Eighth Doctor Adventures: Difference between revisions

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 "[[Virgin Missing Adventures|Missing Adventures]]" that Virgin had called their similar line).

 

 

[[Eighth Doctor Adventures/Characters|Has a character page.]] Please keep most of the character-specific tropes there.

** 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.

* [[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 [[Shout-Out|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.

* [[Cartwright Curse]]: Fitz, the poor dope. The Doctor tends toward this with the few love interests he has, but {{spoiler|it was subverted in ''The Adventuress of Henrietta Street'': Scarlette [[Faking the Dead|faked her death]] just because [[Love Cannot Overcome|she knew he should leave]]}}.

* [[Can't Live with Them Can't Live Without Them]]: Anji, toward Fitz. She once fantasized about [[Armor-Piercing Slap|hitting him with a chair]], and is often annoyed by his [[Fish Out of Temporal Water|old-fashioned opinions and mannerisms]]. However, he's sort of her [[The Not Love Interest|Not Love Interest]], whom she cares about just as much as she would about a love interest<ref>they don't have much [[UST]], and it's all on his part</ref>; she's just as grief-stricken, if not ''more'', over his apparent impending [[Doomy Dooms of Doom|doom]] as she was about the death of her boyfriend of five years. His opinion of her, however, seems to be less conflicted.

* [[The Chick]]: Notable because in most team set-ups, this role falls upon [[Gender Flip|Fitz]] and ''not'' the female companions.

* [[Children Raise You]]: Where do all these little [[Hair of Gold|blond]] Time Moppets come from, anyway? {{spoiler|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 [[Genre Savvy|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.}}

* [[Expendable Clone]]: Particularly evident in ''The Last Resort'', where {{spoiler|almost everyone gets [[Immortal Life Is Cheap|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 {{spoiler|the Doctor}}.

* [[Failure Is the Only Option]]: For a while, it seemed like there are three constants in the EDAs: Fitz will [[Off the Wagon|always smoke]], the Doctor will always have [[Trauma-Induced Amnesia|amnesia]], and Anji will [[You Can't Go Home Again|never get back home]]. {{spoiler|But eventually the Doctor gets Anji home. And then she comes back, mostly for [[Not Love Interest|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.

* [[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. [[Brian Blessed|Ring any bells?]]

* [[No Equal-Opportunity Time Travel]]: Anji has clearly had it up to here with people who want to know about [[Sim Sim Salabim|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.

* [[Oblivious Adoption]]: Inverted with Miranda. Everyone who sees her and the Doctor think they look [[Strong Family Resemblance|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 [[Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering|bicker a bit]].

* [[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 [[Take That, Audience!|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 [[Waxing Lyrical|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 [[Not So Above It All|rather hilarious]] reference to ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|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 [[The Dandy|rather dandyish]], and whether this has anything to do with [[Bi the Way|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" [[Clipboard of Authority|that he was a cop and would write him up for discrimination]], and [[Cutting the Knot|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.

* [[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, ‘[[Surrounded by Idiots|Why are you people all so]] ''[[Surrounded by Idiots|stupid]]''?’, and the Doctor realizes who Kode actually is because it's very similar to the first thing he ever heard {{spoiler|Fitz}} say.

* [[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: