A newly regenerated Fifth Doctor travels to an icy world with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, only to be caught up in the machinations of the Doctor's seventh incarnation. To make matters worse, the Earth Empire are after a fellow renegade from Gallifrey — Patience, the Doctor's wife!
Big Finish Doctor Who adapted the book into a six-part serial
starring Sylvester McCoy and Peter Davison in late 2016. Unique among Doctor Who stories in that the earlier version of the Doctor, in this case the Fifth, is the main character, and the later version is the guest appearance, rather than vice versa. The audio version even emphasises this by using the Fifth Doctor's theme rather than the Seventh's.
The novel contains examples of:
- Call-Back:
- The Fifth Doctor says he was born by loom in Gallifrey.
- When remembering, The Fifth Doctor says several quotes first said by the First and Second Doctor, such as "we can live forever, barring accidents".
- The Doctor and Patience enter each other's memories using telepathic contact.
- The Doctor enters the coordinates for Gallifrey into Patience's TARDIS.
- The Fifth Doctor says he's happy to act as a scientific adviser to the Earth colony, pointing out his previous experience as one on Earth.
- Patience’ second husband, the Other, is a recognizable description of Douglas Camfield's Doctor (possibly) in "The Brain Of Morbius".
- Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Lance Parkin has said that he pictured the characters Provost-General Tertullian Medford and Chief Scientist Whitfield as "played" by Terry Scott and June Whitfield, stars of 1980s sitcom Terry and June.
- Crossover: With the New Adventures. It featured the Fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, along with the then current New Adventures team of the Seventh Doctor, Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej.
- Future Me Scares Me: Witnessing his seventh incarnation leaves the Fifth Doctor horrified at the notion that he will some day be capable of manipulating others into destroying their entire universe (albeit to save his own).
- I Hate Past Me: The Seventh Doctor was portrayed as largely disdainful of the Fifth Doctor's presence because of the dangers it presented.The entire universe is at stake and I'm locked in here with another incarnation of myself, and not even one of the good ones!
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Fifth Doctor admits his recollections of events prior to his second regeneration (from Second to Third Doctor) is a bit hazy... reflecting the many episodes missing from that era.
- Pun: A duck symbol appearing on Adric's helmet HUD is telling him to... duck.
- Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Patience can't regenerate after being shot in the brain.
- Reverse the Polarity: As the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors can attest to, two Doctors trying to reverse the polarity of the same thing will cancel each other out.
- Rhetorical Question Blunder:Adric: What did your last slave die of?Roz: 'I accidentally beheaded him.'
- Shout-Out: In his lame attempt to pretend to be an Australian, Chris Cwej says that Australians love sitting with their neighbours drinking herbal tea, and that's "when good neighbours become good friends".
- When the train the group is on is being pursued by a helicopter, Tegan asks if the train can turn into a robot or travel in time to escape.
- The Nth Doctor: Aside from the Fifth and Seventh Doctors making an appearance, Patience regenerates into her female form shortly after being rescued.
- Taught by Television: Tegan can operate a transmat, having seen it in Blake's 7.
- Two Rights Make a Wrong: The Doctor does this to himself. There are some galaxy shattering grenades that can be disarmed by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow, which he does so he can fake out the villain by pretending that they've won when they send the duds to the target. Then his past self finds the grenades and re-reverses the polarity thinking he's the one disarming them. Which means the bombs are live when sent to their target.
- Undressing the Unconscious: After Tegan passes out from the cold, she awakens in a fur bed now wearing unfamiliar clothing, with a man (Adam) watching over her. When she questions who undressed her, he merely grins and says she has lovely moles.
- Waxing Lyrical: Chris Cwej is posing as an Australian, and describes living in a close-knit community in a sunny suburb, where everyone pops in and out of each others' houses, before concluding "With a little understanding, you can find the perfect blend and that's when good neighbours become good friends". Real Australian Tegan doesn't get the reference, having come from a time before Neighbours began, but does spot he's talking nonsense.
The audio contains examples of:
- Arc Welding: Albeit a fairy subtle case. The Silver Devastation was first mentioned in the new series episode "The End of the World" and further described in "Utopia" as the place where the Master was found as an infant. Here, Chris tells Nyssa that the Silver Devastation was created in the 20th Century by an "entropy field event", strongly implied to be the entropy wave The Master accidentally set off in "Logopolis", and that some of Nyssa's people survived the event on a planet called Serenity. This is a change from the book, where Serenity was just mentioned as a planet in Mutter's Spiral (i.e. the Milky Way), but lines up with Big Finish's Lost Story adaptation "The Guardians Of Prophecy", where Six and Peri visit Serenity and meet those survivors.
- Armed with Canon: The Fifth Doctor claims to be "unambiguously" Loom-born, despite almost all other stories having abandoned the idea of Time Lords being Loomed (or at the very least, the idea that they're born as adults). The original book had the Doctor acknowledge there was some mystery about exactly where he came from. Both, of course, were written by one of the foremost continuity-loving writers, Lance Parkin, who also wrote The Infinity Doctors, and enjoys contradicting himself and others for laughs.
- Call-Forward:
- The Seventh Doctor says the universe housing the Ferutu contains "eternal summers", something the Fifth Doctor will become all too acquainted with.
- The Doctor responds with a preposterously high number when asked how many incarnations he's had, similar to what the 11th Doctor would do in "Death of the Doctor".
- Chris Cwej describes the 7th Doctor as being "neither cruel nor cowardly".
- The two Doctors compare notes for the moment they'll be called to defend Gallifrey with their other incarnations.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Seventh Doctor is about to mention the Knights of Velyshaa incident, but the Fifth Doctor stops him from it, warning him that he shouldn't speak about things he himself haven't experienced yet, as doing so could risk shorting out the time differential. He then notices that his voice sounds older than it should.
- Mythology Gag:
- The interior of Patience’ first-generation TARDIS is an exact description of Dr Who’s cobbled-together Tardis in Dr. Who and the Daleks, down to the armchair and sofa included as seating.
- Among the many things the war-droid says in the first scene that will be familiar to anyone whose ever had to reset a password, it says "To select audio navigation, press enter now", which will be immediately familiar to anyone who's watched Doctor Who on DVD (which is... probably most listeners).
- Pragmatic Adaptation: The audio changes several scenes to better reflect the new episodes and audio stories released since the book was published, such as:
- The Seventh Doctor mentions the Knights of Velyshaa, but the Fifth cuts him off since it hadn't happened to him yet. Originally, the book mentions The Terrible Zodin.
- The two Doctors comment on how some equations they wrote up will help for the moment they are called to save Gallifrey with their other incarnations.
- The fact that the Day of the Doctor reused the "two Doctor Reverse the Polarity of the same object, and cancels it out" gag from this story is lampshaded at the end, when both Doctors promise not to do it again.
- Pungeon Master: Despite being well into his Chess Master phase at this point in his life, the Seventh Doctor still stoops to making puns every now and again.Adric: So, there are two of you in the same place and time.Roz: It's a temporal paradox, then?Seven: Well... *chuckles* a "pair of Docs", at the very least.
- Two Rights Make a Wrong: The grenade incident mentioned above is lampshaded by both Doctors at the end of the story, who say they should remember not to do it again. They do it again.
