We join the 10th Doctor and Martha as they arrive in the TARDIS to find an enormous, smelly mound in, as Martha calls it, ‘Merrie Olde England’. They soon meet a local peasant who explains that the local region is being terrorised by an unseen monster, which is affecting trade between the two villages of Bantling and Kindling. The Doctor, who recognised the smelly mound near the TARDIS, finally twigs that the unseen terror is an alien, which just so happens to look like a dragon. It turns out it is a stranded baby and using the TARDIS the Doctor amplifies its cries which attracts its parents to reclaim it.

This is a fun little comic strip, but some leaps of logic are made to fit the tale into the short page count. The Doctor recognises the smelly mound as alien poo and seemingly identifies the species fairly quickly just based on this fact. He also seems to realise it is a baby and how to get the parents to rescue it without too much thought. Although this results in a fast-paced comic strip, is does also require a little too much suspension of disbelief. There is also no real reason the aliens look a bit like dragons. The locals never actually see the alien and it’s only because people and livestock have been ‘spirited away’ that they assume it must be something which can fly and therefore, as it’s medieval ‘England’ it must be a dragon.

I placed ‘England’ in inverted commas in the previous paragraph because, although Martha states they are in ‘Merrie Olde England’ it doesn’t really feel like that in the artwork. It strikes me as far more ‘medieval Europe’, somewhere more Bavarian/Hammer Horror – the forest, the swamp, the mountain path just don’t feel English. I would expect more of a Merlin/Robin Hood vibe for a Merrie Olde England setting which I don’t get from this story.

There isn’t much else to say about this. The local peasant is suitably peasanty with his clothing and horse-drawn cart and the artwork vaguely evokes a sense of time and place. The Doctor and Martha pitch up, solve the mystery in double quick time (which involves Martha having to push the smelly poo down a hill) and leave. The dragon-like aliens are fairly perfunctory to the story and we don’t even learn what they are or where they came from.

I’m not really a fan of these short comic strips (as you may have realised) just because they don’t have time to satisfy as a story. The ideas are always entertaining and fun – usually due to being pitched at a younger audience (at least the ones from the annuals and Doctor Who Adventures) but hold very little substance and are, unfortunately, forgettable pieces of ephemera which are never going to make the dent in the Doctor Who canon that longer comic strips like those published in DWM are going to make. It’ll be interesting to see if any future one shots break the mould.