From Doctor Who Monthly #78-83
A Review by Finn Clark 28/9/04
These are the least well-known of Steve Parkhouse's Doctor Who strips. Admittedly many people will remember reading the original issues of DWM back in 1983, but I think 4-Dimensional Vistas and The Moderator have never been reprinted. The US comic books stopped at Lunar Lagoon and Classic Comics stopped at The Stockbridge Horror.
As a story, this is a bit of an oddity. It's probably Steve Parkhouse's weakest script for DWM, being little more than "hey, the Meddling Monk's helping some Ice Warriors build a superweapon!". A deus ex machina military unit called SAG 3 pop up to save the day (last seen briefly at the end of The Stockbridge Horror) and the final resolution is just the Doctor being clever at the TARDIS console. The Stockbridge Horror had much more to get your teeth into. However 4-Dimensional Vistas has three things going for it: (a) mood, (b) characterisation and (c) Mick Austin.
The Stockbridge Horror didn't show Mick Austin's art at its best. However here he's on form from start to finish and the result is a story that feels coherent and looks gorgeous. His likeness of Davison is almost uncanny at times (and he also draws an impressive Peter Butterworth as the Meddling Monk), but as I've said before... I love his inking. So his pencils and layouts aren't always perfect. So what? Whether we're visiting a Pacific island, an Arctic snowscape or a four-dimensional vista, this story always looks luscious and brims with atmosphere. That mood I praised owes a lot to Steve Parkhouse, but more to Mick Austin.
Oh, and he draws the coolest Ice Warriors ever. Fact.
I praised the characterisation. I'm a fan of the new companion, Gus (full name: Angus Goodman), who's a flippant American not a million miles away from Frobisher. It's a good outing for DWM's 5th Doctor, who gets some good dialogue and a bigger story role than he'd sometimes had in the past. But best of all is Autek, the Ice Warrior leader, who's downright chilling. (Yeah, yeah, ho ho ho.) As Doctor Who this story is pretty good - but as an Ice Warrior story it's perfect, or as near as dammit.
As a side-note, the Ice Warriors have appeared less than you'd think in the comics. There's A Cold Day in Hell (DWM 130-133) and Descendance-Ascendance (Radio Times 3785-3804) plus an eight-page back-up strip in the Weekly which pitted them against the Cybermen, but bizarrely they've more often been companions (the 8th Doctor's Ssard or Abslom Daak's Harma).
As for the Doctor's characterisation... this is the strongest evidence yet that something happened to Parkhouse's 5th Doctor. Read the story's opening words: "Despite the warmth and brightness of a tropical sun and the sparkling blue of the Pacific Ocean, the Doctor found himself in a melancholy frame of mind. His search for solitude had proved fruitless once again." If these stories are indeed set in a companionless gap between Seasons 19 and 20, then presumably the Doctor would have just lost Adric, Tegan and I guess Nyssa (taking a break or something). The girls would return, but the Doctor might not know that. However I'm not quite satisfied with this explanation; I think there's more than that to this Doctor's attitudes...
There's a scarcely believable character detail. "I've been around for a relatively long time. Different places, different times, and I never did learn how to swim." I'm trying to remember counter-evidence from the TV series and, oddly, I can't think of any. Did we ever see one of the first four Doctors swimming? Certainly the 3rd Doctor goes scuba diving in the 1974 annual. Perhaps the Doctor was exaggerating and there's an unspoken "very well" on the end of that (he says, clutching at straws).
Once again the Meddling Monk is messing around with parallel universes! Okay, yes, 4-Dimensional Vistas preceded Virgin's Alternate Universe Arc by a decade. You know what I mean. I wasn't happy about the "infinite parallel Earths" concept (despite Mick Austin's beautiful spacescapes to represent it), but fortunately it turned out to be a side-effect of the Monk masking Earth with a time-field. Apparently (big retcon alert!) all of DWM's Davison comic strips were part of a single investigation leading up to this point. So did the Meddling Monk's activities trigger The Tides of Time?
The cliffhangers are eccentric. The TARDIS gets its roof blasted off at the end of episode two, only to be intact again at the start of episode three. It's a regenerating elastic TARDIS! Then eight pages later Gus becomes an idiot for the sake of a contrived cliffhanger. Even the story's ending isn't particularly dramatic, though that last line is a killer. [Interestingly one could infer it as meaning either the Doctor or Gus... I think it's meant to be the latter, thinking back to what he said when the helicopter rescued him, but in real life Caves of Androzani was coming up and the 5th Doctor's DWM run was about to end with The Moderator.]
I enjoyed this story a lot. Beautiful art, good characters and strong dialogue in a story that's full of atmosphere. It's not as deep as some of Steve Parkhouse's work, but Mick Austin's artwork makes a huge difference. Recommended.