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Dead Romance
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Note: Almost all the events of Dead Romance are filtered through the eyes of Christine Summerfield, who is less than a totally reliable narrator. Much of it is told is flashback, hearsay and even dreams, so events may not have happened precisely as the text claims. On the other hand, this is part of the point and we're told that what is happening is absolutely, definitely true in more than one place. BASIC PLOT DOCTOR COMPANIONS PREPARATORY READING CONTINUITY REFERENCES Pg 28 Lady Diamond lives on Henrietta Street, revealed to be in the same location as Scarlette's house in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. Pgs 63-64 In Christine's dream Cwej is on Gallifrey. The Time Lords are all below the surface, with Chris their only defender out in the open. Pgs 69-70 The treaty with the People is being altered. In The Also People, the Time Lords had a non-aggression treaty with the People. Here the Time Lords are asking the People not to side against them in the upcoming war and in return they'll let them develop time travel. We later see them beginning to in Tears of the Oracle. Pg 71 Cwej decorates the room with wooden objects in bottles to remind himself he's in a bottle - It's the bottle from Interference/The Ancestor Cell. Pgs 77-78 Chris's story of how he was "abducted" is a distortion of the truth. He even admits that he can't remember much of it - the Time Lords have altered his memories so he'll work for them. The Evil Renegade is the seventh Doctor. Chris details Roz's death in So Vile A Sin. Pg 79 Chris says that eventually the Time Lords caught up with the Evil renegade and brought him back to the homeworld, where he joined up with them - this is the ending of Lungbarrow, where the Doctor left Chris on Gallifrey. Pg 80 "The aliens were so advanced they'd even made machines they could sew into the cells of their bodies." Nanites were mentioned in lots of NAs as being the basis of regeneration (the theory originated in John Peel's Gallifrey Chronicles book). Ace wondered if she'd be able to get pregnant because of them in her system. Pg 81 The creatures are called gods - they're the Gods of Dellah (revealed to be The Ferutu in Twilight of the Gods, which doesn't quite square with this). Chris says the Time Lords assumed they'd never wake up. Their awakening (first in Down, then in Where Angels Fear) was the catalist for all the higher powers of the universe (the Time Lords, the People) to run scared in Where Angels Fear. Pg 82 The Gods were made by superior beings whose ideas were dangerous and had who had since left without records (Uncertain reference - possibly the Time Lords, maybe not). The rumour that the Gods might be a figment of someone's imagination ties in to the running theme in the Benny NAs about questioning the division between fiction and reality. Dead Romance has this theme in spades. Pg 83 There's a potted history of the Gods taking over Tyler's Folly (Down) and Dellah (Where Angels Fear). Pgs 92-93 The Evil Renegade fights a one-man war against the Gods, in possibly the most heroic scene featuring the Doctor in existence. Eventually he steals the bottle from the rogue Gods. It's not clear exactly when the Doctor gets hold of the bottle. In Interference I.M. Foreman has it (although she says she made it herself) and the eighth Doctor appears to steal it at the end. However, in The Ancestor Cell it seems that the Time Lords stole it directly from I.M. Foreman. On the other hand, there's a few hints that the events in Interference take place outside an even bigger bottle. Pg 95 First mention of the war between the Time Lords and the Gods, though Chris says it's not going to happen. Pg 97 "No time travellers". In Interference the Doctor notes that they're having trouble with time travel in the bottle. "Our people spent years trying to work out how to get in and out without the two universes leaking" In The Ancestor Cell, this is the fundamental problem - the bottle is leaking. Pg 102 In the universe where Chris comes from, "The pyramids had been built by aliens" (the Osirans, Pyramids of Mars), "There was life on Mars "(the Ice Warriors). "There were 'lost' planets inside Earth's solar system covered with the ruins of old Inca-style civilizations" (The Tenth Planet? Planet 14 from The Invasion? Vulcan in Power of the Daleks? Voga from Revenge of the Cybermen?). "Humans were meant to start taking over other planets by the end of the 20th century" (Ambassadors of Death?) Pg 107 "The Inside Out World" Chris and Christine visit the Dyson Sphere, from The Also People and various Benny adventures. Pg 108 "'How long d'you think it'll be before you build your first timeship?' 'We've only got a population of about two trillion,' said a voice. 