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Divided Loyalties (novel)

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Divided Loyalties was the twenty-sixth novel in the BBC Past Doctor Adventures series. It was written by Gary Russell, released 4 October 1999 and featured the Fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan Jovanka.

prose stub

This was the first Past Doctor Adventures novel to feature this line up of Doctor and companions and the first full length novel to do so since 1996's Cold Fusion. This was the first, and as of 2017, only full length novel to feature the Celestial Toymaker.

Publisher's summary

There are some evils in the universe that need to be fought. And others that need redeeming...

Many years ago the First Doctor, a student at the Academy on Gallifrey, lost a friend to the mysterious and malevolent force known as the Celestial Toymaker. Now, in his fifth incarnation, the Doctor receives a telepathic call from his long-lost classmate, begging for help.

As he sets out to rescue his friend and exact revenge, the Doctor's companions become increasingly involved. Adric, determined to justify his place aboard the TARDIS, opts to face the Toymaker's game challenges while Nyssa, angered by the Doctor's actions, finds herself excluded by the people she thought were her friends. And what is the connection between the Toymaker and the planet Dymok, whose comatose inhabitants find a new saviour in the shape of Tegan Jovanka?

Plot

to be added

Characters

Little Boy II crew

Nightmare

References

Foods and beverages

  • Adric doesn't know what pizza is.

Individuals

  • While attempting to turn Adric against the Doctor, the Toymaker creates a hallucination of a childhood friend of Adric, who reminds him about some of the things he's run into with the Doctor, including Great Vampires, Tharils, the Tremas Master, the Ferutu and Terileptils.
  • Runcible threatens to report Magnus and Mortimus to Lord Cardinal Zass.
  • Tegan is Jewish.

Planets

Species

Technology

Dates

Time Lords

Notes

Several aspects of this novel seem designed to spoof Virgin Books Doctor Who ranges.

  • The title of the novel is taken from an episode of the TV show Babylon 5, which was very popular in the mid 1990s. In homage to the New Adventures trend of naming chapters after songs from indie bands, each chapter in the book is the title of a song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
  • The book is set between the TV episodes The Visitation and Black Orchid, despite the fact that there is no gap between those two stories. For the Toymaker, it apparently leads into The Nightmare Fair, though it is incompatible with various elements of that story.
  • Each character receives a lengthy "flashback" dream sequence full of unnecessary background information and references to previous episodes. Many of these contradict the very episodes they reference: for instance, the Rassilon Imprimatur is presented as a real thing that a person needs in order to travel through time, despite The Two Doctors only including it as a lie and despite the on-screen evidence of the Doctor's many companions. Similarly, the Master is called by the name "Koschei", despite that the Second Doctor didn't recognise him by that name in The Dark Path.
  • Later, the dream sequences are revealed to have been created by the Celestial Toymaker to frustrate the Doctor and his companions. The Toymaker's statement that he was tormenting the Doctor "because I have the power to, and I can!" acts as commentary on the Virgin Books authors' attitudes toward adding backstory to characters from the Doctor Who television series.

Continuity

External links

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