap set by his arch-enemy, the Master.
When he recovers, the disorientated Doctor looks in a mirror and sees the face of a stranger. He knows only that he is called the Doctor - nothing more. But something deep inside tells him to trust the TARDIS, and his hands move over the controls of their own accord.
The TARDIS takes him to a strangely familiar junkyard in late-nineties London, where he is flung into a confrontation between local drug-dealers and Samantha Jones, a rebellious teenager from Coal Hill School.
But the Doctor soon finds the TARDIS transporting him to various other places in order to recover all his memories - and that involves seeing seven strangely-familiar faces...
Characters
- Eighth Doctor
- First Doctor
- Second Doctor
- Third Doctor
- Fourth Doctor
- Fifth Doctor
- Sixth Doctor
- Seventh Doctor
- The Master
- Retrieves his TARDIS from Devil's End.
- Eats a Deathworm to cheat death (again).
- The Valeyard
- Miss Olive Hawthorne
- May have latent telekinetic abilities.
- Tarak
- Dead vampiric leader.
- Ivo
- Plans to make an Inn of the town hall.
- Rassilon
- Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
- Meets the Eighth Doctor.
References
- Flavia is president.
- Drashigs are time scooped in order to launch an attack on the Doctor.
- Shobogans speak highly of the Doctor.
- Deathworms were tamed by the Morg. The Master experimented on them for his own purposes.
- The Eye of Harmony seen in the TARDIS is a symbolic manifestation.
- The Raston Warrior Robot feeds on atomic radiation in the atmosphere. You can confuse it with two similar brain wave patterns.
- Rassilon's Red is Gallifrey's finest vintage, the Sixth Doctor and Eighth Doctor drink several goblets it.
Notes
- There are several...discontinuities within The Eight Doctors (owed perhaps to Dicks's tendency to insert continuity links everywhere).
- Flavia is president, however according to continuity so far Romana is President (Dicks' own novel Blood Harvest established it).
- Borusa's time scoop was previously destroyed in Goth Opera is now eaten.
- In this novel the Seventh Doctor has a "mid life crisis" while trying to deal with his approaching death...which was more or less addressed in The Room With No Doors and Lungbarrow.
- There is an explanation of how the Master became worm like in Doctor Who: The TV Movie.
- By the end of the novel:
- All 8 of the Doctors have appeared.
- Two versions of the Master (Roger Delgado and another) have appeared.
- At one point there are two Sixth Doctors.
- Borusa testifies in a future where he's still locked in the Dark Tower.
Continuity
- This novel also makes for one of the more continuity heavy novels with Terrance Dicks referencing: DW: State of Decay (which he had previous written a sequel as NA: Blood Harvest). Also DW: The Five Doctors (also by Dicks) is references heavily here.
- The Eight Doctors revisits point in the past during:
- First Doctor: DW: An Unearthly Child
- Second Doctor: At the end of DW: The War Games, or just prior to PDA: Players
- Third Doctor: After DW: The Sea Devils
- Fourth Doctor: After DW: State of Decay
- Fifth Doctor: After DW: The Five Doctors
- Sixth Doctor: Just before DW: The Ultimate Foe
- Seventh Doctor: Some point before DW: Doctor Who: The TV Movie
- The Master retrieves his TARDIS from where he hid it in PDA: The Face of the Enemy.
- The BBC audio Bounty follows directly from this.
- While pondering the Doctor's interaction with his other selves, Flavia mentions the events of DW:The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, and The Two Doctors as other events where multiple incarnations were present. She neglects to mention MA:Cold Fusion (Where the Fifth and Seventh Doctors met), BFA:The Sirens of Time (Featuring the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors), PDA:Heart of the TARDIS (Featuring the Second and Fourth Doctors), PDA:Wolfsbane (Featuring the Eighth and Fourth Doctors), EDA:Interference (Featuring the Third and Eight Doctors), BFA:Zagreus (Featuring the Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors) and PDA:Players (Featuring the Second and Sixth Doctors as well) but this neglect could be explained; the Doctors' actions in Sirens erased the events in the adventure from history, so presumably their meeting ceased to have ever occurred in the first place, in Cold Fusion the destabilisation to the timeline could have been so great that the Time Lords failed to notice a little detail like the Doctor crossing his own time stream on top of everything else they had to deal with, for Interference, Wolfsbane and Zagreus, it has yet to happen in the Eighth Doctor's point-of-view, and as for the rest - Flavia was not present during these events or the Doctors featured in them never met at all or exchanged looks and sped off.