'I shouldn't think we'll have a working model in operation until, oh, about tomorrow luchtime" God expects the People will invent time travel quickly, but we discover in Tears of the Oracle that it isn't that simple. Cwej says that the sphinxes sound like "Grel on morphine". The Grel lived on Dellah and were in Oh No It Isn't! and Where Angels Fear. Pgs 111-112 Cwej goes to Skaro to make a deal with the Daleks. The Time Lords had made a deal with them to let them build time machines (the time corridors, the machine in The Chase), but then the Time Lords had reneged and tried to wipe them out - hence the Doctor's mission in Genesis of the Daleks. Christine dedicates her notebook to the Daleks, wherever they are. Pgs 113-114 Christine has another dream that might be set in the House Lungbarrow, but it might not be - "bone people" without lips doesn't quite square. "His people were supposed to be able to bring themselves back from the dead, and rebuild their bodies from scratch if they had any kind of nasty accident, so if that had ever happened to Cwej, and he'd ended up with a new body built by his employers..." Cwej regenerates in the very next book, as a result of this book's conclusion. Iain Truskett: It's Lungbarrow. Compare Glospin and Homuncullette with these thin, sharp people. Remember: it's a dream. Pg 118 "How do you know your universe isn't inside some other kind of bottle?" In Interference, I.M. Foreman speculates that the bottles go all the way down. There's a theory that the NA universe bottle is inside the BBC universe one. Pg 122 "When the pilots rebuilt themselves, their new bodies would fill up the cracks in the clockwork, until the spheres were perfect combinations of skin and metal." The pilots of the Time Lord war machines filling up the cracks in the clockwork fits in with the Time Lords as clockmakers, from Christmas on a Rational Planet. Pg 125 We get a timeline from Gods emerging, including "sea serpents spotted on Tyler's Folly", 18 November 2593, to "Earth finally admits that Dellah is a no-go area", 30 March 2596. (Down and Where Angels Fear) Pg 127 "Cwej told me that the reproductive system is supposed to be the first to go, after your body rebuilt itself." This ties in with the nanites and Ace wondering if she'd be able to get pregnant. Pg 129-130 "Our... travel machines... they work by taking you out of normal space-time, then putting you back somewhere else. Right? We... um, how can I put this? We have to kind of cut throught the different layers of space to get anywhere. [...] The sphinxes can mess up space. That meas they can shift around the layers. Tie us in knots. Basically, what I'm saying is that if we try to get out of here they could just lock our machines in a loop." In Alien Bodies it was said that one of the first things done in the war was the blocking of time travel. Pg 133 "And their statues look weird, compared with the ones on Earth. Like there are patterns in them we poor humans can't see properly. It's only when you remember what Cwej said about thinking in four dimensions that you start to figure out why. The statues are made so that when they get old and fall apart they still look artistic. Decay's all part of the design." There are significant Time Lord statues in The Infinity Doctors and The Ancestor Cell. Pg 137 "A cat's cradle of beams and arcs" The Time Lord warship is described. The Time Lords also send a huge warship (to destroy Earth) in Interference. "Figures in robes that make them look like monks" - Time Lords of then look like monks ala The Time Meddler or the monk we see inÊ who helps Cwej regenerate. Pg 138 "There was a bust set into the wall above the arch, a carving of a man's head and shoulders, glaring down like one of those gargoyles I remember throwing stones at on the school French trip to Notre Dame. The man was wearing a crown on his head, and there was a huge collar behind his neck, with shoulder pads so big they looked like armour. It was my first sight of one of Cwej's employers, I suppose, although [...] you couldn't make out the details of the face. At the time I wondered if Cwej's employers actually looked like that, or whether they just wanted people to think they were faceless, the same way they wanted people to think they were nameless." The setting of this statue is a bit like the statue Borusa becomes in The Five Doctors. The huge collar is the collar the Time Lords wear in The Deadly Assassin onwards. Pg 140 "But all the stories say that one of these ultra-sphinxes is black [...] and one of them is white" The two super sphinxes, the Kings of Space, are black and white, making them the equivalent of the Black and White Guardians (or possibly they are the Black and White Guardian from a higher bottle). Pg 141 "I told you, didn't I, about the morning he came back from the planet of the machine people? I can't forget the way he looked then, the shock on his face, the horror of knowing who he'd been talking to. [...] When we had sex, it felt like he was doing it because he had to, not because it made him happy. " Chris's reaction to having talked to the Daleks is appropriately horrific. Pg 142 " Chris told me about the deal his employers had made with the machines, thousands of years earlier. About how his people had let the machines invent time travel, but only a simple kind. About how they'd promised not to scoop any of the machines out of time for their own entertainment, like