Introducing the Real Doctor's Wife: Cold Fusion, by Lance Parkin

"Turning her over onto her front, kissing the back of her neck, his hand running down her body. His thoughts dipping into hers, tasting her emotions. She was propping herself up on her elbows. Her body was familiar, he'd known it for centuries, seen it for centuries, seen it age ever so slowly. The birthmark on her ankle, the pattern of freckles on her shoulderblades. Only he had ever had those thoughts."

The above is one of the rather racy memories that Dr. Who experiences when he mindmelds with "Patience" a mysterious woman from ancient Gallifrey who turns out to (probably) be his wife. That the Virgin novels would include sex scenes involving, or at least appearing to involve, Dr. Who is an example of just how radical they were. Of course, the introduction of the lost Doctor's wife is not the only ambitious thing about this Missing Adventure. It is multi-Doctor story involving two Doctors, two sets of companions, includes an encounter by the Doctor with Adric after his death, as well as a complex plot involving another universe and dealing with themes of political conflict and a clash between magic and science. More than any other Missing Adventure, Cold Fusion pursues the New Adventures path of radically reshaping what Doctor Who can do. Lance Parkin is one of the few Doctor Who writers who could write a novel like this and he truly makes it work.

Lance Parkin pursues a somewhat ambivalent course with Patience. In some parts of the book, it is implied that she is the Doctor's wife. Yet he also implies, equally strongly, that she is the wife of the Other, an ancient Gallifreyan who was an associate of Rassilon and Omega. Since Remembrance of the Daleks, the Seventh Doctor material has hinted at a connection between the Other and Dr. Who. This myth arc was concluded with Lungbarrow by Marc Platt. This revealed that Dr. Who was an reincarnation of the Other. It also made the monstrous and abominable suggestion that Susan was not the Doctor's granddaughter, but the granddaughter of the Other. This is a terrible idea. Not only does it pander to the preference of some fans for an asexual Doctor, but it seems to diminish the genuine bond between the Hartnell Doctor and Susan. Lance Parkin seems to play a double game in Cold Fusion; on the one hand implying that the Doctor is a reincarnation of the Other and on the other hand implying that the Doctor was really married to Patience in some time in the past. He also stronly implies that the Doctor (or Other) married to Patience was one of the Morbius faces, specifically the Douglas Camfield face. I have said before that I do not care for the idea of pre-Hartnell Doctors. However, as the Doctor's experiences are only revealed through recovered memories when he mindmelds with Patience, the reader is left free to figure it out themselves. The Infinity Doctors seems to contradict this. The Infinity Doctor tells Patience that he is in his old body, while she has regenerated. This would imply that the Infinity Doctor has not regenerated, that he is a younger Hartnell Doctor and that there are no pre-Hartnell incarnations.

Freed from the constraints of the Virgin editorship, Parkin would go on to write Gallifrey Chronicles and The Infinity Doctors. While neither book is exactly intended as a retcon of Lungbarrow, Parkin drives a few nails into the coffin of the Virgin novel, by giving the Doctor biological parents and implying even more strongly in The Infinity Doctors than in Cold Fusion that the Doctor is the husband of Patience and the biological grandfather of Susan. Many fans have wrongly assumed that The Infinity Doctors is an apocryphal Unbound Adventure that does not take place in real continuity. This is a mistake; Lance Parkin incorporates it into his AHistory chronology, while acknowledging the conflict with Lungbarrow. Other fans have treated Infinity Doctors as an 8th Doctor story, taking place on a reconstructed Gallifrey. Parkin has stated this was not his intention and it is contradicted by the fact the Infinity Doctor is surprised by Patience's regeneration. It is clearly set in the Doctor's past, but Patience's future.

In trying to make sense of how Patience fits into Doctor Who continuity, I not only consulted Parkin's own AHistory, but I also bravely attempted to study the perplexing and bewildering chronology of the Doctor on Curufea.Com. Curufea offers a fascinating attempt to tie up disparate sources about the life of Dr. Who and the history of Gallifrey. It is difficult to read because of the multi-coloured text and like most fan chronologies, it completely ignores the TV Comics and World Distributors annuals (as does AHistory sadly). According to Curufea, Patience was in a love triangle with Omega and the Other in the Dark Times of Gallifrey. She went on to marry one of the Morbius Doctors. When the Time Lords began to kill their children for being womb-born, she travelled back to the Dark Times to ensure Susan's safety, possibly in the company of her son. She then attempted to leave ancient Gallifrey in a proto-type TARDIS, only to be discovered in Cold Fusion.


