The Tides of
Time
MAY 2005
The Tides of Time is
a bit of
a weightier volume than the first two Panini graphic novels; not
surprising considering that it contains the entire run of fifth Doctor
strips from Doctor Who Monthly. Steve Parkhouse is still on hand
for writing duties, penning a selection of inter-linked tales with an
overarching mythic quality. Parkhouse’s style suits this epic format, and
Dave Gibbons’ artwork is of his usual high standard. However, we do get
something of a mixture of artistic styles this time, with Parkhouse
himself trying his hand, before handing over to Mick Austin and Steve
Dillon.
We start off with a story that
seems plucked from the legends of old.
“The Tides of Time” is a stirring
seven-parter that
crosses time, space and reality, as the Doctor, seemingly taking a holiday
in the sleepy village of Stockbridge, finds his weekend cricket match
interrupted by a stray World War II grenade. This
is the start of some terrible temporal trickery – time and space are
becoming unravelled. The demon Melanicus, a monstrous being intent of universal destruction, has taken hold of the Event Synthesizer, the
foundation engine of reality itself. It’s all vast in scope, so it’s
thankful that Parkhouse drops a little humour in – the first smatterings
of his trademark whimsy. As time comes unbuckled, the Doctor, companionless, picks up a temporary new friend. Sir Justin, a medieval
knight, could have been the cheesiest character ever, but Parkhouse pulls
it off with some very genuine-sounding dialogue and gives the character a
real likeability. Intensely moral and unafraid of the unknown, Sir Justin is
a perfect companion for the upright fifth Doctor.
The story moves rapidly,
transporting us to Gallifrey – albeit one rather different to the world we
saw on television. It’s a space-age world of hi-tech towers and turrets, a
sort of futuristic fortified city. It’s also home to a link to the Higher
Evolutionaries. Quite who these high-flying chaps are is never really made
clear, but they seem to be a grouping of the most powerful minds in the
universe. Rassilon is there, appearing to be in surprisingly rude health,
as is Merlin – meeting the Doctor just as he said he would in the
previous, fourth Doctor story,
“The
Neutron Knights” (available in the Dragon’s Claw
anthology).
Appealing for the
Evolutionaries help, the Doctor and Justin are dragged away by the psychic
powers of the terrible Melanicus – into a bizarre, surrealist realm
modelled on a funfair. It’s a heady, baffling ride; the Doctor and Justin
all the time pursued by a shadowy, globe-headed figure… This turns out to
be Shayde, a Gallifreyan construct sent to aid the Doctor, and to keep him
on the straight and narrow. As the Doctor and his two new companions
continue in their quest, to Melanicus’s homeworld, the beautifully bizarre
crystalline world of Althrace, the universe begins to collapse into
turmoil, as time unravels. Cue some frightening, evocative imagery as
battles across time rip history apart.
In the end, during a showdown
with Melanicus, it’s Sir Justin who saves the day. Time reverses, and all
is as it was. However, this use of the reset doesn’t hurt at all, coming
as the natural conclusion to this
temporal horror, and there are still losses on the Doctor’s side. The Time
Lord continues his vacation alone, or so it seems.
“Stars
Fell on Stockbridge” introduces a young man named Maxwell Edison, a UFO-spotting geek who is ridiculed
by the rest of Stockbridge’s populace. Whilst tracking alien emissions, he quite coincidentally happens upon the Doctor’s TARDIS.
The Doctor is still hanging around Stockbridge, but has detected signals
from a craft in decaying orbit. Taking a nervous Max along for the ride –
although he’s convinced that the Doctor comes from Venus (Gallifrey isn’t
in the A-Z of Inhabitable Planets) – he investigates the apparently
abandoned spacecraft. It’s a sweet little story that’s really about the
Doctor making one man’s life a little happier, and the ending’s rather
lovely.
“The
Stockbridge Horror” takes on more serious matters, although it’s still
shot through with a rich vein of humour. The Doctor, enjoying his
vacation, is horrified to read that a police box has been dug up out of
500,000,000-year-old limestone. Rushing to where he left the TARDIS, he’s
relieved to find it still there, but caked in mud after apparently having
travelled without him. Worried, he sets out to investigate, but he has
bigger problems on their way; not only have the Time Lords sent Shayde
after him, to arrest him for such gross negligence in allowing his ship to
alter scientific thinking on earth, but there’s an elemental being after
him too.
This strip gives us some
arresting images, such as the elemental, black and muscled, stubbornly
holing onto to the TARDIS as it hovers in space, and the first ever image
of a war TARDIS. However, it’s told in a confusing, disjointed style, and I
wasn’t entirely sure why any of this had happened by the end of it (although
more hints were on their way, they didn’t explain much either). The switch
in artists, from Steve Parkhouse to Mick Austin halfway through is also
jarring as their styles are very different.
