Challenge of the Piper

A visit to TV Comic land sees us join the company of Doctor Who and his two grandchildren, John and Gillian.

The Challenge of the Piper is wonderful – if completely at odds with the Doctor Who we know and love from television.

The story opens with the familiar tale of the Pied Piper in Hamelin (which I have used to date this story, as the Doctor merely surmises they are in the Middle Ages). The children of Hamelin are led away by the Piper after the townsfolk refuse to pay him the amount agreed for ridding the town of rats. The children are taken to a magical land reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and soon after the TARDIS arrives in the Piper’s kingdom.
The children have tired of the unending supply of sweets and want to return home but the Piper won’t release them. The Doctor, John and Gillian travel to the Piper’s castle past a series of obstacles. The Piper sets the Doctor a series of challenges before he will agree to return the children to their parents. The Doctor, of course, succeeds and the children return to Hamelin. The Doctor retrieves the Piper’s money from the mayor but when he tries to give it to the Piper the magical kingdom below the hill has gone and only the TARDIS remains.

This adventure is a fantasy. This is the sort of story that Steven Moffat sailed dangerously close to, and now RTD has dived into more consistently (and consequently annoyed many fans).   I’m not one of those fans. I’ve always been of the opinion that Doctor Who is, if a genre can even be assigned to it, ‘science fantasy’ not ‘science fiction’. A central conceit of a box bigger inside than out, piloted around time and space by a near-immortal alien with two hearts isn’t an extrapolation of current science. It’s magic. Pure and simple. However the series likes to explain away various ‘magical’ aspects, the bottom line is that the series is a fantasy with science fiction trappings.

The Challenge of the Piper dispenses with any scientific pretence. The Doctor battles a dragon with a fire extinguisher; the Piper has the power to turn himself invisible, fly and (as in the original tale) play music with magical powers; the Piper’s realm is filled with lollipop trees, mysterious marshes and a dark spooky castle. For these reasons, I love it! This is Doctor Who as a fairytale. I’ve always loved the fact that Doctor Who is one of very few programmes that can be any genre it likes – horror, fantasy, romance, historical, comedy. Although the TV series has to understandably, always stay just on the right side of its science fiction/fantasy label, the spin offs have usually taken the opportunity to jump feet first into the extremes. Whether that be the novels which toyed with horror (Rags and Combat Rock) or cartoons (The Crooked World); the audios which have ventured into musicals (Doctor Who and the Pirates), broad comedy (The One Doctor) and interactive storytelling (Flip Flop); or the comics with wordless strips (Onomatopeia) and cross-overs (the IDW comic featuring the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation and featuring a Borg/Cyberman alliance!).

All these examples feel the need, again understandably, to give a narrative justification for the genre or storytelling device. TV Comic, only ever having a tenuous grip on its parent show, never feels that need. The dragon is a dragon, the Piper is a magician.

Interestingly, though, the Doctor only uses real life/scientific gadgets to solve the many puzzles he is presented with – a fire extinguisher, a radar, a sonar device, a parachute and a tape recorder. It is a slightly bizarre juxtaposition with the outright fantasy of the story’s setting, but feels oddly in keeping with the Doctor as we know and love him from the TV series.

John and Gillian contribute nothing to the story. They don’t even know the story of the Pied Piper, apparently, making me wonder if the writer of this comic strip assumed, as the Doctor’s grandchildren, that they weren’t from Earth, even though practically every other comic strip they appear in suggests that they are – even down to Gillian’s reference to pop singers in this very story. The two children spend the entire story trotting along behind the Doctor, literally for most of the story. There is one wonderful frame where the Doctor has jumped out of a turret after the Piper and the children’s reactions are so underwhelming it just made me laugh.

Historically, this story is clearly based on the fairy tale and, if I’m not mistaken, a 1933 cartoon version of the Pied Piper made by Disney as part of their Silly Symphonies series, which features a magical land not dissimilar to the one depicted here. Certainly there is no indication that the Doctor is visiting a historical period experiencing one of the possible explanations for the tale – that the Piper is a representation of Death and that the children of Hamelin all died! The story does, however, keep the place names intact – Hamelin, the river Weser, where the rats drown, and Koppelberg Hill where the Piper’s magical kingdom is hidden.

It was refreshing to read such as fun story as this.