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Eighth Doctor Adventures

Break, damn you! Break! You've never had a spanner like this thrown in you! Chew on me till your teeth crack. Grind me up till your gears lock. I'm the nail in your tyre, the potato jammed in your exhaust pipe, the treacle poured in your petrol tank. I'm the banana peel beneath your foot, the joker that ruins your straight flush, the coin that always comes up heads and the gun you didn't know was loaded. I am the Doctor!

— The Eighth Doctor, Camera Obscura

After the Seventh Doctor's Expanded Universe tenure in the Virgin New Adventures came to an end in 1997, BBC Books picked up the licence to produce new Doctor Who literature from Virgin Publishing. Realising Virgin had the right idea, BBC decided to have an honest crack at it, moving on from wiley ol' McCoy onto the newly regenerated Paul McGann.

Running from 1997 to 2005, a series of 74 novels revolving around the exploits of the Eighth Doctor and his companions. These books, commonly referred to as the EDAs, were notable for fleshing out the character of the Eighth Doctor after his short run in the television movie, for having several interconnected Story Arcs, for having been seemingly written on drugs, and having a very compelling cast of characters.

The tone of the novels is a bit Darker and Edgier and more mature than the television series (usually not as "edgy" as the New Adventures, but arguably "deeper"). No Hugging, No Kissing is averted, people get hurt, the 'right thing' is often not cut and dried, the Doctor happily snogs his male companion just because he feels like it, and there's a quite a bit of sex, albeit not explicit.

As with the Virgin Books, a companion range featuring the previous Doctors (i.e. One through Seven) was published alongside the Eighth Doctor novels, doing much the same thing. This line was called the slightly-more-clunky "Past Doctor Adventures" (as opposed to the "Missing Adventures" that Virgin had called their similar line).

The title "Eighth Doctor Adventures" was also used for several series of Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas starring the Eighth Doctor.

Has a character page. Please keep most of the character-specific tropes there.

This series provides examples of:

Absurdly Youthful Father: The Doctor is reunited with his daughter Miranda when she's caught up to his apparent age and seems to have more grey hair than he does.
The Alleged Car: The Doctor's Trabant in Father Time. He brought it all the way from East Germany to England! Nobody knows why...
All The Myriad Ways: Just... a lot. Deconstructed in Timeless, where Chloe thinks it's okay to chuck out people's alternate selves so that there can exist one copy who has a nice life. Other characters disagree.
Alternate Reality Episode: The Obverse, from The Blue Angel, where the Doctor is a mentally ill human with two hearts who has dreams about the events in the main universe, and his companions are his tenants.
Alternate Universe: Several.
Ambiguous Disorder: Erasmus in Timeless is a Gentle Giant who's generally perceived as having something wrong with him, but basically all it amounts to is being naive enough to think his ward, who looks and generally acts about eight years old, has good ideas. Besides that, he's articulate and responsible enough to seem basically normal. It seems that there's just something a little childish about his mannerisms, although you could say the same thing about the Doctor.
And the Adventure Continues: After spending the entire novel haphazardly tying up the series' leftover plot threads, the final book The Gallifrey Chronicles ends just as the Doctor and friends finally set off to confront the Monster of the Week.
Animal Motifs
- The Doctor is repeatedly compared to a cat, possibly because Cats Have Nine Lives, or some sort of allusion to the ability of a cat to land on its feet, or because cats are mysterious and cuddly at the same time. He's represented by a stray cat in Seeing I and goes native among the tigers in The Year of Intelligent Tigers. In EarthWorld, Anji tries to decide which animal from The Jungle Book he reminds her of, and after initially thinking of and then dismissing the tiger, can't decide between the snake, the bear, and the panther, but is quite sure Fitz is the orangutan*
  This initially seems like she's making fun of Fitz because he's a, ahem
  , Butt Monkey, but note that this takes place in the book when he finally starts to come to terms with being an Artificial Human, and the orangutan wants to be human]].
- Apparently, Sabbath is some sort of canid; he's compared at one point to a mastiff, and at another point Anji, talking about how he's an ineffective, annoying villain, compares him to Wile E. Coyote.
- Trix's Green Eyes are repeatedly described as "catlike".
