I really enjoyed this one. I got a lot out of the Victorian, spiritual setting and liked the ambiguity of the Hypothetical Man himself. There is a nice contrast between the bubbling mystery and potential of his character, and then Amy violently throwing a chair at it to end proceedings. Very funny.

Another IDW comic and another visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (again throwing the 10th Doctor’s comment, in The Next Doctor, about 1851 not being a very interesting year into disrepute).  This time it’s the 11th Doctor, Amy and Rory who come up against mysterious goings on.  What with the 7th and 8th Doctors running around the Exhibition with, possibly, the Paternoster Gang too, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next multi-Doctor story is set in and around the great crystal palace.  Indeed, the Doctor actually comments that he had better be careful not to run into himself.

Hypothetical Gentleman is firmly entrenched in the Victorian obsession with spiritualism.  A medium, apparently fake, but not really, has received instructions for ‘another world’ (apparently in High Gallifreyan) about how to make a strange machine which will allow a being to pass into our world.  There is some guff about time being stolen, which apparently freezes the unfortunates that this being touches (including Rory) but when the Doctor’s clever macguffin doesn’t do the trick (because he doesn’t bother to look behind him and gets frozen) all it takes is for Amy to smash the thing to smithereens.  The Doctor had said this wasn’t an option initially because he wanted to find out who, or what, was trying to break through (with the Gallifreyan language a hint that it should be someone the Doctor knows.  We don’t, however, find out who it is trying to get through.  They remain a relatively indistinct, androgynous humanoid form.  At the end of the story, they are revealed to have infiltrated the TARDIS and have set up camp inside the time rotor, but I have no idea if the being returns in a later IDW story.

To be honest, the TARDIS crew are rather vaguely characterised in this story.  Amy is feisty, Rory is a nurse (he stays behind to care for the ailing medium) and the Doctor is twirly.  I have been impressed by a lot of the IDW comics I have read since purchasing the Humble bundle but this story was a bit of a disappointment.  I also wasn’t keen on the artwork which was rather wishy-washy, particularly in the opening scenes of the ‘sort-of’ fake medium plying her trade to a married couple.

Not much is made of the Great Exhibition setting itself, but we do have some policemen in full Victorian get-up.  There is also a race through London to track a trace of artron energy which turns out to be the TARDIS, which someone has moved.  It’s a part of the story I didn’t understand and the Doctor comments on how they’ve been on a wild goose chase.  Why was the TARDIS moved?  Why didn’t the Doctor recognise the artron signature of his own TARDIS?

Historically, aside from the setting of the Great Exhibition, the policemen and the Victorian fascination with the spirit world, there is little else.  This story doesn’t have a strong Victorian feel although its parallels to The Unquiet Dead are interesting (a medium allowing passage for an alien entity into our world).

One other thing is this story’s title.  It was quite difficult to resist the urge to write THE Hypothetical Gentlemen every time I typed the title, but it is, in fact, simply – Hypothetical Gentleman.  For some reason, this really offends my sensibilities.  Must be the English teacher in me…

I enjoyed this comic strip story a lot. It's a creepy tale about a being from another dimension trying to establish a corporeal form, set during the time of the Great Exhibition. It reminded me a bit of a recent Titan Comics story, with the hand coming through the weird portal thing being similar to the hand reaching through in the Road To The Thirteenth Doctor comics.