That isn’t to say that I don’t
like Austin’s artwork. Far from it; his unique style is one of the best
things about this book. It’s peculiarly cartoonish yet highly emotive at
the same time. He takes on art duties for the next two strips, although
they’re really one extended story.
“Lunar Lagoon” is a grim beauty,
although why it’s called
“Lunar Lagoon” I don’t know – it’s not on the
Moon, and it’s not in a lagoon! Nevertheless, it’s a quietly beautiful
story, as the Doctor, still living the quiet life, now on a Pacific
island, finds himself up against Fuji, a Japanese soldier who has been
hiding in the jungle, and believes that WWII is still going. Parkhouse
makes Fuji the antagonist, but never the villain, and his own life is
sympathetically portrayed. As US fighters cross overhead, the story plays
out to its tragic, inevitable conclusion.
This leads straight into
“4-Dimensional Vistas”,
a time-tangled tale that heads off the ongoing story arc. The Doctor
confronts Gus, an American fighter pilot, discovering that it isn’t 1983
as he believed, but 1963 – yet the war really is still going! The Doctor chooses to take Gus
along with him, giving the trooper a chance to escape the unending war
he’s part of. They track disturbances in time, eventually landing in the
Arctic of the ‘original’ Earth. There, we discover that time is being
manipulated by none other than the Meddling Monk, who has join forces with
the Ice Warriors! It’s not a team-up you’d ever expect, but it’s cleverly
done. The Monk – or
“the Time Meddler” as he’s referred to here – has
swapped his habit for some tundra wear, but is still modelled on Peter
Butterworth. The Ice Warriors look tremendous – faithful to their original
design, but beefed up and made more menacing and expressive by Austin’s
artistic style. The story is fairly puzzling – I still have no clear idea
why the Monk has teamed up with the Ice Warriors – but it’s fast-paced and
visually exciting, with a stunning chase scene, in which the Doctor’s
TARDIS pursues the Meddler’s (also disguised as a police box, oddly)
sideways through time. It’s a baffling but exhilarating story.
“The
Moderator” ends the fifth Doctor’s comic strip tenure, and it’s a change
of style and pace. Steve Dillon takes on artistic duties, and ably
illustrates this grim tale of an intergalactic bounty hunter. The greedy Dogbolter, a frog-faced entrepreneur who owns Mars, Jupiter and Venus,
wants to buy the TARDIS (time is money, so a time machine could be very
useful). The Doctor refuses, making himself a new enemy in the process.
The tale ends with a gunshot, as the bounty hunter guns down Gus. As the
story closes, centring on the grieving Doctor, for a moment you can
genuinely believe he’s taken to revenge…
We also get a bonus strip –
“Timeslip”, an
old fourth Doctor strip from Doctor Who Weekly by Dez Skinn and
Paul Neary. Quite why this is in this volume, and not one of the previous
two, I don’t know. In any case, it’s a flimsy tale that sees the Doctor
pulled back through his incarnations as the TARDIS is swallowed up a space
creature. Essentially, it’s an excuse to get the first Doctor back in the
strip to save the day, and it just about works as a silly bit of fun.
Altogether, bonus strip not withstanding, this volume is a heady ride
through time and space. The fifth Doctor’s graphic adventures, supposedly tied together as one long string of
events, can become somewhat confusing, but when the stories are told with
such fervour and illustrated with such style, it’s hard to quibble. Not
only that, but this volume sees DWM truly carving out its own piece of the
Whoniverse, with its own mythology, and its own version of Gallifrey,
introducing recurring characters such as Rassilon; Shayde; Max; and Dogbolter along the way.
Excellent stuff, all told. |
Most of my
Beyond History’s End selections have required very little
effort on my part. Since closing The History of the Doctor’s
doors almost two years ago, there have been a flood of stories released
across the media that I’ve been keen to talk –and invariably rave –
about, most of them coming out of Big Finish Production’s incessant
Who factory. However, determined not to let this fiftieth
anniversary series turn into an ode to Big Finish, as is the obvious
temptation, when it came to choosing the fifth Doctor’s story I decided
to take a side-step into his often-overlooked adventures amidst the
pages of Doctor Who Monthly, as collected together in Panini’s
colossal 2005 volume, The Tides of Time. In so doing, I erred.
Having
heard its collective tales described as “Some of the greatest Doctor
Who comic strips ever published”, I had high hopes for the heavy
paperback – hopes raised even higher by two of the adventures’
Stockbridge setting. The quaint Hampshire /
Mummerset village was used to astounding
effect by Big Finish as the canvas for a trilogy of linked audio dramas
in 2009, not to mention a stirring one-off instalment in 2006. My
expectations were promptly dashed, however, as I soon found myself in a
world that seemed to subscribe to the notion that Doctor Who is a
kids’ show – and an exceedingly wacky one, at that.