- In "Frontier Worlds," Compassion says that she and Fitz are like the Doctor's pets. She compares herself to a cat, which thinks "My owner loves me and feeds me and takes care of me so I must be god." Fitz, she says, is a dog, thinking "My owner loves me and feeds me and takes care of me, so he must be god."
- In "Fear Itself," Fitz and the Doctor are asked what animals they think they are most like. Fitz says he is a dog, "probably a golden retriever," while the Doctor thinks of himself as a unicorn.
Armed With Canon: Some writers take thinly-veiled, snarky potshots at each other, which can get really hilarious.
Ascended Fanfic: Portia da Costa's erotic fiction novel The Stranger sees her heroine having lots and lots of sex with an amnesiac hero who's a blatant Expy of the Eighth Doctor (or just Paul McGann himself, given the flashback with the Withnail and I slash) - the last EDA namechecks this book's main character in a list of the Doctor's offscreen 'companions'.
Asleep For Days: In The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, the Doctor sleeps for a week after losing one of his hearts.
Bad Dreams: Happens to both Fitz and the Doctor.
- Flashback Nightmare: In Camera Obscura, the Doctor falls asleep on a train and brings the reader up to speed on one of the salient points of the story arc.
- Nightmare Sequence: Fitz has a particularly unsettling one about his late mum at one point.
This Bed of Rose's: The Doctor, Fitz, and Anji are staying at Scarlette's brothel for most of The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, and the young ladies working there help them to save the world from extradimensional apes and whatnot.
Beware the Nice Ones: Karl Sadeghi in Year of Intelligent Tigers, big time.
Big Eater: Both Fitz and the Doctor, although it's portrayed in different ways. There's no particular reason Fitz stays rail-thin despite consuming enough fat and sugar for a small army, but it's implied that stuffing your face with no consequences is a perk of being a Time Lord. Anji finds it all somewhat distressing.
Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Sam, Anji, and Compassion, respectively, and their personalities contrast interestingly. Sam is too emotional and idealistic, while Compassion is too cold and cynical. Anji, the brunette, is more balanced.
Bloodier and Gorier: Quite a lot. The Doctor is injured in probably a majority of the books, sometimes in ways that would kill a normal person.
Bride and Switch: In The Book of the Still, between Fitz and the Doctor. Well, it never really happened; it's actually a virtual reality world where the Doctor is a Card-Carrying Villain trying to force some poor girl into marriage, but gets a Disguised in Drag Fitz instead. It's a sort of Lotus-Eater Machine for Fitz, since he gets to be a swashbuckling hero... wearing a Fairytale Wedding Dress and marrying the Doctor isn't actually stated to be part of the appeal for him, but one never knows.
Brief Accent Imitation: Fitz and Trix both make a bit of a habit of it, although Trix sometimes takes it to unsettling excess. Even Sabbath gets in on the fun. In The Domino Effect, he puts on a fake Upper Class Twit accent just to be sarcastic*
which must require a pretty good grasp of the distinction between regular upper class and twitlike upper class, since he did go to Cambridge
...]], and in The Last Resort he does an odd accent for no reason at all:
"Hi matey. Fancy a chip?"
Canon Immigrant: The Brigadier's American counterpart, General Kramer, who appears in Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, originated in one of Blum's fanworks.
Cartwright Curse: Fitz, the poor dope. The Doctor tends toward this with the few love interests he has, but it was subverted in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street: Scarlette faked her death just because she knew he should leave.
Can't Live with Them, Can't Live without Them: Anji, toward Fitz. She once fantasized about hitting him with a chair, and is often annoyed by his old-fashioned opinions and mannerisms. However, he's sort of her Not Love Interest, whom she cares about just as much as she would about a love interest*
they don't have much UST, and it's all on his part
; she's just as grief-stricken, if not more, over his apparent impending doom as she was about the death of her boyfriend of five years. His opinion of her, however, seems to be less conflicted.
Cat Folk: The tigers in the novel The Year of Intelligent Tigers. They're just intelligent tigers who have Bizarre Alien Biology, lay eggs, and have two opposable thumbs on each paw.
The Chick: Notable because in most team set-ups, this role falls upon Fitz and not the female companions.
Children Raise You: Where do all these little blond Time Moppets come from, anyway? The Doctor seems to be too Oblivious to Love for the matchmaking element of the trope to really work out. In Anji's case, Chloe seems to actually realize that as the adopted daughter of a slightly lonely and troubled businesswoman, she's supposed to help her find a love interest, so she wanders off and gets escorted home by an eligible bachelor who Anji ends up engaged to.
