Script: Paul Cornell Art: Neil Edwards, Ivan Nunes
The scientific encyclopedia by Noe Geric 24/9/20
Each year, Titan comics published a special summer series of comics featuring the three Doctors of their regular series (the tenth, eleventh and twelfth). And when you've got a special event, what's better than a festival of continuity? Yes, we've got Gabby, Clara, Alice, the Reapers, Marinus, the Voords, the Ninth Doctor, the War Doctor, Daleks are mentioned, the Time War, alternates events for three different episodes... And all of them are just here for the 'fun'.
Nothing is particularly good, and the plot is incredibly complicated for nothing. There's so much technobabble that I had a headache trying to understand what was happening. The villain is so cliched, revealing his plan for no apparent reason and always laughing about being the master of creation and all the stuff we've seen thousands of times. Written by Paul Cornell, featuring the Reapers. You know, these monsters with absolutely no logic. Appearing when paradoxes happen AND only if the story need them.
The Reaper scene only consists of a lot of running, with more technobabble. There are some nice twists (the weeping angel is one of them), but nothing will save the story from being too complex. Cornell tried to be too clever and failed. I was bored at the third episode, and I was happy to finally see a resolution. The Doctors beat the villain easily, but that doesn't matter, that time stuff is over.
The characterization is horrible. The Twelfth Doctor is the highlight of the story, with one of his best representations, but the tenth and eleventh Doctors completely fail. They talk exactly like each other, and the drawing doesn't help: they hardly look like they were on TV. Particularly the eleventh. The companions Alice, Gabby and Clara seem to be the same person. Their lines are so mundane... Even Dodo Chaplet would've done better. Here, Gabby and Alice are just Clara's splinters; nothing in their personnality can differentiate them. There's a brief sequence with Gabby's diary, but that's all. We learn nothing new about their characters.
The Voord are here. It could've been any villains, but for some reason Cornell chose them. They've got new unseen powers that don't look like Voord stuff. The World-shapers explanation about Voord being Cybermen now seems more interesting. And the drawing is bad. The tenth and eleventh Doctor look like each other, and the whole thing is uninspiring, but I think that the colours are the main plague that spoil everything. They're so dry and boring. Even when the whole background was white, the characters were looking dark. The story would've been better with another colourist... The drawings and colours are better in Supremacy of the Cybermen!
Clearly, there's nothing good here except some little things there and there, but I can barely remember anything because of the incredible amount of techno-things. I don't even think Cornell knew what he was talking about. The scientific talking is just here to distract you from the ridiculous plot about a photo and a museum and Clara's stupidity: 3/10. I'll recommend people buy this only if they want a temporal-science lesson, because there's nothing here to see. There's also so much pointless continuity that Craig Hinton would be jealous.