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TARDIS Guide

Overview

Released

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Written by

Mark Michalowski

Publisher

BBC Magazines

Pages

12

Time Travel

Present

Tropes (Potential Spoilers!)

Environmental Message, Ice Planet, Transmat

Location (Potential Spoilers!)

Isqar, Earth

Synopsis

The Doctor brings Martha to a frozen world that's melting.

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This review contains spoilers!

The Doctor and Martha arrive on an icy planet.  After some mid-quality banter, Martha slips and is saved by an alien.  It's actually pretty cute as the alien looks like a big scary troll riding a pterodactyl but Martha, clearly used to this sort of thing by now, is just friendly to her rescuer and pays him a compliment about his hair.  Then the alien gestures to this big tower and explains it is his home, only to point out a MASSIVE FIREBALL IN THE SKY currently melting their world that somehow, I guess, Martha and the Doctor up until that point had never noticed or cared enough to comment on.

I think that disjointedness sets the tone nicely.  Visually, there are interesting elements to this alien world even if I find John Ross' art a little awkward and clunky.  There are also some cool character beats and the story does ultimately go in an at least somewhat fun if confusing direction.  It turns out this world is actually a victim of Earth, which is dumping its own hot air onto the ice world and taking the ice world's (Isqar) cold, unpolluted air to combat climate change.  It's incredibly silly the human scientist behind this scheme didn't just target an uninhabited world, but hey - that's an actual story.  That's something at least concrete and relevant which is more than I can say for some of my other experiences with Doctor Who Adventures.  It's got a rushed ending but at least it was an actual resolution to the conflict at hand.

But a lot of the dialogue feels like a very blunt and simplified parody of the Tenth Doctor era.  It is full of eye-rolling comedy - expect a lot of puns about the temperature!  The Doctor's dialogue is rough in particular, either just a lame attempt at humour but also sometimes uncharacteristically mean-spirited to both Martha and a few strangers he meets.   Martha is written a little better and more in line with her show self.

Yes, this is clearly one of those stories just intended for children, but even by that standard (since that can apply to most of Doctor Who) I think the creative team behind this could have done better.  There's also at least one error in the speech balloons being attributed to the wrong character I spotted, and even kids deserved better than material that was clearly rushed to publication.


dema1020

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