What did the writers know and when did they know it?: Doctor Who and the Rocks of Venus

So we are back from our holiday edition break and the Doctor has thankfully lost that Charlie Manson look. Indeed, he appears all friendly and winks at us readers. But his open eye reminds me of the Master in Deadly Assassin and so that portrait just has an odd feel for me.

This is the longest TV comic yet for the Third Doctor - 7 parts of 2 pages each. Epic!

It begins with the Brigadier and the Doctor in the back of a UNIT limousine heading deep into the Scottish Highlands. Their destination is a highly secure facility where they meet its director, Professor Logan, who looks like he should be in the "Land of Confusion" video. Logan has surreptitiously sent a manned mission to Venus which has returned with rock samples that prove there's life on the second stone from the sun. Are astronauts who go to Venus properly called Venerealnauts?

The Doctor brings a sample of the Venusian rocks to UNIT's lab where the bonnie lass Liz Shaw is thrilled and amazed at the discovery. Her Time Lord mentor, however, is sure they're fakes.

Never one to put off confrontation, the Doctor goes to Logan's home, a well-appointed and well-maintained castle that is highly expensive, and tells him straight up that he's been to Venus at least five times and there are no rocks there akin to the sample he was given. Logan laughs off the Doctor's accusation and tells him to go away. No one would believe his outlandish allegation.

The Doctor begins to return to the big city when he has an epiphany. Doing a MacGyver routine, he hastily assembles a device from parts taken from Bessie which can put people into suspended animation. He infiltrates Logan's facility but is eventually captured. Logan, tired of the Time Lord's interference, has the Doctor strapped into a rocket which is launched - destination Venus.

There's a panel showing the Doctor in that chair where he looks like Davros. It's uncanny. I suppose his visage is being distorted by the force of the rocket's thrust similar to the facial distortion seen in Spies Like Us but he really looks like the creator of the Daleks.

But our hero won't be defeated so easily. He manages to escape his bonds and turn the craft around onto a course for Earth. Logan likes his castle. No, he loves it. He is so castlephilic that he lets the Doctor live and vows to give a full confession to the authorities so that the Doctor doesn't crash the capsule into the villain's precious castle. 

I can never recall exactly when we understood that Venus is totally inhospitable to aikido instructors. Let me see here...It seems that by 1967 we apes understood that the temperature and air pressure were just too great for even a Time Lord to traipse around in. Yet Doctor Who writers kept up the charade. Either that or they made up some tale as to how Venus got so bad. For a series that began as something to impart some knowledge to kids, it sure lost its way when it comes to Venus.

Logan is a good, cartoonish villain. As an engineer, he gets points for giving his rocket self-destruct mechanism a big handle with "EXPLODE" in big letters. 

Little old lady from Gallifrey: Undercover

Another two-pager from a holiday edition of TV whatever they called it over there. Probably the same one as "Assassin From Space". Once again the Doctor has that Charlie Manson look in the intro panel. 

The Brigadier summons the Doctor and tells him that a small device has been stolen and is at a foreign embassy which precludes any official UNIT involvement in its retrieval. He wants our hero to get it back as Time Lords are not really official representatives of UNIT nor the human race, for that matter. Ere long the Doctor approaches the embassy at issue which appears to be the German one, by the look of the coat of arms on the lintel, dressed as an old lady. She, er, he has come armed with some mind control juice applied via a perfume mister.

The Doctor manages to snag the stolen device and makes an escape with the aid of the Brigadier who is disguised as a bobby.

The Third Doctor in drag looked quite funny but the Brigadier looked disturbingly like Joe Stalin in a panel or two. No Liz in this one. Confirmation of it being the German embassy comes when a guard yells "Halt!" Was there ever an East German embassy in London?

God rest ye merry, Gallifreyan : Assassin From Space

At first I thought that I had neglected to copy all of the files onto my phone but I soon realized that "Assassin From Space" was indeed only two pages long. Further research shows that this appeared in a special holiday issue of the English equivalent of TV Guide so perhaps they only had room for abbreviated Time Lord Tales in order to get all the jolly Christmas stuff packed in the issue.