they did with so many other races in the days before they knew better." In The Five Doctors it's said that the Daleks weren't time-scooped into the Death Zone because they played the game too well. Pg 149 "Cwej's employers [...] were ready to let their warships wipe out everything on this planet, us included. They've apparently done this before, sterilized [...] whole satellites if they think there's some kind of threat to the grand order of things." In Interference they attempt to do exactly this to Earth. Page 156 "Where Cwej comes from. Jack the Ripper was probably a renegade time traveller from a parallel universe" He's actually a possessed seventh Doctor who comes via a parallel universe in Matrix. Pgs 156-157 "Never mind the fact that Victorian gentlemen were nothing but misogyny and VD, never mind the fact that they spent most of their time beating up their wives and hanging round male brothels. You get the same shit told to you over and over, the same old stabs at rewriting history, whether the stories are set in the French Revolution or ancient Babylon." The latter is a reference to Walking to Babylon, which features Victorian gentleman John Lafeyette in ancient Babylon. The French Revolution reference might be the first Doctor either in Reign of Terror of his pre-An Unearthly Child visit to Revolutionary France, as detailed in Christmas on a Rational Planet, or it might be something else entirely (the Doctor isn't exactly a Victorian Gentleman). Iain Truskett: p.156-157 - French Revolution: see Set Piece. Pg 164 "He had had friends on Dellah, anyway, before the Gods had come. One of them was called Bernice. Bernice Summerfield." Christine also asks if Bernice is a descendent of her, but realises this isn't possible. She also asks if whoever made the bottle used inspiration from real people and that maybe Bernice inspired her. Chris says no and that they're nothing alike, but this is in fact very close to the truth. Pg 166 "The statue was at least twice as tall as a normal human, although Cwej seemed to think the subject really had been that tall while he'd been alive. The man had a face that could probably have been called 'ageless'. He had a bushy beard and a wiser-than-thou moustache, but the sculptor had done everything a sculptor could to make him appear strong and virile [...] two of his eight hands on his hips, the others holding on to a collection of rods, orbs, keys and sashes." The statue of Rassilon is on Symia KK98, holding the "objects of Rassilon" from The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time etc. His description matches his appearance in The Five Doctors, although the reference to the sculptor altering his appearance to make him appear strong and virile is a reference to The Five Doctors Special Edition, where the restoration team altered Rassilon's voice to make it deeper and less pantomime-like. Pg 167 "The founder of time-traveller society was a great thinker, a great scientist, a great philosopher, and a great politician. That's what the stories say, although whenever Cwej told me the stories he always got distracted and started talking about space fights with giant vampire-beasts." The Time Lord-Vampire war is from State of Decay. Pg 174 "STATEMENT OF FACT: DURING THE TRANSITION OF THE UNIT CWEJ FROM THE VORTEX TO THE BOTTLE ENVIRONMENT, ANY OTHER PRESENCES IN THE VORTEX WERE GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO ENTER THE BOTTLE." Cwej entered the bottle via the space-time vortex and accidentally let anything else living there in. Pg 180 "The 'policemen' are the sphere-shaped machine people we can see floating between the buildings., keeping track of all the insect people down on the ground. Thinking, breathing cameras. Watching everything." The capital of Symia KK98 is very similar to The Village from The Prisoner, complete with floating spherical guards and populated by former Time Lord agents. Pg 188 Khiste tortures one of the Gods' followers by injecting her with the same drugs his employers use to rebuild themselves, making her immortal. He then kills her in a variety of ways, but each time her body is rebuilt out of proportion and with pain as a feedback loop. However, all this takes place in Christine's imagination, so it might not happen like that. The idea of aborted regenerations was first introduced in Timewyrm: Exodus, where we saw the War Chief's aborted regeneration. Iain Truskett: p.188 - Aborted, or regenerations that simply went wrong, are also in The Deadly Assassin. Pg 194 The Ouija board message contains the words "Makes things out of Dust" "Interference", "Christmas on a Rational Planet" and "The Watchmakers are the men who will not be blamed for nothing". Dust was the planet where the third Doctor regenerated in Interference and was later remade as Foreman's World. The Watchmakers are the Time Lords, as mentioned in Christmas on a Rational Planet and Cold Fusion. Iain Truskett: p.194 - Ouija board actually says 'Christine on a Rational Planet'. Pgs 195-196 Christine has another dream about a Time Lord house, with an in-bred line of Summerfields and Cwej being referred to as "Cousin Cwej". Pgs 199, 201,202-203,205-206, 207, 208-209, 210 The Summerfield family tree. Benny has ancestors Bene(dict) and Jason. The early records may be forgeries, though, due to Benedict Summerfield II, who was a criminal and altered his personal history. There's no mention of the Summerfield in Damaged Goods, but this only mentions direct ancestors of Bernice. Admiral Isaac Summerfield was in Return of the Living Dad and is reported dead in combat (fighting the Daleks) in 2543, but also in active service in 2595, so presumably he gets back at some later point in Benny's time. The dates for Benny cleverly don't add up. She lost 20 years because of travelling with the Doctor and the Benny NAs have been subtly consistent about this. Also, on page 206 Marshall Summerfield I is head of Caprisi Military Academy. Benny was born on Beta Caprisis (except in Sanctuary, where she said she was born on Vandor Prime). Pg 202 "'Contraceptive,' I told him. 'You know?' 'Er,' Cwej looked down, maybe because he was embarrassed [...] 'That's... not a problem, OK? I don't... I mean, I can't...'" Cwej has obviously lost the ability to reproduce between travelling with the Doctor and now. He fathered at least two children while travelling with the Doctor, although he didn't know about either (The Also People, Happy Endings). Pgs 214-216 "Some of the rumours said the computer would have existed even without Cwej's employers, and that the machine had invented the time travellers itself, just so it could be sure that it's be built - in which case, the computer must have been a lot like the Gods" The Matrix on Gallifrey gets a long description, but this is the cleverest part. Also the nature of the Enemy in The Ancestor Cell is very similar to this in its paradoxical way. "This computer had things programmed into it, special defences, which would be set off whenever it spotted anything going wrong with the universe." The Doctor's premonition in The Deadly Assassin. "Halfway across the galaxy, there was a whole planet that Cwej's employers used as a prison" That's Shada/Dronid, where the Doctor was said to have been killed in Alien Bodies. Iain Truskett: p.214-216 - Shada is not Dronid. Pg 216 "It's not possible for a human being to keep his dignity while he's eating a banana. Nothing reminds you of your monkey genes faster than that." This is very reminiscent of the Reverend Matthews eating a banana and being turned into an ape in Ghost Light. Pg 218 "It's one of those old SF fairy tales. Clocks don't melt or start going backward if you go through a time warp" This pokes fun at The Edge of Destruction... although the next line is "at least, not unless the timepiece has been specially built by Cwej's employers". This is spectacular. In one fell swoop, Lawrence Miles deconstructs the story and in the next he provides an extremely plausible way in which it just might make sense. Pg 225 "One of Shakespeare's arms dropped off" The Horror-sphinx is one-armed, just like Father Kreiner (and Grandfather Paradox, incidentally). Pg 228 "'I can't let you do this,' Cwej told the Horror in Leicester Square." Cwej stands up to the Horror exactly the way the Doctor would. Pg 235 "Basically, the professor's idea is that the Gods are just a side effect of being alive. They have to exist, to fill up the big black spaces in the universe that our imaginations keep focusing on." Background on where the Gods came from. Pgs 240, 285 "It's a picture of a city, stretching off into the distance, all spiky pyramids and shiny domes" "I'm looking at that photograph again, the one of the dragon boats over London, with the sphinx wrapping itself around one of the spires that Cwej's employers had planed there." The cover illustration is London after the Time Lord invasion. Pg 243 In the vortex were Time Lords, aliens, machines and humans. Some of them start swearing at Christine in funny accents. Presumably one of them is Salamander. One machine has tentacles everywhere, squeezing in between the other shapes and bringing the Horror together. In the 25th century, some supercomputer or other had been dropped into the vortex by the Doctor during a duel. This might be the N-Form from So Vile A Sin, but the Doctor blew up the whole planet there, so it probably isn't. Uncertain reference. Iain Truskett: p.243 - Pool from Deceit (the one with Abslom Daak). Pg 244 ""And the armour wasn't exactly the same style as, say, Khiste's. It was jet-black for a start, and his head actually looked like a helmet rather than a face that had grown new parts. Like an old Pharoah's death mask [...] One of his arms was all twisted and gungy, crippled by the accident. My first impression? That he was one of Cwej's people, but some kind of renegade. Not the Evil Renegade himself, but maybe one of his followers, a soldier from an enemy faction." This is Father Kreiner, who ended up in the vortex at the end of Interference. He is Fitz Kreiner after hundred of years, from Interference. The description is pointedly different from the Time Lord agents, which clearly says that Cwej's employers aren't Faction Paradox (as some have suggested). Pg 247 "What