The attempt to re-sexualize the Doctor that we see in Cold Fusion (and in Infinity Doctors) has been done very differently from the New Series. While the Tennant Doctor kisses one woman after another, the Fifth Doctor in Cold Fusion recovers tender and bittersweet memories of a love we have never been allowed to see. Contrast Patience with the horrible attempts to create a "Doctor's wife" in the New Series. We get the pathetic notion of a man wishing his car was a sexy woman in The Doctor's Wife and elsewhere, we get River Song, a character who tastelessly flirts and who exists primarily to serve Moffat's banal and mechanical plot-writing. Patience, on the other hand, is a beautiful and mysterious figure, elegant and almost goddess-like. Somebody we can imagine being married to the Doctor. Like him, we never know her real name (of course, he is called Who, but this may be a pseudonym). In a DVD commentary, Andrew Cartmel suggested that it was a mistake that the Doctor was given a granddaughter at the birth of the show. In his opinion, the Doctor should not have a family. Cartmel did a great job as script writer in the 80s and he did write the hauntingly brilliant Cat's Cradle: Warhead, but a lot of his ideas about Doctor Who are very wrong. That is certainly one of them. That Dr. Who has a granddaughter actually makes him more mysterious. It means that he had children of which we know nothing. What happened to them? It also implies he had a partner of whom we know nothing. What happened to her? Cold Fusion offers us a glimpse of the answers to these questions, but still leaves the Doctor and his past as mysterious as before.

Forgive me if I am talking a lot about Patience and forgetting the novel. The introduction of this character is such a bit development that it does almost overshadow the brilliance of the novel itself. Cold Fusion is extremely well written. Lance Parkin does a great job of portraying two Doctors, the Fifth and the Seventh, along with their companions, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric, and Chris and Roz. Parkin's prose has a strong flavour of Terrance Dicks. One thing that he particularly excels at is writing action scenes, never allowing the reader to be bored by his prose. It is very much in the style of a Seventh Doctor adventure, but it manages to fit the very different Fifth Doctor era characters into it.

The Crystal Bucephalus by Craig Hinton (Virgin Missing Adventure)

The late Craig Hinton's novels are best remembered for their multitude of continuity references. Personally, I find these rather fun. They were rather well done in Millennial Rites, which I very much liked. They got a little silly in Quantum Archangel, but that novel was alright in places. The Crystal Bucephalus is perhaps most well known for offering an explanation for the absence of Kamelion for most of the stories of Season 21, as well as the change of look to the Console Room in The Five Doctors.

I read most of Crystal Bucephalus in one go. It has the makings of a very good Doctor Who novel. It handles the regulars very well and gives them a much needed temporal change of outfits. It has a fascinatingly soap opera feel, with an odd emphasis on the relationships between the non-returning characters. The premise of the Doctor investing in a time-travelling restaurant is an imaginative one. We also get some hints about the future destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords, which are poignant now that we have seen the new series. The influence of Douglas Adams in its themes is very apparent.

What lets down The Crystal Bucephalus is the unbelievably high volume of techno-babble. This could rival a Star Trek novel in its use of jargon. I'm afraid to say I found much of the plot practically incomprehensible. Coupled with this techno-jargon are a number of 'time-wimey' elements that typically add to the confusion.

Still, it has some fun moments and offers a somewhat different take on the team of the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough than what we saw on screen. For instance, where on television, Tegan did a lot of very unfeasible running in high heels. Here, she does a Romana I and kicks them off to run about in her stocking feet!

Millennial Rites, by Craig Hintom (Virgin Missing Adventure)

"Anne placed the glass on the table. 'Yog-Sothoth? Now why does that sound familiar?'

'It's the Intelligence's real name and it crops up in certain arcane literature from time to time. Over the billennia, he mounted thousands- millions- of campaigns against inhabited planets, trying out the gambits and games that he had played on computers in his previous existence. On Hiskith, he chose to use the Hiskith version of Koala bears to invade; on Danos, domestic animals- like dogs- were the vanguard. And on earth, well the Intelligence seemed to have a fondness for Tibet and the Yeti.' The Doctor held up his hands. 'Don't ask me why. Perhaps some childhood teddy-bear fetish.'"

I quite like Millennial Rites. It is hardly the greatest Doctor Who novel, but it is enjoyable and is easily better than his later Sixth Doctor novel, The Quantum Archangel. Two factors made me want to read it; the influence of Lovecraft (this is thematic, rather than stylistic) and the fact that it dates UNIT to the 1980s, contrary to other Virgin novels.

Millennial Rites has been criticised for all the heavy continuity stuff with Anne Travers and the Great Intelligence. This misses the point. It actually plays a trick on the unknowing reader, letting them think that this is a sequel to Web of Fear, with the Great Intelligence behind it all, when in fact the alien menace is something else entirely. Anne Travers herself is portrayed in typically grim Virgin fashion as an angry and embittered woman. I don't have a problem with that; why should everyone always be grateful to the Doctor? I am a bit annoyed that Hinton kills her off at the end though (why do Virgin writers have to do that?).

