I don’t remember where I heard about this comic, just that I did, and immediately reserved it at my library. Watching the 50th Anniversary special a couple of years ago was one of the best fictional experiences I’ve ever had, so I was looking to recreate the feeling a little.
Alas, this comic does not manage to convey the feeling of a Doctor Meet-Up, and honestly for me it didn’t even convey “Doctor Who.”
I suppose if this had been a TV episode or even a radio drama it would have been good, because the actors would have gotten ahold of the lines and made them their own, but on the page, they were just sort of bland. The storyline was also just ‘meh’ for me, despite the premise of the Doctors meeting, in order to try and prevent a meeting that will destroy the universe (because of course it will).
The art was just okay.
My two main problems, I think, were:
1) That I didn’t give a crap about Ten and Eleven’s companions, who for some inexplicable reason Cornell just makes up wholesale. I suppose I could buy Ten getting a new companion some time in between losing Donna and meeting up with Wilf, saving Wilf’s life and giving up his own in the process (a moment that is revisited here in this comic to diminishing returns). But even that would be stretching it. The whole point of Ten’s last arc is that he becomes a different person when he travels alone. He NEEDS a companion. And if he’d had one that we didn’t know about, as this comic posits, it doesn’t make any sense. He wouldn’t have acted the way he did in “Waters of Mars,” for instance. The loss of Donna devastated him, and he didn’t recover enough to get a new permanent companion until he got a new face. And Eleven! Come on. There was zero wiggle room there. He had no companions in between the Ponds and Clara.
Anyway, if you can put that aside, there’s still the fact that:
2) I don’t buy the central premise. The idea of the Continuity Bomb is interesting in theory, that by setting one off you can change a person’s key decisions, thus creating an alternate reality and erasing the old one. The problem here is that several of the decisions they reexamine directly contradict the character of the Doctor. I do not buy for a second that there is any universe in which Ten did NOT save Wilf.
Anyway, I suppose this was a harmless way to spend an hour, but I was expecting more from it.
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