I'm getting at is that in a pointless, empty universe a good time is as meaningless as a bad time, so you might as well slap on a smile and get on with your life. Personally, I've ever been able to do either of those things, but that was just my problem." Christine's life philosophy and her inability to carry it out is Slartibartfast's from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Pg 250 "In Cwej's world, everything always gets sorted out, see? Things always end up in a big face-off." Cwej's universe is both more real than Christine's and also less real, since it follows the structure of fiction, with tidy plot and character resolutions. This fits in with the general reality vs fiction theme of the Benny NAs. Pg 255 "Do you know how to play rock-scissor-paper?" The fate of things being decided by rock-scissors-paper might be a reference to Destiny of the Daleks, but it probably isn't. Pg 271 "I might as well say it now, seeing as you'll be working it out for yourselves soon anyway. A lot of this book is, strictly speaking, lies. The parts about Cwej are all true, of course, and so are all the bits about the Horror, the sphinxes, and Cwej's employers." Despite much of the book being an unreliable account from a fictional (in more than one sense) narrator, we're told that all the background information is the truth, such as it is. It's even the first entry in the section "Notes on the truth". Pg 277 "Cwej used to be a policeman. Mr Good Cop." Chris and Roz played the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine in Original Sin et al. Pgs 283-285 "It was the time-traveller invasion of Earth. It was the end of the world." The Time Lords invade Earth to escape the coming war in their universe. "You could hear a kind of muttering from some parts of the column, like songs that had been translated into computer talk" They're likely muttering like Logopolitans to change the structure of the world to suit their needs. Pg 287 "Cwej told me they were planning on turning the sun into some sort of black hole" Presumably this a new Eye of Harmony. Pgs 287-288 "Why had Cwej's employers picked Earth as their new home anyway? [...] it was the same size as their homeworld and and had the same length of day" There are constant hints that Gallifrey and Earth are similar in the series (The Sensorites is the earliest, where Susan says it is quite like Earth). "The invaders decided to turn the sky orange" This fits in with Susan's description of Gallifrey in The Sensorites. Pg 290 "They must have seen Cwej's employers the same way Cwej's employers saw the Gods" That is, they're both a big threat but there's also the possibility that the Gods are Time Lords from a higher bottle. "Whether he was going to regenerate into something like Khiste, or into a new version of himself - or into something specially designed for life inside the redecorated bottle - I didn't ask" We see Cwej's regeneration back in the 'real' universe in Tears of the Oracle, after Braxiatel requests his help from the Time Lords. Pg 291 "Khiste dropped me off on Ordifica" Ordifica has been mentioned in Ghost Devices, Down and appears in Interference. Pgs 291-292 There's a world called Shatner's Climax (!). Ultra Caprises is presumably near Beta Caprises, where Benny was born. "I'm sitting in the ruins as I write this" Christine is on the ruins of Gallifrey - Alien Bodies, Crystal Bucephalus and Goth Opera all told of a future Gallifrey in ruins after some great war. Iain Truskett: p.291-292 - Didn't Goth Opera have a completely empty part of the galaxy being where Gallifrey was meant to be (somewhat like Pg 292-293 "Cwej's employers never told us what it was they'd found out about the Gods, what it was that had scared them out of their own universe. But I think I know. After all, when the time travellers arrived in the bottle, didn't they look like Gods to the humans?" The Gods are Time Lords from outside that bottle. They spend time getting used to the universe and sleeping. This contradicts Twilight of the Gods. "None of us are 'real', not even the people who weren't grown in a cloning machine or built inside a bottle" This is quite ironic, because the Time Lords were grown in cloning machines - the Looms - in Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, Lungbarrow etc.
Iain Truskett: p.292-293 - Strictly speaking, the Looms aren't cloning devices. Somewhere it was mentioned that they intentionally introduce irregularities.
Pg 294 "After I leave this planet, I'll start drifting again. Towards Dellah, I think. [...] I want to know what happened to Professor Bernice Summerfield" Christine actually sends Benny a message when she takes a post at a university on Vremnya, in Twilight of the Gods.
OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES Khiste, a genetically altered Time Lord agent.
The Horror, a creation of the tortured souls in the Vortex.
CONTINUITY COCK-UPS PLUGGING THE HOLES [Fan-wank theorizing of how to fix continuity cock-ups] FEATURED ALIEN RACES FEATURED LOCATIONS IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith? |
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