You have to love TV Comic Doctor Who. It’s so very close to the real thing and yet so far at the same time.

The Doctor, John and Gillian arrive on Vortis and find the Menoptra at the mercy of the Zarbi again. It turns out some other aliens want some rare mineral from Vortis and have enslaved some Menoptra, mind-controlling the Zarbi to aid them. They’ve also, for some reason, created flying Zarbi suits with laser weapons.

There are some great images in this - the Doctor being whacked by a rock and flown away by Zarbi; the alien invaders strapping him to a table with a laser heading towards him slowly like James Bond at the mercy of the villain; the alien invader crawling out of a Zarbi suit.

It’s interesting that this story also has Zarbi you can climb into and control like in Lair of the Zarbi Supremo. Weirdly, this story can’t seem to decide if the Zarbi are mindless drones or an evil force to be combatted. (Listening to the novelisation and it’s interesting to note that Strutton hints at more autonomy for the Zarbi, even with the Animus, so maybe this was something being picked up on by these writers). It smacks of the same desire that came with the Quarks extra-curricular appearances. Both they and the Zarbi get presented as evil in their own right rather than being slave to some sort of master. I guess it was all part of trying to make them the next Daleks.

The Menoptra are pretty useless in this story but at least they’re not as openly hostile as they are in the annual story The Lost Ones. They know something is wrong with a nearby mountain where Menoptra have disappeared but haven’t bothered to investigate and are surprised to find a whacking great abandoned spaceship atop it, covered in dust. They also seem never to have discovered the alien’s secret base - which is huge!

The alien invaders - the Skirrons - are typically two-dimensional baddies intent on becomng ‘masters of the universe’. We have to credit the TV show’s writers, directors and producers with striving to create a show which rose above this straightforward ‘aliens are evil’ trope and actually bothered to give us alien races who were ‘people’ like the Menoptra or the Sensorites. Even the ‘evil’ Daleks have more nuance. There’s a really obvious attitude in terms of ‘writing for children’ that has never affected the main show but really is to the detriment of these comic strips.

The violent ending is also indicative of how these writer’s didn’t seem to understand Doctor Who. The Doctor, in a flying Zarbi suit, turns around and blasts the alien base to kingdom come. It just isn’t right and, as fun as these comic strips are, they just don’t understand the show rather taking the trappings and placing them over generic sci-fi stories. This still gets a 3/5 from me though just because I find the images so entertaining and overall this is one of the strip’s stronger entries, especially in being a sequel to a TV story.