Cold Fusion

Novel Adaptations #11

Released: 15 December 2016

Listened: 1/8/22

This is one of the novel adaptations, and I normally don’t care for those all that much, but it was on sale, so. It’s also a fairly impressive story, featuring both the Fifth and Seventh Doctors, as well as the mysterious Time Lady called Patience. Normally I place multi-Doctor stories with the “latest” Doctor involved, but this is really a Fifth Doctor story that intersects with the Seventh. For Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan, it’s still early days, but fortunately all of them have seen a regeneration quite recently, so they’re clued in to that aspect. The Seventh Doctor is with Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej, so after Ace and Benny, and well into his “chessmaster” phase. It’s also quite long, being a novel adaptation. However, it has several aspects common to the novel series, where things are slightly more adult: Tegan wants a beer, both Nyssa and Tegan are on the receiving end of flirting from Chris, but Nyssa completely misses it and makes some inadvertent innuendo of her own. There’s danger to the entire multiverse, there’s Time Lord history involved, and of course the Seventh Doctor is acting the mastermind while appearing to be somewhat silly. The interactions between the Fifth Doctor and Patience are full of references and vague hints of events in other novels, and none of it is explained properly, which was rather a feature of the novels. The Seventh Doctor is pretty mournful about Adric, but keeps it carefully hidden. However, this adaptation has a few unique features, particularly references to the events of “The Day of the Doctor” and “Time Crash.” Like most of the novel adaptations, I find the plot to be not very memorable, but the character interactions are worth it. And because it’s a Fifth Doctor story, we don’t get a ton of the Seventh Doctor being super-manipulative, which can get old fast.