Cloning Blues: Fitz's main story arc hinges on his being a clone of his original self, brought back by the TARDIS after Fitz 1.0 joins the Faction Paradox and becomes a bad guy. Okay, you want a full explanation?
Fitz 1.0 was separated from the Doctor and joined Faction Paradox, going on to become Father Kreiner
. Before this, Fitz put himself in a Remembrance Tank, which was a sort of cloning device that would remake a person after they died from the memories of the people who knew them. A few remembrances down the line, Kode was created. He met up with the Doctor, who eventually recognized Fitz in him. The TARDIS re-remembered Kode into Fitz (with a few upgrades and smoothed edges, similar to what the Doctor did to Sam) and it's this Fitz 2.0 that continues traveling with the Doctor. Got all that?]]
Cold-Blooded Torture: Happens to the Doctor for most of book one of Interference.
Cold War: The Doctor is Walking the Earth throughout the 20th century. Naturally, this comes up, particularly in Endgame, where Josef Stalin actually makes a brief appearance.
Continuity Nod: Stacy and Ssard, companions of the Doctor from a relatively obscure line of comic strips in the Radio Times, feature in Placebo Effect. It's revealed in the story that the Doctor had those Radio Times adventures while Sam was dropped off somewhere, but returned for her before she knew he'd been gone.
Creator Provincialism: YMMV, but taken to extremes with end of the Earth Arc. Escape Velocity author Colin Brake seemed to bend over backwards to make sure the Doctor didn't actually have to go to America to get to "St. Louis."
Depending on the Writer: The major details are maintained, but some fluctuate wildly depending on who the author is. For example, Stephen Cole and Orman-Blum disagree severely on Fitz's height, Lance Parkin has Alternative Character Interpretations of everyone, Sabbath's portrayal and stature*
His height is sometimes described as unremarkable. Sometimes he's taller than the Doctor. It was once implied that the Doctor is taller than Fitz. They are all sometimes described as tall. The Doctor is 5'8". It's confusing.
shift from book to book, and everything gets gayer when Paul Magrs is writing.
Denser and Wackier: In relation to the TV series: more Talking Animals, more breaches of the laws of physics for cheap tricks, more McDonaldses in Ancient Egypt, more Badass Normals who do things that seem like they should involve a wizard somewhere, more Rule of Funny, and far, far more Meta Fiction. Yet it still manages to be at least as serious, in other ways, as the TV series, especially relative to the TV series that preceded it rather than the new one. Sure, the Doctor coming across as manic-depressive is nothing new these days, but the EDAs did it first!
Distressed Dude: The Doctor ends up captured and often tied up in most of the books, sometimes more than once per book*
especially if Lloyd Rose is writing
. He often seems to enjoy getting the chance to annoy someone. And he almost always gets himself out of his own predicaments, although sometimes with a bit of help. This happens to Fitz, too, although since he's less badass, he's less likely to save his own ass.
Dreaming The Truth: The Obverse!Doctor. Or maybe not.
Easily Forgiven: Karl Sadeghi at the end of The Year of Intelligent Tigers. A week after committing mass murder on their fellows, Karl is fielding requests from tigers to join his orchestra. The Doctor's reaction, on the other hand, seems totally proportionate.
Expecting Someone Taller: In Seeing I, Sam has some new friends who meet the Doctor after she's had the chance to talk him up a bit, and this trope is nearly quoted verbatim. Based on the height of the actor who played him in the film, he's 5'8".
Expendable Clone: Particularly evident in The Last Resort, where almost everyone gets extremely prone to dying, just because almost everyone suddenly has all these doppelgangers. Or else can teleport and therefore safely make fun of everyone else's mortality rate.
Eye Scream: Seeing I. The ordinary implants needed to use INC technology are bad enough, but in OBFSC prison an invasive contact lens becomes the stuff of nightmares — especially for the Doctor.
Face Heel Turn: Romana, and to a lesser extent Original!Fitz in The Ancestor Cell. Some fans were annoyed by the former, and a bit confused by the latter.
Failure Is the Only Option: For a while, it seemed like there are three constants in the EDAs: Fitz will always smoke, the Doctor will always have amnesia, and Anji will never get back home. But eventually the Doctor gets Anji home. And then she comes back, mostly for Fitz. And then the Doctor gets her home again. And in The Gallifrey Chronicles, the Doctor seems to be regaining his memories. But Fitz will always smoke.
