A mini-series about the Eighth and Eleventh, which Titan advertised as a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Eighth Doctor's debut. However, there's not much of the Eighth here apart from him. No work with the events of his era, no mention of his companions. To be honest, this comic focuses more on the Eleventh's emotions.

To be honest, the most interesting part is the beginning of the story, where we are shown the life of our Rose with the Doctor's Metacrisis in a parallel world. I am absolutely sure that you need to know that the Metacrisis Doctor calls himself John Smith and that Rose has a teenage daughter, Mia, with him. And in fact, because of the paradox and the existence of the second Rose in the ‘original’ universe, our Rose is pulled back to her home dimension, which creates a second paradox!

But the rest of the plot is no different... We have two Roses: The original Rose, who meets the Eighth Doctor and together they try to understand what happened and why she was pulled back, while she irritates the Eighth and tries not to give away his own future, because this version of him hasn't yet seen the Great Time War; and an alternate Rose, who has founded her interstellar empire, but has strange dreams about the original Rose's life (it's worth noting that the original Rose has dreams about the alternate Rose's life), so she orders the Doctor to find and bring her to her, to help her, but instead of the Tenth, who is familiar to her, they bring the Eleventh, who is at a point in his life between the death of the Ponds and settling on a cloud in Victorian London, in other words, it's a sad horror.

The very essence of the plot is that, as I said, Rose founded an Empire. A kind of ‘good’ Empire. She, as she said at the end of Alternating Current, helped various oppressed aliens to win their freedom, and with one of the liberated species after the overthrow of tyranny, they actually founded this Empire, which expands as follows: there is a planet where some aliens oppress others → Rose and her army occupy the planet and overthrow the tyranny → they establish their own government, appoint someone from the oppressed species to head the administration → the oppressor species is sent to correctional labour, and in fact to a kind of concentration camp. As you can see, the picture is not the best, because technically, this is just a change in the status quo, where the oppressor and the oppressed simply change places and so the whole cycle starts over. But the alternative Rose doesn't know this, sitting in her posh palace, and the Eleventh's role is to show her. Which presents us with a thesis: ‘You're doing wrong, of course, but you just grew up in a world where there was no other way. But I know Rose Tyler wouldn't allow it.’ Here, the Doctor is obviously referring to the original Rose, but I don't think it should have worked. After all, the original Rose and the alternate Rose grew up and formed as individuals under radically different conditions, and the appeal of ‘I know Rose Tyler wouldn't allow it’ completely disregards the identity of the alternate Rose, putting the identity of the original Rose in the absolute.

In turn, the original Rose and the Eighth Doctor oppose a coup in the Empire led by the right-hand man of the alternative Rose. The coup takes place for the reason I have already described in the paragraph above: ‘...the oppressor and the oppressed simply change places, and so the whole cycle begins again...’. The right-hand man of the alternative Rose was a representative of the first species, which she helped, and it followed her. But after years of conquest, the Tip and his species caught delusions of grandeur and wanted to simply conquer the whole world to expand the Empire, not help. In fact, the oppressed became even more oppressors.

In general, this whole theme of the oppressed, the oppressors, and the status quo sounds interesting and could potentially have been a great story, but unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.

In the end, the alternative Rose realises her mistakes, the coup fails, and the original Rose returns to the parallel world - the paradox with two Rose`s is overcome!

The interaction between the Eleventh and Eighth is worth noting in this story. Earlier in the article, I praised this aspect of the Thirteenth and Tenth, but I can't do the same for the Doctors in this story. Potentially, things look interesting: The Eleventh is going through some kind of trauma and the Eighth Doctor, noticing this, offers a helping hand. However, the Eleventh rejects the help and reacts to the younger version of himself quite sharply, because what can he understand at that age. On the one hand, this is logical, because Eleven is going through a trauma and this is his reaction, but on the other hand, it is not something that is typical of him. Yes, he could be withdrawn, as he was in The Snowmen, but to snap at Eighth and accuse him of something... It's also strange to see Eleven in one scene address Eighth a little dismissively when he's assessing the Empire's military forces, saying: ‘Oh yes, why don`t you tell us everything that you know about war.’, - clearly making a curtsey to the fact that the Eighth has not seen a real war (the Great War of Time). It's a bit of a strange disdain coming from a person who despises his own regeneration, who fought in the Great War of Time. In addition, it is not known whether the Eighth has already survived the Eighth War in Heaven or not. It was already looking pretty bad to me, so when they started acting and talking like Siblings towards the end (but not chaotic), it was a strange transition.

All in all, I have rather mixed feelings about this mini-series and probably wouldn't recommend reading it. It's very sad that the Eighth Doctor got this kind of story.

This review is a translation of a part of my Ukrainian-language text, the original can be found here: https://www.mzut-podcast.com/post/2-paradoksy-4-doktory-1-dalek