Deep Time

A Twelfth Doctor Glamour Chronicles novel by Trevor Baxendale

I've loved all of Baxendale's Doctor Who books and this one was no different. As part of their mission to track down the mysterious Glamour, the Twelfth Doctor and Clara join the crew of the exploratory ship the Alexandria. They crew are following the last Phareon road, a wormhole created by an ancient, mysterious race.

For Doctor Who, this is pretty hard sci-fi. It features dangerous and gritty space travel, time fluctuations, an alien planet and a fair bit of pretty up to date psychics. This may put off some people but I thought it worked really well. For me it felt quite like the Alien-prequel film, Prometheus, with a similar atmosphere and mission, although the crew here are considerably more competent and likable than the crew of Prometheus.

The Doctor and Clara are well portrayed here, especially Clara. Baxendale really manages to get inside her head, something you can't do on TV, and it works wonderfully. What really makes the book are the other members of the crew. There's an element of Firefly about many of the characters, which is definitely no bad thing. Ray Balfour, the billionaire funding the mission, is fairly typical of sci-fi books whereas 'astrogator' Jem is considerably less so. Together the crew feel like real people with real histories and goals. 

In summary, I loved it. There's no way that all Doctor Who should be such hard science-fiction but on occasion it's great. For me, this felt like a high-budget TV episode, which is exactly what you want from a Doctor Who book.

Four Doctors

A Multi-Doctor event! In comics! 

Here Titan Comics three main Doctor Who issues come together. The Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors along with their companions Gabby, Alice and Clara team-up, which you know means bad shit is going down. Here it's a picture of the three Doctors arguing which is going to cause the end of the universe. 

The plot itself is OK- I loved the first four issues but the resolution is not great. The main enemies are the Vvord, monsters from the classic 60s story The Keys of Marinus, although their look has been improved somewhat. It also focuses on the person leading them, a character I didn't really like in that role. 

What makes this shine is the usual things you get from a multi-Doctor event. For one, it's the joy of having the Doctors and their companions interact with each other. Twelve has yet to meet any past incarnations so it's fun to see how he deals with his immediate predecessors here. It's also good to have Gabby and Alice, the two Titan Comics original companions, involved as much as Clara. 

The other thing you want from a multi-Doctor event is a celebration of the show and we certainly get that here. Cornell re-uses the Reapers, the monsters from his TV episode Father's Day and both the War Doctor and the Ninth Doctor make quick cameos. It really has that celebration feel that a crossover event should have. 

The biggest downside of this is the artwork. It's not bad and the monster and landscape pages look brilliant. But the characters often don't look much like the actors that play them (especially Matt Smith, who I get the impression is especially difficult to draw). It's not all the way through, so I suspect it's less a case of a poor artist and more a rushed one.

A really great crossover event, but I'd suspect nothing less of Paul Cornell!