The Dark Path (novel)

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The Dark Path was the thirty-second novel in the Virgin Missing Adventures series. It was written by David A. McIntee and featured the Second Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon and Victoria Waterfield. This novel features one of the earliest encounters with the Master and the Doctor, greatly expanding on their personal histories on Gallifrey.

Publisher's summary

"He's one of my own people, Victoria, and he's hunting me."

Darkheart: a faded neutron star surrounded by dead planets. But there is life on one of these icy rocks — the last enclave of the Earth Empire, frozen in the image of another time. As the rest of the galaxy enjoys the fruits of the fledgling Federation, these isolated imperials, bound to obey a forgotten ideal, harbour a dark obsession.

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive to find that the Federation has at last come to reintegrate this lost colony, whether they like it or not. But all is not well in the Federation camp: relations and allegiances are changing. The fierce Veltrochni — angered by the murder of their kinsmen — have an entirely different agenda. And someone else is manipulating the mission for his own mysterious reasons — another time traveller, a suave and assured master of his work.

The Doctor must uncover the terrible secret which brought the Empire to this desolate sector, and find the source of the strange power maintaining their society. But can a Time Lord, facing the ultimate temptation, control his own desires?

Plot

to be added

Characters

References

Books

The Doctor

  • The Doctor is recognised as a Noble of Draconia.
  • At first, the Doctor is afraid that Koschei, despite being an old friend, is looking for him under the direction of the Time Lords.

Koschei

  • Koschei persuades Terrell to use the Darkheart to destroy Terileptus (home planet of the Terileptils).
  • Koschei uses hypnotism to convince some of the crew he and Ailla have been onboard the Piri Reis all along.

Organisations

Planets

  • The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria have just departed Vortis.
  • Darkheart is the location of a device constructed by Chronovores to heal their young and sick. It is actually a hollow bubble made from neutron star material connected to the star by a dimensional bridge
  • Koschei shows Victoria Skaro prior to the period when the Daleks developed space travel.
  • In a bid to prevent Ailla from being killed in the first place before he learns the truth, Koschei shows Terrell how to focus a blast of temporal energy from the Darkheart and the Imperials use it to destroy Terileptus.
  • Koschei compares the pyramid on Darkheart to be similar to the ones on Phaester Osiris.

Psychology

  • Victoria gets hypnotised by Koschei, initially playing on the idea that destroying a planet is not always a crime by referencing the possibility that he could do this to the Daleks.

Species

  • The Veltrochni previously triumphed against the Tzun confederacy. Many of them took to the stars to become nomads to escape the Earth Empire so they wouldn't have history repeated.
  • The Doctor refers to the Animus as Lloigor.
  • Sherwin wishes there was a mentiad on board her ship.
  • Epilira is an Alpha Centauran who was a cultural advisor on the ship Piri Reis.
  • Victoria distantly observes the early Daleks in the Dalek City.
  • There is a mural in the Empire's colony depicting the conquest of the Solonian "mutts."
  • The Federation ship has a culturally diverse crew - humans, a Draconian, a number of Terileptils and an Alpha Centauran among others.

TARDIS

  • Koschei's TARDIS is a Type 45 with user definable macros for easy navigation.
  • The Doctor can use Koschei's TARDIS to remotely control his.
  • Koschei deletes Ailla's rooms in his TARDIS after encountering her new incarnation.

Technology

  • The Darkheart is the technology of the Chronovores. It focuses time energy on any area the creatures needed to heal.
  • The Imperials have found the Darkheart and have learnt it can manipulate morphic fields, and have used it to become immortal. It has a side effect of rendering people sterile.

Theories and concepts

  • Koschei considers the Blinovitch Limitation Effect while pondering saving Ailla's life.
  • The Doctor once explained to Victoria you couldn't change the past in a TARDIS without splitting off another universe. Koschei confirms this before going on to explain that Darkheart can affect time anywhere.

Time Lords

Transport technology

  • "Telefrag" is a Marine Corps term for transmatting somebody into the exact same coordinates as somebody else (the result is "splat").

Notes

  • The story takes place between The Web of Fear and Fury from the Deep, and follows on from Twilight of the Gods.
  • While the publisher's summary mentions "Time Lord", the text of the novel does not. This preserves the inner continuity of the first mention of the name in the television story The War Games.
  • This is the very first, and one of the few, stories released which depict the Second Doctor in his own story with the Master, though it would be chronologically preceded by AUDIO: The Home Guard. Some readings of PROSE: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons also suggest that the Master appeared in The War Games itself, as the War Chief, (PROSE: CIA File Extracts)]] backs this claim up. Additionally, AUDIO: The Black Hole saw the Second Doctor encounter Pavo, a character intended to be an even earlier version of the Master who has yet to become a Renegade, although this is not confirmed in-story.
  • Scenes cut from the novel were published in the charity anthology Perfect Timing.
  • Victoria briefly observes the Daleks in their city, marking the only appearance of the Daleks in the Virgin Missing Adventures.
  • The Master was illustrated on the cover of the book as already having the likeness of Roger Delgado. However, this is inaccurate to the text of the book, which features an incarnation of the Master who has yet to taken on that name, instead going by "Koschei", and whose involvement in the plot ends with him trapped in mortal peril at the same time he takes on the name of "the Master" for the first time. The Face of the Enemy would later see the Master looking back on "Koschei's death", as well as regarding the name as no longer applying to the person he had since become. Koschei, at an earlier point in his timeline, would later appear under license from David McIntee in the short story Rebel Rebel, which added the detail of "green eyes" to his description, further solidifying that he could not be the same incarnation as Delgado.
  • Koschei, often dubbed "Koschei the Deathless" is a stock antagonist in Slavic mythology. Among his key characteristics are being a villainous sorcerer who sought immortality, and being locked underneath a tower for inhuman amounts of time. The former characteristic closely parallels a recurring character trait of the Master, while the DWU Koschei would be depicted in the latter predicament (at a point prior to his becoming "the Master") in the short story Rebel Rebel.

Continuity

External links

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According to one account, the Master had the appearance of Roger Delgado while on Gallifrey. According to another, he had Anthony Ainley's likeness. According to another one, the one with James Dreyfus's appearance was the incarnation who ran away from Gallifrey.

Divided Loyalties, A Brief History of Time Lords and The Legions of Death feature, or otherwise acknowledge, the War Chief, but in the process contradicted the notion put forward by other stories that he was an incarnation of the Master.

One account suggests that the incarnation portrayed by Roger Delgado may be the same as the one portrayed by Peter Pratt while some others distinguish them.

According to one account, the incarnation portrayed by Gordon Tipple is the one portrayed by Anthony Ainley, while some others state that the Ainley one was already lost by then.

While fighting to extend his life at the end of his regeneration cycle, many bodies were possessed by the Beevers incarnation, but all kept somehow reverting to his real being until he finally regenerated into the MacQueen one. Hence, these sections cannot be strictly chronological
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