Fate Worse than Death: Becoming TARDIS breeding stock, being vaporized into the Time Vortex, turning into a monster with a clock for a face, madness-inducing brain slugs... etc., etc., and so forth.
Fictional Document: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, in a way, is one, since it's supposedly a piece of nonfiction involving the Doctor. And it also contains a number of other fictional documents, which end up showing that the Doctor writes like he's on something and Sabbath has a stenographer who, stranjly, can't spell. Fictional Documents play major roles in the plot of Time Zero and Mad Dogs and Englishmen. And there's one in The Blue Angel which is... significant for some reason.
Foreshadowing: Around the end of the run and the time when the new series was being announced, the Ninth Doctor was getting mentions and small cameos.
Future Imperfect: The theme park on New Jupiter, EarthWorld, is filled with this. It's meant to put different eras of Earth history on display. Their research needs a little work.
Funetik Aksent: Often used when Fitz is doing a Brief Accent Imitation. And in The Book of the Still, he gets a bit self-conscious about how unsophisticated he is, and his third person narration mentions, "you can take the boy out of Norrrrf Laaanden, but you couldn’t take the Norrrrf Laaanden out of the boy", which is pretty clearly a self-deprecating exaggeration. And, yes, that's funetikspeak for "North London". Otherwise, generally averted.
Funbag Airbag: Narrowly avoided by the alternate Doctor in The Blue Angel, who almost jams his nose into someone's bosom while walking up stairs. Too bad he's Ambiguously Gay and probably didn't enjoy it.
Gainax Ending: Is the ending of The Blue Angel symbolic, or just a Real Hallucinations Are Weirder sort of thing? And how much of it is real?
Genre Savvy: Most of the characters have their moments.
Genre Shift: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street reads like a historical non-fiction work instead of the usual style. Therein lies the heart of its Love It or Hate It status.
Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: It's morally acceptable for Fitz to smoke, because it was much more common in his era. In one of the books, Sabbath is smoking a cigar for some reason; the Good Smoking, Evil Smoking page says this means he must be evil, a self-important jerk, or Winston Churchill.
Heart Trauma: The Doctor loses one of his hearts. Long story short, it's not much fun for him.
Heel Face Turn: Sabbath, of course ending in Redemption Equals Death.
Heroic BSOD: A couple.
- After having to destroy Gallifrey (for the first time), the Doctor went through one that took a hundred years on Earth to recover from.
- In EarthWorld, Fitz has a truly massive one, about the fact he's a clone of the original Fitz Kreiner that's been "improved" by the TARDIS. It's worth noting it took him over ten books to finally have his meltdown over this. He must be very good at denial.
- In "Seeing I", the Doctor has one that it absolutely epic. *spoilers*
  While tracking down Sam, who'd been separated from the Doctor the last three books, the Doctor tracks her to a suspicious Mega Corp where she'd found employment as a data entry clerk under working conditions only a shadowrunner
  could appreciate. After forging an identity to get into the building and examine their records, the Doctor is found out, captured, and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment for industrial espionage. It's very much a Lighter and Softer prison, with organized activities, a library, music, and an understanding and sympathetic counselor who genuinely wants to help the Doctor with (what he sees as) his neuroses. Over 3 1/2 years (!!), the Doctor makes over a hundred escape attempts, thwarted every time. He starts to crack under the strain, turning his cell into a crayon picture Room Full of Crazy. He's not being mistreated in any way; they simply will. Not. Let. Him. Leave. For a man who can be anywhere and anywhen, this is like total sensory deprivation. He only escapes after eventually learning that the prison had implanted a control device in his eye that transmit everything he sees to prison security. After finally breaking out, being reunited with Sam, but then threatened with recapture by the very same counselor who promises that he'll be sent back to the same relatively nice prison to resume his "treatment, the Doctor snaps, screaming, begging not to be sent back, pleading for the terrible maximum security cell, torture, anywhere but there!]] *Interesting tidbit*
  This book is also where the Doctor loses the original costume he found during the TV Movie, as it was confiscated during his arrest and never recovered. Never daunted, by the end of the book, he's made a trip to an Australian tailor he knows who's made him an exact copy, this time from genuine period materials and durable construction that's made to last, as compared to the fancy dress replicas he had before that were already falling apart after years of hard wear.
