Seeing Things

A visit to 1943 for a short Doctor Who Adventures comic strip where the 11th Doctor and Amy meet a stranded Australian soldier in the Outback. It turns out he is being hunted by a Mirrorite, a weird alien that looks like a shiny pool of water when lying on the ground. Fortunately, the soldier had been ignoring it because he believed it to be a mirage. The Doctor and Amy have arrived with a plan to force the Mirrorite to divide itself in two which weakens it and allows them to capture it.

As with most of the Doctor Who Adventures a lot of the story remains unexplained: why is the soldier alone in the Outback; how do the Doctor and Amy know the Mirrorite is there; where has the Mirrorite come from? But plot is never really that deep or developed in these short 4 page strips.  It is enough to have an innocent human being terrorised by a weird alien and saved, non-violently, by the Doctor and companion.

One of the common tropes of these strips is bizarre alien design. They are always something that could never have been realised on TV. The Mirrorite is hugely reminiscent of the Stingrays from Planet of the Dead (a similarity strengthened by the desert setting). The setting and flying alien also reminded me of the DWM comic strip, A Wing and a Prayer.

I quite liked the conceit of the Mirrorite having camouflage which makes it look like a pool of shimmering water. It made the alien feel like something based on a real creature as the camouflage of creatures in the real world, for both prey and predators, can be just as innovative as the Mirrorite’s fictional adaptation. The way the Doctor and Amy defeated it also made sense and was definitely in the spirit of Doctor Who with them obviously wanting a non-fatal solution for a creature which was just following it’s nature.

Even though the DWA comic strips always feel a bit inconsequential, I think I’ve said before about how I still look forward to giving them a re-read and appreciate the desire the writers seemed to have to take Doctor Who all over the world, and all over time and space. Here it is the rarely-visited Australia in 1943 and other strips, as this marathon will attest to, have visited many far flung times and places, possibly more than any ‘version’ of Doctor Who.