Notice how the portrait of the Doctor has lost its warm, avuncular charm and our hero has taken on a rather menacing look, as if he were Ebenezer Scrooge readying Bob Cratchit's corpse for transport to the dog food factory where it would fetch a few quid. Look at those crazy eyes!

The plot here is simple: an alien race seeks to colonize the Earth but understand that they must rid our planet of its Gallifreyan champion first. And so they send what looks to be a mechical ant-like thingy to ambush the Doctor as he strolls through his favorite park in London.

The Doctor is able to fend off the creature with his cane which might be sonic as it can do all manner of things including zapping giant mechanical insects with a laser beam.

No Liz here. The Doctor exclaims, "By the powers!" Is that an English phrase or did the writer just pull it out of his a**? "Great powers!" "By the powers!" Hmm...

It's beginning to look a lot like fishmen: The Fishmen Of Carpantha

 

This little tale gave me a strong sense of déjà vu.

The Doctor and Liz are amongst the observers aboard a Royal Navy cruiser which is testing out some fancy new depth charges. They pass the test which involves destroying a bit of rock. While everyone celebrates, the Doctor and Liz note some radio interference which they think originates from the nearby S.S. Monitor whose job is to assist other ships navigate the rocky waters of wherever it is the story takes place.

But it turns out the Monitor is offering bad course data, much to the chagrin of various captains whose ships end up in Davy Jones' Locker. Upon investigating, it is discovered that the crew of the Monitor have been knocked out cold and a tape recorder with the bum data is being broadcasted to unsuspecting ships. The Doctor and Liz investigate under waves in a bathyscaphe which is "eaten" by a larger submersible with nasty, big, pointy teeth.

They are taken to the home of the Carpanthans, a race of fishmen who put the Doctor and Liz on trial for the destruction of their city - that rock the depth charge destroyed was no mere rock. Their trial takes place in a courtroom which fortuitously happens to have a stash of emergency gas cutting cylinders. Luckily Liz has a lighter with her - does she smoke Virginia Slims? You've come a long way, baby!

Despite a makeshift flame thrower, our heroic pair are unable to effect an escape. However, the Doctor manages to convince the Carpanthan leader that he will not reveal their presence to the apes on the surface. For this act of kindness, the Doctor and Liz are allowed to leave. Those Carpanthans weren't so bad after all and didn't seem to worship Dagon.

I don't know when this comic was written but it bore more than a passing resemblance to Doctor Who and the Silurians. Fish people under the ocean, reptile people under the ground. The Doctor trying to broker peace between a cold blooded race below and the warm blooded apes on the surface.

Liz is back, although she blurts out "Doctor, I'm scared!" at one point. A little science at the beginning but she's mainly the pretty thing needing the Doctor's help.

They eat heavy metal: The Mysterious Meteorite

The Third Doctor's first season continues with another comic: "The Mysterious Meteorite".

A large ferrous meteorite lands near an airfield which of course attracts UNIT's attention. Standard Operating Procedure dictates that the Brigadier enlists the help of the Doctor and so he does. Our beloved Time Lord investigates the large iron mass. Finding it safe, he declares it fit for a museum.

The iron giant is transported via truck to its new home but small hole opens on it from which escapes a cloud of iron filings. No ordinary filings, they are sentient and quite hungry. And so they attach themselves to metal where they dine like a king. Bridges, storage tanks, airplanes, guns - anything made of metal becomes part of their smorgasbord. You can see where this would cause problems.

The Doctor is ably assisted by Liz Shaw in what I think is a first for these TV comics and they discover that the iron filings are alive. By chance they dined on a tank full of Rust-Oleum, er, an anti-corrosive liquid which provides a cure for infection by the wee iron beasties.

A fairly standard TV comics adventure notable for the presence of Liz which makes me wonder why she wasn't in earlier comics. She was present in Spearhead From Space so why did it take so long for her to appear in print? While she does lend a hand here, she doesn't exactly put her scientific genius to work. And wasn't she an expert on meteorites?

The Roundup: Insect

We now complete a trifecta of TV comics before moving onto a different medium. Meine Damen und Herren, better living through chemistry. Er, I mean "Insect".