Historical Domain Character: Surprisingly rare; they all seem to be concentrated between two adjacent books; The Turing Test and Endgame. The latter seems to mostly use it as an excuse for gratuitous Info Dump. Oh, and The Domino Effect reintroduces an Alternate Universe version of a previously seen Historical Domain Character, to fairly sad and touching effect, and then more or less Shoots The Shaggy Dog at the end.
Hotter and Sexier: A bit.
Hurt/Comfort Fic: Although not strictly fanfiction (although given how many fans there were writing the novels, the line between fanfiction and not did start to blur at times), more than a few of the novels in this range seemed to involve something very nasty happening to one of the characters at some point — the Doctor or Fitz were popular candidates — from which both their physical and emotional wounds would need to be nursed back to health by the others. Generally, if the name on the front cover was 'Kate Orman', you could be assured of at least one chapter of this nature showing up at some point.
Hyperspace Arsenal: Actually justified in Time Zero. Clothes that are bigger on the inside are useful for more than just super-effective Spanx. Although they are useful for that, too.
Incredibly Lame Pun: Fitz and the Doctor are both occasionally guilty of these, and, probably unsurprisingly, Fitz's name makes him a bit of a Phrase Catcher for bad puns. He even mentions a reasonably subtle one his mum made once in Frontier Worlds.
It Makes Sense in Context: For many stories, the authors seemed to have taken a twisted glee in just honestly summarising the premise of each novel in the blurb. This being Doctor Who, the results are...unique. For example, The Year of Intelligent Tigers starts with:
The weather is going to hell. The tigers are coming to town. And the Doctor has taken his violin and vanished.
It Runs in the Family: There's a reason Fitz's family is like this. But that's not a reason for why he's sometimes a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander.
It's Been Done: The fandom takes much glee in pointing these out.
- A rift in space and time opens in a major city, inciting a ton of general weirdness into said city? Unnatural History.
  - This book also has paradox machines.
- The Doctor being forced to destroy Gallifrey? Ancestor Cell.
- The first Doctor/Male Companion kiss? Beat you to it in Dominion.
- The Doctor, newly regenerated, picking up a blonde, teenage, contemporary London girl who falls for him? Sorry, Rose, Sam did it first.
- The Doctor grows a beard and gets married? The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.
- A skinny, kindhearted non-action guy gets copied and spends thousands of years waiting for the person he loves? Sorry, Rory, Fitz did it first.
- A TARDIS in a human body? Sorry, Idris, Compassion did it first.
- The TARDIS is cleverly referred to as being "old, new, borrowed, and blue"? Happened in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.
Jewish Mother: The Doctor's mother in The Blue Angel comes across as a little controlling, and has a thick Eastern European accent, creating an impression of Ambiguous Judaism. She also fusses a lot over his health, although since he's technically human but has two hearts, you can't blame her.
Lady Drunk: The Doctor's mum, again. She also never really left the 1920s. She's basically a Shout Out to Bette Midler's Delores Delago, so she's implicitly a White Dwarf Starlet. Oh, and she's a mermaid.
Late Arrival Spoiler: Fitz ends up replaced with a clone; the Doctor gets Trauma Induced Amnesia and spends about a hundred years Walking the Earth. If you've read this far down the page, You Should Know This Already. But it's about the journey, not the destination!
Legal Jailbait: A water nymph in The City of the Dead. And that's all I have to say about that.
Locked Out of the Loop: Fitz, with the TARDIS's aid and apparent blessing, spends a lot of time keeping the Doctor from remembering what happened before the Earth Arc.
Magic Realism: The Blue Angel. The Doctor's mum is a mermaid, so she's confined to a wheelchair and he has to mow her lawn for her. His two hearts are just a strange birth defect which she worries about. Almost all the weirdness takes place Through the Eyes of Madness. Fitz is theoretically sane, but has a conversation with a talking dog, but maybe he's just extremely drunk.
Mind Screw: The Blue Angel. Full stop.
- Interference, the book right before it, has a truly bizarre Framing Device and segments that suddenly become a screenplay just to be meta and confusing.
Mythology Gag: In The Fall of Yquantine, Fitz mentions having worked at "the Mother Black Cap in Camden Town in the sixties."
