Review: Doctor Who Classic Comics volume 4

Doctor Who Classics Volume 4 by Dave Gibbons


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The stories in this volume get a bit more epic. There's a kind of multi-story arc; the fate of all creation is frequently at stake; and the Time Lords feature frequently, along with a new character, their mysterious agent Shayde. This volume also includes the stories that added the small English country village of Stockbridge to the Doctor Who mythos. I previously only knew Stockbridge from the Big Finish audios in which it featured, so it's nice to see where it began.

I think the character of Shayde is rather interesting - it's quite intriguing to have a recurring figure who's not an enemy, nor straightforwardly an ally, but someone who has his own agenda. I hope we get to see more of him in future comics. I'm less keen on the regular appearances of the Time Lords, especially Rassilon. They function more as a plot device than anything else, and it doesn't do much to enhance their air of majesty or mystery.

All these stories feature the Doctor traveling without a regular companion. Though this allows for some interesting surrogate companions, it has the unfortunate side-effect of making this a very male-centric slice of the Doctor Who universe. There's a really notable dearth of female characters. This probably passed without comment in the early 1980s when the comics were originally produced, but it jars now.

Despite this, it's an enjoyable volume, and I'm looking forward to the next one. Which I hope will feature more Shayde, more Stockbridge, and, for God's sake, more girls!


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Audio Review: Doctor Who - Song of Megaptera

Song of the Megaptera by Pat Mills


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not a bad story, by any means, but one that doesn't fully live up to its potential.

On the plus side: Space whales are cool. Time-travelling space whales are particularly cool. Peri gets to be wise-cracking rather than whiny, and has a couple of particularly funny lines. ("I'm not delirious, I'm an American!" was hilarious for reasons that I can't fully explain.) There's some rather good double-act repartee between a pair of hapless security guard characters.

On the minus side: Mills seems never to have met a bit of technobabble he didn't like. Throwing around words like "dark matter", "event horizon", "hyperstition" and "techno-shaman" is presumably supposed to give a nice shiny science-fictional verneer to what is otherwise basically a whaling story, but it never seems like the author has thought particularly hard about what it all means or how it works. Not to mention that it leads to ridiculous lines of dialogue like, "No! It's a fungoid lifeform! Lasers have no effect!" The fungoid techno-shaman whale hunter represents a potentially fascinating alien culture, which is not explored in much depth. Although this may be for the best, since Mills ultimately seems determined to expose him as just as greedy and morally dubious as the big industrial space whale hunters. (Which made me wince a bit, since Mills drew from Polynesian and Native American whale hunting cultures in creating the character. I don't think that Mills intended to do anything other than subvert the audience expectation that this character would turn out to be a kind of noble savage. But still...)

Entertaining, but flawed.

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