‘Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension #7’ Review
Written by Emma Beeby | Art by Ivan Rodriguez, I.N.J Culbard and more | Published by Titan Comics
I am having something of a love/ hate relationship with this ‘event’, as I have detailed in previous reviews of it. It’s hard to not love any time multiple Doctors team up, rather like a cosmic The Odd Couple, but there are good ways and bad ways of doing it. Virtually all the previous years have had nice, tight storylines, consistent creative teams, and set beginnings and wrap ups. This year’s effort, The Lost Dimension, has been all over the place creatively and storytelling wise. While a couple of individual issues have managed to shine, more have not. Which will this Special be I wonder?
Looking at the creative side of things, hopes are not high. While I have no problem with Emma Beeby scripting, I see we have six artists involved, in three separate stories, told in a total of 25 pages. These seem to be of the ‘fill in the gaps’ variety, showing us how River Song is doing her bit fighting the white hole threat (you know about the white holes destroying the universe, right?), how The Doctor’s daughter Jenny found her way back to Earth at the right place and time to warn The Doctor of the white holes, and a little Alice cameo tale. Essential reading? We shall see.
Let’s firstly drop in on River Song, who we last saw discovering a lost colony of Silurians who seemed to have some connection to the white holes popping up everywhere. After taking out a dinosaur, as you do, River becomes aware of what The Doctors are doing, fighting the white hole threat. She declines to help though, destroying the artifact she came initially to save, realising it is too powerful to keep. This was a hectic eleven pages, some fun but mostly confusing, too wordy, and teeny tiny panels because, as you would expect, eleven pages is not enough to tell this story. Emma Beeby got River’s personality and dialogue spot on though.
So, who’s been craving the return of The Doctor’s daughter? Thought so. Still, she has actually had a role to play in all this, unlike some (cough, River, cough) and so deserving of her own tale. Although we get less of a dramatic story, and more of a travelogue, as we literally go from A to B to C. Jenny gets ship, Jenny repairs ship, Jenny builds a suit, go’s adventuring, finds a crashed time ship (actually I liked that bit), and flies straight into the opening pages of The Lost Dimension first issue. To be fair, this isn’t bad. Again, nice writing by Emma Beeby, and the art is decent enough, but this is more fluff than substance. The last Alice tale, a mere two pager, is essentially just an extended scene to get Alice to where she needs to be for the wrap up.
As I feared, this was perfectly fine for what it was, but the fact is it is a completely unnecessary issue. Remove this from the storyline and it doesn’t affect anything. The River Song part just seems an afterthought in the grand scheme of things, and Jenny’s back story moderately interesting at best. There was a time in the 1990’s when the big comic companies came under huge criticism for milking readers by publishing huge crossover events, full of sub standard issues put out just because they knew the completists out there would buy anything. Yep, I was as guilty of this as many others. This issue, and the other Special, felt like that. By removing them, you lose nothing from the storyline.
The Lost Dimension could have been a pretty good 4-6 part event, but has ended up as a somewhat bloated eight parter lacking focus and any sort of tension. Yes, I’m still looking forward to the final issue, as the creative team have shown they can pull it out for individual issues, but I will be very surprised if it can rescue the entire series.
Still, as The Doctor would no doubt tell me, stranger things have happened.
*** 3/5
