Originally published October 6, 2016. Updated November 14, 2019.
Tony Black reviews Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen #3…
Witness the birth of the new Cybermen invasion, as the history of this aggressive Cyberiad is at last revealed! The Tenth Doctor takes a titanic machine into combat. The Twelfth Doctor finds an unlikely ally. The Ninth Doctor loses one of his own. And the Eleventh Doctor discovers something impossible!
SEE ALSO: Check out a preview of the issue here
The multiple storylines making up the saga of Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen really start to spiral outward and complicate in this third issue from George Mann & Cavan Scott, who have great fun in creating some truly galactic stakes of desperate proportions which, in classic Who fashion, paint multiple Doctors here in a corner you wonder how on Earth they’ll escape from. It’s very well put together in that sense, even if there is simply perhaps too much going on to contain in such few pages, to once again the detriment of certain characters and plot strands.
The Twelfth Doctor appropriately bookends the piece, now on Gallifrey with a Time Lord resistance movement who explain how Rassilon–in his cyber-enhanced form–came to once again take control of the planet, but it becomes clear as the Cybermen successfully start re-writing time, the Doctor physically struggles to take the repercussions. On ancient Earth, the Eleventh Doctor and his companion Alice are facing the prospect of cyber-enhanced Silurians to deal with, while the Tenth Doctor on Sontar with companions Gabby & Cindy begins to face a Cyberman invasion of Sontaran facilities, only to find a connection to Time Lord tech which may start linking everything together. Again short changed is the Ninth Doctor, inside a collapsing TARDIS with Jack, Rose & Jackie – but we do get a great little Star Wars in-joke out of him.
You can’t fault Scott & Mann for stakes and epic reach with Supremacy of the Cybermen, which continues doing a good job bringing together multiple Doctors and companions to tell a vast narrative, but we’re fully in complication phase here which means all plot, and not much substance. It’s fun though and Who fans will, as they should, continue lapping it up.
Rating: 7/10
Tony Black
