Review of The Crimson Hand by 15thDoctor
27 October 2024
This review contains spoilers
This is excellent! A year’s worth of comics leading up to this gives it a series finale feel. We’re finally getting the answers we’ve been promised for a long time. And for all the epicness and outer space action that is featured in this story it feels grounded by the characters who we have been watching all this time, not just The Doctor and Majenta, but their pursuers. The fact that Majenta has never proven herself as reliable and totally trustworthy up to this point gives everything an edge and an exciting uncertainty.
I’d spotted the theme of The Crimson Hand hidden throughout the series. I like how the story moves throughout her hidden memories, integrating things we’ve seen before with the new and the old (events from before we were introduced to Majenta). The world building that has been put in place across the previous comics starts to really pay off now. There are stakes!
The cliffhanger at the end of part three, where the Crimson Hand have ripped through the Justice system and have de-atomised The Doctor is just plain cool. It’s epic without any of the “epic nothingness” you get from other comics.
Majenta’s world when she joins the Hand is a dystopian “utopia” which she is controlling with an all seeing eye and an iron fist. But she has a screw loose and is not enjoying a world without The Doctor. It’s reminiscent of what is done much later in Wandavision. A woman in total control of everything but herself. She has stored The Doctor in a pocket dimension ready to be unleashed to save the day.
The final part is a worthy send off for the tenth Doctor’s era in DWM, and for Majenta. She gets to be the hero which feels fitting, destroying one world to create another. Her whole era is justified by this story, a story which is my favourite of the lot and possibly one of the best DWM comics ever.