From Doctor Who Magazine #123-126
A Review by Finn Clark 2/12/04
One of my all-time favourite Doctor Who stories! It's not a dramatic classic like others I could mention, but for sheer delirious loopiness it's hard to beat. The Doctor, Peri and Frobisher visit Zazz, a planet that seems to have been timewarped from 1930s Chicago ("paging Terrance Dicks..."), and party like there's no tomorrow with the dwarf Lorduke of Zazz. However the Lorduke's mad scientist brother has sent him a self-replicating scavenger robot. Wackiness ensues!
If this was just bubbling silliness, it would be great. Everyone on Zazz is a hoot, while the TARDIS crew are on top form. This might be Frobisher's best story, in fact... he gets some nifty one-liners and an assistant of his own to drive up the wall (the aforesaid mad scientist). Oh, and you haven't lived if you haven't seen a penguin in a fedora and shades with a tommy-gun. Naturally the Doctor's solutions to the scavenger robot problem get loopier by the page.
As an aside, the Lorduke's brother is one of Doctor Who's very few mad scientists to be played for laughs instead of being evil or tragically misguided. He's completely barking, don't get me wrong, but he's also such an endearing goofball that you can't take him seriously for a moment. I loved his double-act with Frobisher, but the Doctor also gets a good line with him:
"Professor, I did you an injustice. Your rocket's not TOTALLY useless. It could just fly."Basically I spent these 32 pages laughing my head off. However, on top of that, we have the adorable scavenger robots. They're so cute! They never say a word, but you gotta love 'em anyway. At the end, Frobisher hopes that "the little metal critturs make it!"... which theoretically should feel odd since he wasn't on the moon with the Doctor to see the evolution of their civilisation, but he's so wholeheartedly echoing the reader's thoughts that it doesn't matter two hoots.
This story seems to be set far, far in the future. The professor expects to be "the first man of Zazz to venture into space". However according to the Doctor they're... "distant descendants of an Earth colony. Although they don't recognise their origins, the Zazz culture is largely a phenomenological echo of early twentieth century Americana." We also see the development of a robot civilisation from scratch over the course of twelve thousand years!
John Ridgway does his usual fantastic art job, but by this point he'd also got the Hellblazer gig for DC Comics and so Tim Perkins helped him out here on inks. It's a solid inking job, which you wouldn't notice if you weren't looking out for it, but close attention will reveal a certain inconsistency of style. Compare the first episode with the last, for instance. Nevertheless this is still a John Ridgway comic strip and every bit as beautiful as you'd expect.
Overall, this story is a delight. In my humble opinion, anyone who doesn't adore The Gift is, frankly, dead.