A farmer in the West Country innocently dusts his crops with a new-fangled insecticide which doesn't work very well. Instead of sending the pests to meet their maker, it has the effect of making a pair of caterpillars grow to gigantic proportions. Thanks, Monsanto. But rather than taking their situation with a bit of pantagruelian good cheer, they go on a rampage.

U.N.I.T. is alerted and the Brigadier tries to enlist the Doctor who is, like last comic, grumpy and resentful of being disturbed when he's trying to repair the TARDIS with household chemicals, Bunsen burners, and surplus vacuum tubes. Thankfully strange happenings in the West Country pique his interest and away our heroes go. 

One of the creepy crawlies meets its demise after being hit by a lorry while the other is captured after the Doctor douses it with riot gas. I don't know what this stuff is but score another point for the chemists as it knocks out the second creature which is taken back to a facility for study.

Cue giant ants. Who says they only have Them! in New Mexico? The pair get into a slugfest in the center of the village of Cragwell, which does not appear to be a real place. I smiled when I saw that one of the ants was wielding a cross as it went mandible a mandible with its foe.

The Doctor and the Brig get in the former's helicopter to investigate when they become the hunted. A "daddy-long-legs of horrifying size" gives chase. I did a double take because, while the text says "daddy-long-legs", the picture is of a beastie with wings that looks suspiciously like a mosquito instead of the spidery creature that I know by that name. My country and England are truly divided by a common language.

The Doctor studies the captured caterpillar and comes to the conclusion that there was a freak error in the production of the insecticide that led to this outbreak of entomological gigantism. He hastily devises an antidote just as the creature breaks its rusty cage and attempts to run. This new formula is used to dust the infected fields and all of the insects return to their normal size.

I noted that the hitherto unknown exclamation "Great powers!" has been replaced by the more natural "Great Scott!". I also felt that "Insect" presaged "The Green Death" with its giant insect beasties. If the caterpillars had been left to their own devices, would they have turned into Mothra's?

1,900 litres of diesel and 2 lumps, please: The Multi-Mobile

Whether I go with the DW Reference Guide or The Complete Adventures, my Pertwee season 1 venture is going to be fairly short as there are no novels and I am forgoing the Big Finish stuff. It's the 4 TV stories, several comics, and some short stories. Next up is "The Multi-Mobile", another TV comic.

The Brigadier has brought a thoroughly uninterested Doctor along to a demonstration of the Multi-Mobile, a new mechanical marvel which is a squat, flat tank, basically. It reminds me of the creepy crawler hoolie that NASA uses to haul the space shuttle to the launch pad. The Doctor is suitably unimpressed as the demonstration of the vehicle's mad brush burning skillz comes to an end and the crew of the hulking mass of steel take a well-deserved pee break.

But leaving the vehicle unattended opens a window of opportunity for three scofflaws who commandeer the behemoth. U.N.I.T.'s initial attempts to stop the beast with a tank and some armored vehicles prove ineffectual. The same goes for an aerial strike.

Soon enough the Doctor figures out that the hijackers' destination is the British Nuclear Defence Centre. A little bit of cipherin' later, he calculates that the Mobile will run out of fuel a few miles short of its target. A plot is hatched whereby U.N.I.T. would lay in wait at the petrol station most likely to be visited by the Mobile and ambush the villainous hijackers when they attempt to refuel.

Things don't go according to plan but the Doctor comes through in the end by dropping a couple sugar cubes into the fuel tank. The sucrose sabotage proves successful.

I was impressed with this one in that it seems its creators actually watched the show. Or had better notes. Or read what they were given. When the Doctor is all pouty and in a huff about being at the demo when he could be back at the lab chillin' with Liz, Lethbridge-Stewart reminds him of the Brigaderian bargain they struck at the end of "Spearhead From Space": the Doctor helps U.N.I.T. in exchange for spare parts to tinker with.

While none of these TV comic have been good, at least they've become largely inoffensive. No, that's not totally fair. The Third Doctor in these comics so far really isn't too far removed from one seen on TV, er, bluray. Hopefully the ones in the Annuals follow suit.