Things get very weird when reality is reshaped and London turns into a place resembling an hybrid of a Michael Moorcock novel and Warhammer 40K. The main characters all take on important roles in this bizarre role-playing game style world. It is quite a clever idea.

Craig Hinton does a good job of portraying the Sixth Doctor. Of course, he brings up all that stuff about the Valeyard. It is good, but personally I am a bit sceptical of the claim that the Valeyard really is the Doctor. I suppose I shouldn't be, being a broad canonist (the novels and audios mostly seem to take the claim at face value), but I just feel it is too bonkers an idea to be assumed as truth.

Mel is brilliant in this book. She gets a much needed rehabilitation. She is presented as cheerful and moralistic, but also clever and resourceful. She is very much like the Mel we see in the audio, The Juggernauts. The minor characters have something of a soap opera quality, though they are well-rounded.

The reference to Rachel Jensen in Remembrance of the Daleks peaked my obsessive fannish side, not least because I consider her to be the most sexy character to have appeared in Doctor Who (including that Burberry-clad chav, Romana I). We are told that Anne Travers replaced Jensen as scientific advisor to the cabinet in the 1980s. This surprised me because Jensen was talking about retiring and growing Begonias in Remembrance and I assumed that she was in her late forties or early fifties in 1963. More recently I read John Peel's novel War of the Daleks that states that Rachel Jensen was in her mid-thirties in 1963. While that age description makes her talk of retiring in Remembrance of the Daleks odd (perhaps she was married and could live off her husband's income?) does fit better with the idea of her being scientific advisor to the cabinet in the early 80s. I can't believe it, this is the longest paragraph in this review- you can see where my priorities are. Anyway, Millennial Rites is a good novel.

Goth Opera, by Paul Cornell (Virgin Missing Adventure)

Tegan flicked open a page and began to read at random and with force, drowning out the vampire's words. She kept on walking until she was nose to nose with the creature. 'You can't lay a finger on me, can you?' she told him. 'I've got a good book in my hands, and a dirty great snake in my brain, so get back!' She emphasised the point with a finger stuck very nearly up Jeremy's nose. 'Or I'll bite your head off.'

These days I don't like vampire stuff very much at all. I was introduced to the Anne Rice books when I was when I was 17 and read quite a few of them, though all the sex did bother my conscience. I also developed a collection of vampire movies that I destroyed about seven years ago when I decided they were not very edifying. Nevertheless, within the Doctor Who mythos I am quite fascinated by the idea of an ancient conflict between the vampires and the Time Lords. Goth Opera homes in on why this conflict seems so appropriate- the fact that there is a similarity between the immortal, invulnerable vampires and the immortal, invulnerable Time Lords. It is Goth Opera that first suggests the notion that the Time Lords gained their ability to regenerate from the vampires, a notion repeated in Lawrence Miles' Book of the War.

Paul Cornell is a great writer and it's hard to imagine him giving us a bad novel. Goth Opera maintains the standards to which he had kept in his New Adventures. Cornell liked to go to town on continuity references and he pushes it a little too far in describing Romana's escape from Ruath, an escapade that sees her ending up in a Drashig-filled miniscope, meeting Sabalom Glitz, before being rescued by Castellan Spandrell. It's a silly incident, but one can't help finding it funny.

Continuity-wise, this book is closely connected to Terrance Dicks' New Adventure, Blood Harvest. It would be helpful for readers to have read this before embarking on Goth Opera, but it can still be enjoyed without the knowledge of the events of Blood Harvest.

Nyssa gets to show some much needed personality in this book. Having her becoming a vampire made her so much more interesting that I wished she would stay that way. The Fifth Doctor is also very well portrayed, showing that breathless energy that made him so likable. However, for me it was Tegan who was the star of the show. She is so fiery! I love her description of the Fifth Doctor- "a really dull Romper Room reject who'd rather play bloody cricket than do anything entertaining." Cornell dwells on the fact that the Mara's possession is a permanent change to Tegan's nature. It does seem it is rather an improvement. The best moment in the book for me was when Tegan was completely unafraid of the vampire and chases him out of her room, having been taught to deal with his sort by her Serbian grandfather.

Yarven and Ruath are rather pantomime, but they are fun. The part where Ruath sacrifices herself to restore Yarven and then regenerates was cool. It was especially interesting to find out she was the Doctor's ex-girlfriend. I loved her description of Borusa's class at the academy:

Her eyes never left the Doctor's. 'Mortimus, the Rani, that idiot Magnus. And you, Doctor. All graduates of Borusa's Academy for Scoundrels.'

I thought the vampire baby was a little too comical to fit with the darker themes of the book. The story could have done without it. Nevertheless, the rest of the characters are very well conceived. Goth Opera is definitely one of the great books of the Virgin range of novels and a superb introduction to the Missing Adventures.