The
anthology’s seven-part title track is, admittedly, an incredible visual
banquet, abounding with all manner of Dave Gibbons’ finest monstrosities
and delights, which I imagine must have been even more liberating in
their day, given the budgetary restraints that kept the television
series’ writers’ imaginations in check back then. However, without
context art is just art, and unfortunately the story that these
enchanting pictures paint is not only bonkers, but bears little
semblance to Doctor Who then or now.
The Doctor is a case
in point. Save for his opening-scene batting and a passing resemblance
to Peter Davison, there is nothing about this story’s Doctor that put me
in mind of the series’ focal hero at all – a trend that regrettably
extends across the whole volume. I recall writing reviews of stories in
which I’ve felt that their Doctor was portrayed “generically”, but until
now I’ve always meant that the Doctor in question could easily have been
any of his incarnations - here I mean that he could be any
quasi-scientific hero full stop. The Doctor’s world is arguably even
more off-kilter – instead of the vice-ridden hegemony borne of Robert
Holmes’ seminal Deadly Assassin script and perpetuated by the
Gallifrey spin-off and even recently-televised Who, this
Gallifrey’s “Time-Lords”, with their laissez-faire approach to
hyphens, live inside the Matrix as “Matrix-Lords”, along with their
Celestial Intervention Agency, and, apparently, Merlin. On occasion,
this colourful, two-tone insanity does produce something fresh and
exciting that works well within the Whoniverse as I know it, and
especially so in the medium – take the removable-headed Gallifreyan
construct Shayde, for instance –, but for the most part, it seems to
shoot wide of the mark.
The
Stockbridge strips, on the strength of which I’d purchased this volume,
are much better, though my complaints about the Doctor’s dearth of
distinguishing features stands in both. “Stars Fell on Stockbridge” is
the
lovely tale of the Doctor saving loveable misfit Maxwell Edison (sans silver
hammer), and vindicating his Mulderish existence into the bargain.
Whilst even Dave Gibbons’ finest sketching couldn’t measure up to the
amiable performance that movie star Mark Williams gave in The Eternal
Summer, the story is so very poignant that, even as someone
approaching the media-sprawling Stockbridge saga backwards, I was
considerably buoyed going into “The Stockbridge Horror”, which is
probably, on reflection, the collection’s finest offering.
Steve
Parkhouse’s sophisticated tale plays with temporally-twisted elements
that would unwittingly sow the seeds of audios the calibre of
Neverland and particularly The Fires of Vulcan. Further, as far as I
know, this strip boasts the Whoniverse’s first-ever battle TARDIS, and
more notably still, throughout it boasts a level of implied horror that
you’ll seldom find in any form Doctor Who, offsetting the
juvenile vibes that I got from “The Tides of Time”. Like an X-File
ahead of its time, Parkhouse and Austin’s artwork never actually shows
the dreadful images of immolation that the dialogue refers to, and on
which the tale turns, but this only makes it play on the reader’s mind
all the more.
It’s
downhill from there though, as the next two stories descend into utter
anarchy. With the stalwart Steve Parkhouse leaving for bigger and better
things, Mick Austin takes sole responsibility for the artwork, bringing
with him a slightly surreal style that, whilst perfectly in keeping with
the tone of the adventures, does little to aid their penetrability. “Lunar
Lagoon” makes “The Tides of Time” seem straightforward, deliberately
blurring the lines between ally and antagonist as well as one timeline and
another, while “4-Dimensional Vistas” just blurs everything, pitting the
Doctor and his newfound ally Gus against the interesting pairing of the
Monk and the Ice Warriors. I desperately wanted to like both strips, as
each contain elements that I think are inspired, but I struggled to follow
either.
The
final fifth Doctor strip, “The Moderator”, is more successful. Save for
“The Stockbridge Horror”, it has the most adult tone of all the stories
in the anthology - a feeling exacerbated by Steve Dillon’s spikier
illustrative style. The villain of the piece, the frog-like mogul
Dogbolter, is an especially magnificent creation, particularly in this
medium and particularly in an era of rampant Thatcherism. The volume is
then capped, rather abnormally, with a fourth Doctor strip of
questionable relevance but fair spirit, bringing The Tides of Time
to a discordant finish that somehow feels oddly appropriate.
Overall then, my fifth trip Beyond
History’s Endhas been the most disappointing. I had assumed that Big
Finish’s Stockbridge stories had shown me only the top of the proverbial
iceberg, and that these evidently-inspirational strips lurked below like
some great clandestine masterpiece. In the event, it seems that the Big
Finish stories cherry-picked the most successful elements of the fifth
Doctor’s DWM run, leaving the confusing and contradictory
remnants festering frozen below water, where I wish I’d have left them.
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