Naked People Are Funny: Talking poodles strip the TARDIS crew naked and fit them with dog collars. The Doctor plays along, Fitz is amused, and Anji is utterly humiliated.
Necromantic: The part in Interference where the Doctor turns Kode back into Fitz could be seen this way. Good job talking a teenage kid into suicide so you could be reunited with your friend, Doctor. Considering the fact he fibs to Sam about it, he obviously knew it was wrong, but he did it anyway.
No Celebrities Were Harmed: In The Tomorrow Windows, Prubert Gastridge is a large, bearded, bellowing actor best known for playing Vargo, the King of the Buzzardmen. Ring any bells?
No Equal Opportunity Time Travel: Anji has clearly had it up to here with people who want to know about the wonders of the mysterious Orient. In Victorian Britain, conforming to social expectations by wearing a sari seems to help, but she has some hangups about her heritage and doesn't like it. And Fitz's lower-middle-class accent is also a bit of a problem.
Not So Harmless: Alien Bodies. Just for starters, their leader arrives in a Dalek ship he's hijacked — along with the digested corpses of the original owners.
Oblivious Adoption: Inverted with Miranda. Everyone who sees her and the Doctor think they look very, very similar, and they're the only two of their species around, but she's just his adopted daughter and as they see it that's all there is to it. She's implied to be his Kid from the Future.
The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: In Sometime Never..., and a paragon of vagueness and sitting-aroundness. They also bicker a bit.
Only a Flesh Wound: Mentioned by name by the Doctor in Frontier Worlds, about, not very surprisingly, being shot in the shoulder. Of course, it's his mild Healing Factor that makes the wound so easy to shrug off, not just a writer leaning too heavily on artistic license.
Pop Cultured Badass: Almost everyone. Fitz has been known to reference H.P. Lovecraft, James Bond, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek, and he's very into music, particularly from The Fifties and The Sixties. He also has a Cut Song (yes, you didn't think that happened in books) that just listed a bunch of It Was His Sled moments, designed to irritate people who skipped to the end of the last book. The Doctor apparently likes X-Men and Transformers, not to mention a scene where he starts quoting "All Along the Watchtower". Anji makes some odd reference in almost every book, and seems to have given up on caring whether some Fish Out of Temporal Water gets it. And even Sabbath makes a rather hilarious reference to The Wizard of Oz in The Infinity Race.
Politically Incorrect Villain: At least two villains have made disparaging remarks about the Doctor's apparent sexuality (he's rather dandyish, and whether this has anything to do with his sexuality is his own affair). He always handles it with complete savoir-faire: in one book, a villain shouts "Queer!" at him and then beats him up for good measure, and he shags the guy's wife, which was almost certainly not intended as a Take That but would have been a pretty awesome one if it was. He endeavored to convince a Mook who'd called him a "poof" that he was a cop and would write him up for discrimination, and when that didn't work he poked him in the ear with his pencil and shoved him off a boat. So, homophobes take warning: the Doctor bashes back.
- Generally averted when it comes to Anji: the bad guys might brainwash her and kick her around and whatever else, but have not been noticed to say anything about her ethnicity, even though various minor characters sometimes do. Also, despite the fact that Sabbath, one of only a scant few recurring villains, is from the 18th century, he also usually averts this trope.*
  Maybe he's learned something from people picking on his weight all the time, maybe he's just above all that
  the same way he's above having hair, or maybe the fact his closest known relationship was with a Little Miss Badass from a remote Polynesian tribe made him less bigoted than the average 18th-century bloke.]] There is one instance where he tells Anji to go put the kettle on. Like the proverbial 800-lb gorilla, he gets away with it even though she's seething.
Pragmatic Adaptation: In the audio play The Company of Friends (Fitz's Story), the only story to date from another medium to take place within EDA continuity, Anji spends the whole adventure sleeping off a strong drink in the TARDIS so the story can focus on the Doctor/Fitz team.
Pungeon Master: Fitz, the Doctor, and everyone who's introduced to Fitz.
Rear Window Witness: Fitz, in Timeless, witnesses a woman being brutally attacked while snooping through the window of her house. Shaking and horrified, he works up the courage to go into the house, and finds seemingly the same woman, denying that anything happened. Hmm...
Roger Rabbit Effect: The Crooked World, wherein the TARDIS lands on a cartoon planet. The cover suggests that the normal characters have been cartoonified, but they never remark on any such thing, suggesting they haven't been.
Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Theoretically impossible, or, more accurately, just an extremely bad idea, so the Doctor has to keep reminding people not to even try it. In The Janus Conjunction, the Doctor manages it anyway.
Shout Out: In Camera Obscura, a group of circus freaks exhibit "The Giant Rat of Sumatra". It also seems that the Doctor and company are subletting their flat from Sherlock Holmes, which Sabbath lampshades in typical enigmatic fashion. Also, in the same book, Sabbath uses the pseudonym "G.K. Thursday", a reference to G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, which, given his name, size, and Nietzschean pretensions, is a stunningly appropriate reference. Also, The Man Who Was Thursday is about a mysterious council of seven men; there's a council of eight extradimensional beings who boss Sabbath around. Coincidence? Yeah, maybe.
Stealth Hi/Bye: It's a bit of a bad habit for the Doctor. Aside from him, this trope is apparently easier the less probable it seems. The narrator constantly belabors the point that Sabbath is holy crap so huge, especially when he employs improbable sneaking abilities to suddenly show up while you're not looking. Even aside from when he could teleport in The Last Resort. And in Vanishing Point, Fitz has a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Disabled Love Interest with a congenitally malformed leg that causes her to hobble along slowly and noisily. But she gets around pretty well anyway, and Fitz notes her "uncanny" ability to "just appear".
Slipping a Mickey: In Timeless, the Doctor gives everyone else on the TARDIS drugged hot cocoa just because he has to pilot the TARDIS through the Big Bang and he's not sure it'll make it, and he doesn't want his companions freaking out about it because they'd get in the way and he doesn't want to put them through that. Also, if they don't make it, he doesn't want them to die scared. Still... it's a bit of a dick move.
The Slow Path: Both Father Kreiner and the Earth Arc. The Sleep of Reason contains a rather sensible and convenient solution to this.
Something Only They Would Say: In book two of Interference. Kode asks, ‘Why are you people all so stupid?’, and the Doctor realizes who Kode actually is because it's very similar to the first thing he ever heard Fitz say.
Spoiled by the Format: Lampshaded in The Infinity Doctors, in which the Doctor, captured by the villain on p229, happens to mention that if the hero's captured on p229 of a 280-page novel, he's clearly going to get out of it pretty quickly. invoked
Starving Artist: Averted in The Year of Intelligent Tigers; Hitchemus has a system in place whereby all musicians get enough money to get by. It's not very much, but starving isn't an issue.
Story Arc: Apart from the series-long character arcs, the series can be divided up as:
1. The "War in Heaven", as the Doctor learns of a future Time War between the Time Lords and an unnamed "Enemy", and contends with the mysterious Faction Paradox.
2. The "Earth Arc", following the Doctor's derailing of the war, he spends a century literally Walking the Earth (but mostly Britain)
3. The "Sabbath Arc", where the Doctor meets with Sabbath and tries to stop his benefactors, who are trying to get a stranglehold on all of space and time.
4. Epilogue, as not long after the above was resolved, a new series of green lit, and most novels attempted to resolve the ongoing character and myth arcs.
Strapped to an Operating Table: The Doctor, in Frontier Worlds. He's impressively calm about the whole thing, except for when he Screams Like a Little Girl just to be aggravating, especially considering the fact he's naked and facing a device that's supposed to bite out his heart.
Switching P.O.V.: Usually, the perspective is third person, but sometimes some or all of the characters use first person. In Parallel 59, only Fitz uses first person because he's writing a diary. But even in third person, First-Person Smartass-type editorializing often comes through, even to the point of interjections. The Doctor's narration is surprisingly snarky at times. The Adventuress of Henrietta Street largely averts this, being mostly narrated by an unnamed historian, but uses Scrapbook Story to get some of the same effect.
Talking Animal: The aforementioned intelligent tigers. There are also talking poodles.
The Team Normal: Fitz, while Compassion is a TARDIS. But you could say, since Fitz is an Artificial Human with an assortment of massively lame barely-superhuman abilities, Trix and Anji fit this role better when they're onboard the TARDIS. Anji in particular has the surrounded-by-weirdos attitude often typical of a Team Normal, and it's actually possible (thanks to Trix's Multiple Choice Past) that she's the only completely normal human who's been on the team since Sam left.
