Skip to content

Review of The Stolen TARDIS by dema1020

24 November 2024

There's a lot this little comic offers.  I love its gorgeous and creative art, and this story is novel in that it is one of the earliest chronological depictions of the Time Lords according to the internet.  It's neat to see a relatively early conception of ancient Gallifrey when our main character and villain travel back in time on this world.  I like my Time Lord content to be not overly grounded and human since they are supposed to be an alien race with all this cool technology, which is where a lot of these stories can fall short, but it does feel like many Gallifrey-focused stories, it does simplify a race that I feel should be infinitely more complicated than Earth.  The people of Gallifrey get robbed by a travelling circus in The Stolen TARDIS, for example, and that feels a little silly to me how easily they are fooled and how poorly the TARDISes are secured.  Another example is ancient Gallifrey itself - which mostly seems to be a jungle world full of dinosaurs.  A pretty boring choice that might as well have been Earth!

The main character Plutar is interesting.  He is failed out of the academy for wanting to travel to other worlds, and help them fight evil.  A faction within Gallifray advocates for that but most of Time Lord society is against such notions.  All of that serves as interesting back-drop for the Doctor and gives Plutar's character an extra sense of meaning to him.  There's set-up for him to return but that never actually happens.  Still, I like him as he is, with some interesting implications to the character and nothing more.  Even though the villain Sillarc has a very simple plan, at least he is visually very interesting.  Steve Dillon does a great job with the art overall.  There's also a really dumb plot point where Sillarc winds up caught red-handed with a TARDIS, and the Time Lords STILL don't want to interfere!  It's an insane moment that instantly took me out of the story.  No society this secretive and isolationist would permit such a thing!

Review created on 24-11-24