The mob of 10 year-olds rules: The Arkwood Experiments

For my previous Doctor Who marathons, I used the chronology at the Doctor Who Reference Guide. Since I had a good thing going, I returned to it in preparation for the Third Doctor only to discover that it had gone offline. Thankfully the Wayback Machine has it archived. But, in my panic to find a replacement, I ran across Andrew Kearley's site, The Complete Adventures. This site has the advantage of not only being online but also of being more current. There are newer Big Finish adventures, which I am not listening to in my marathon, in Kearley's timeline that were never added to the Reference Guide but also newer comics, which I will endeavor to read.

I noticed some differences in ordering between the two sites and so I've opted to throw a little Reference Guide in here and some Complete Adventures there for my marathon. Whatever discrepancies they have, they both list "The Arkwood Experiments" as the story that follows "Spearhead From Space".

"The Arkwood Experiments" is a TV comic from early 1970. I've run into these comics before during my earlier marathons and like pretty much every First and Second Doctor comic from their eras, they were almost uniformly bad. It was apparent that their creators had never watched the show and instead were given a paragraph long synopsis of it along with some publicity stills and told to go off and make comics. Would that be the same here?

Pertwee's elongated face in the first panel has a slightly caricaturish feel to it plus he's got a big grin so we've got a whole new feel already.

The Brigadier calls the Doctor to ask for help with a bit of bother down at the local zoo. It seems that either the animals have jointly declared Opposite Day or something is quite amiss. While a panther and lion are both meek as a pussy, the birds attack anyone who dares enter the aviary while the penguins are the most murderous since the giant electric one that Scott ran into in the Sahara.

It turns out a 10 year-old boy named Cedric Mathews used the zoo animals as, er, guinea pigs, to test a new drug he has concocted that he hopes will turn boys his own age into "raging hooligans". One wouldn't think a wonder drug would be needed to accomplish this.

Aside from using the exclamation, "Great powers!"(?!), the Third Doctor here is not wholly un-Third Doctorish.

Reflecting the TV show at the time, I think this may be the first Doctor Who comic set on Earth. Contemporary Earth, at least. A slight story to be sure but it was funny to see our hero flee from a waddle of savage penguins.

It is categorically imperative that we move you to the Vortex

"Land of the Blind" was serialized over the course of 3 issues in Doctor Who Magazine back in 1995.

Our heroes land at the Denossus Settlement, a space station that had been taken over some two decades previously by a trio of creatures from the Vortexian Union. They seem to be very paternalistic as they feel they have a duty to bring all life inside the Vortex for its own good - whether they want to go or not. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe of course fall in with some rebels.

The day is saved when the Vortexian Union representatives violate their own principles by causing the death of a man who had a bad ticker. Kant would no doubt be proud to know that the reps accept their guilt at having violated the Thou Shall Not Kill thing and do their duty: they leave the Denossus Settlement.

The daughter of the man whose heart gave out mourns his death while the Doctor sagely laments, "If only the price of freedom wasn't always so high."

"Land of the Blind" is a nice change from those old Doctor Who Annual comics. The Doctor doesn't call Jamie and Zoe "children", for instance. It's also drawn a bit better than those ones from the 60's. The settlement is diversely populated and I suppose there's a deontological lesson to be had.

The Doctor brings on Darkness and night

"Bringer of Darkness" is a comic that appeared in the 1993 summer special edition of Doctor Who Magazine and so is very different from the comics that appeared in the late 1960s.

The Doctor, Victoria, and Jamie finally escape the London of The Web of Fear and land in the forested part of a planet. It all seems idyllic until they discover a damaged Dalek ship with a trio of the evil eye-stalked demons building a beacon to send a distress call to bring even more of these menaces to their rescue.

In classic style, the Doctor reverses the polarity of the beacon's neutron flow or some such thing causing the SOS signal to go in reverse and kill the Daleks. Victoria gets to see the creatures in the metal shells and feels a bit of empathy for them in contrast to the Doctor's glee at having killed 3 of his enemies. Victoria is disturbed by the display of hatred on the part of the Time Lord and wonders why the Daleks referred to him as Ka Faraq Gatri, a name which the Doctor dismisses a superstition. She realizes that she must leave the TARDIS.

A neat little tale that gets into Victoria's head more than you'd think possible. I like how the text that is from her journal is in script while Dalek dialogue is in their font. It was really nice to have a comic with a bit of substance and one where the Doctor does not refer to his companions as "children".