The Teaser: The first chapter of any given book is generally something thrilling, spooky, and/or cryptic that won't make much sense until later, and the main protagonists usually don't appear in it. The Book of the Still lampshades this; the first chapter is titled "Obligatory Spectacular Opening". However, it turns out at the end that, for once, it does feature a main character.
There Is Another: Fitz mentions it by name in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, when the Doctor realizes Iris has a TARDIS, so he's likely not the Last of His Kind.
Time Travel for Fun and Profit: Anji and Trix's stock-tips arrangement.
Transplant: Iris Wildthyme was originally a Time Lord in all but name from some Magical Realism novels by Paul Magrs. When Magrs began writing for the Whoniverse, he transplanted Iris into it as the Doctor's New Old Flame.
- Iris was later spun back off by Magrs and Big Finish into a new line of audio adventures and novels which have since gone right back to writing around the Doctor Who trademarks.
Trauma Induced Amnesia: After the events of ''The Ancestor Cell'', the Doctor suffers from this.
Twisted Ankle: Fitz twists his ankle quite badly at least twice in the series. Once he later manages to get himself shot in the same leg, which results in a cute girl tending to his wound and the Doctor carrying him around, so it turns out pretty well for him. In general, delay-causing injuries happen a lot; even though it'd take more than a mere twisted ankle to slow the Doctor down, he tends to get shot, stabbed, and squashed a lot. Oddly, female characters are less likely to be incapacitated by random injuries, although falling about fainting for plot-related reasons is likely.
Two Lines, No Waiting: The books tend to immediately split the TARDIS crew up and alternate between the Doctor and the others as the story progresses. It's rare for them to stick together for even half the plot.
Victorian Novel Disease: Mentioned in Camera Obscura, in which the Doctor is suffering from having lost one of his hearts, making him pale and frail and prone to fainting. The book takes place in Victorian times and some people do assume he's consumptive.
Wag the Conductor: In The Year of Intelligent Tigers, the Doctor joins an orchestra as first violinist. He is very gifted, but becomes a massive diva, eventually playing a solo over 100 bars long. It was supposed to be 24. He only stops when his violin strings break. The rest of the orchestra is not pleased. After being called out for his antics, he tells the conductor-composer that he doesn't understand the music because he's human. Then the Doctor throws the music sheets into the air, smashes his violin, and flounces off.
Walking the Earth: The Doctor, during the Earth Arc. And by Earth, I mostly mean England, but we are later told he also became a sailor in the South Seas and traveled through China and Thailand.
- There are shades of the Wandering Jew as well, since it doesn't seem like he particularly wants to be traveling around alone like this.
We Have to Get the Bullet Out: Averted in The Crooked World. The Doctor gets shot with a blunderbuss, and, seeing that the bleeding has already stopped, Fitz decides there's nothing to do except clean him up a bit. However, the Doctor does later attribute his speedy recovery to the fact the buckshot mysteriously dissolved.
Weird Aside: Fitz sometimes casually brings up his Dark and Troubled Past without fully realizing it's awkward, then tries to pass it off as a joke. Anji eventually stops giving a damn whether people in the future or the past understand her Turn of the Millennium references, causing them to come across like this. And the Doctor has a tendency to namedrop improbably; in a modern-day setting, he might suddenly start talking about his dear old friend William Shakespeare. In The Year of Intelligent Tigers, Karl Sadeghi happens to mention his "surviving family", which might be an odd distinction to make if you've got about as many living family members as anyone else, implying he has a difficult backstory which never really comes up.
What Could Have Been: The villains from the second major arc of the series, Sabbath's allies, were originally meant to be the Daleks, reappearing after 52 books and 6 years absence. The Council of Eight was a last minute replacement, meaning some of the clues as to their identity ended being a bit misleading.
What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Fitz is the begonia, right?
What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Talking poodles, alien tigers who long to learn to play music, the entirety of The Blue Angel— the EDAs bring the crack.
Where I Was Born And Razed: Let's just say the TV revival wasn't the first to pull the Doctor blowing up Gallifrey trick.
What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Sometimes explored in relation to the Doctor, actually.
Writing Around Trademarks: A Grace Holloway expy, some thinly-veiled Daleks...
You Are Fat: The Doctor knows that if you want to upset a human, just tell them their weight variance is above the norm. Actually, Sabbath tends to be unfazed.