Villordsutch reviews Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time #4….
“The year-long celebration of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary continues! Put on your scarves and munch on some jelly babies, as the fan-favprite Fourth Doctor takes the spotlight in this issue of a 12-part epic adventure featuring all 11 incarnations of the Doctor!“
From the pen of Scott and David Tipton (Star Trek) comes issue four of Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time, which has been created to run across all of 2013 for the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.
Now if you read my Prisoners of Time #3 review you will know how much I liked the artwork by Mike Collins. In this issue Gary Erskine (Silencers, Hellblazer) keeps the bar high with a clean and bold looking strip. My only fussy gripe is that it looks too clean for the comic era it’s portraying. The previous issue felt like I had picked up a copy from the early 70s, whereas the art and colours for this issue look much like a comic drawn and coloured today.
Whereas in PoT #3 Scott and David didn’t bring a good story to meet the glorious ‘Retro’ looking artwork, this time they have. I feel that the inclusion of a New Who creation, the Judoon, has allowed them to make the story better. Now they can open up their thinking caps, unlike the last issue where they appeared to being held back by using the “Not-Sea Devils”. Now they can make a proper Doctor Who tale.
It’s the time for the Fourth Incarnation of the Doctor (my Doctor) with Leela and K9 as they take a stop off on the Planet Agratis for a feast and to see Jewel of Fawton. When they arrive we discover the Judoon have been called in to, with a heavy hand, investigate and find the recently stolen Jewel. The Doctor goes off to investigate where the Jewel has gone and why, leaving Leela to kick the living heck out of the Judoon Police force as a distraction to the Doctor’s investigation.
Now albeit the story is fiction, and science fiction at that, it is believable and stays within the realms of what you’d expect the characters to do, whereas last issue it really wasn’t very believable. There is nothing as extreme as USA launching an all-out nuclear assault on the UK, or a scuba diving Sarah Jane. This makes the story feel a lot better when you’ve read it. We have a mystery which the Doctor investigates and a primitive, smart, sexy assistant fighting her way through the space equivalent of the SPG, and a comic that is worth its cover price and enjoyable.
Once again, disappointingly, we only get see a small fragment of the story that is going to bind all of these tales together. We are getting closer to halfway through the 50th anniversary run and we near enough have the same pose and look at our time-leaping enemy as we did right at the end of the last issue, but this time nipping off with Leela and K9. Unless I’m missing something and not examining the panels in the comic properly this cloaked villain isn’t getting a lot of ink time, which is going to severely impact on the future Doctor stories by squeezing in more of the side story.
Still I’m reviewing this issue and not future issues. Buying this comic is a good idea; of course, if you’re collecting the set you’ll want it anyway, but for anyone wanting a comic to pass the time you’d do well to part with you pennies here.
Villordsutch – Follow me on Twitter.
Originally published April 16, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
