From TV Comic #699-704
Published: 1965
A Review by Finn Clark 8/2/05
A somewhat pedestrian story, but not without interest. For a start, it has no villains! (This story marked a shift in emphasis for Neville Main's Doctor Who strips. Until now, his stories had all been traditional Whoish "beat the bad guy" runarounds, but from this story onwards he didn't create a single villain! The nearest you'll get is the Pied Piper and I suppose maybe the guards in Time in Reverse (TV Comic 713-715), but the latter in particular is a real stretch. Even the Pied Piper will be more sinned against than sinning.)
The set-up of The Gyros Injustice is complicated. The TARDIS lands on the planet Gyros (which is also the name of some spherical robots), fortunately choosing to do so in the habitable bit. As a native explains... "This planet has three zones. There is the hot zone, the side of our world that is always turned towards our sun. It is so hot there that nothing can live in it." The other two zones are the dark side, permanently facing away from the sun, and then the narrow strip between them, which is the only place where anything can live and grow.
That's already more sophisticated than you'd expect from a twelve-page TV Comic strip in 1965, but the backstory doesn't end there. The people of Gyros got infected by a disease and even though it's no longer fatal, their Gyros robots aren't letting the infected survivors back into the fertile area. And that's not the half of it. The story's only just beginning...
Normally you'd expect a cackling supervillain to be behind everything, but in fact the explanation is more human and sympathetic. I liked that. The Doctor's role is dodgy, though. "I have seen this illness on other planets," he says, despite the fact that nothing is known about it beyond what I've already said in this review. Well, he's a smart guy. Maybe he noticed clues we didn't. We read on. "A simple injection prevents it! I can give you this protection, but only upon certain conditions, one being that my granddaughter is returned to us at once." [Gillian got kidnapped in episode one, by the way.]
However at the end of the story, after rescuing Gillian, Dr Who scarpers in the TARDIS without administering a single injection! We could interpret this in two ways. Firstly, we could assume that the promised medicinal treatments were given offscreen at some point and that the local guy's parting salutations are truthful. Alternatively we could assume that the Doctor was deliberately lying and had always meant to leave at the first opportunity, trusting to the fact that the disease had mutated into a less lethal form and expecting the people of Gyros to sort it out for themselves. I think we're meant to assume the former solution, but to me the latter feels more credible (not to mention funnier!).
That's all well and good, but before reaching that point we have much robot-dodging to endure. Four of the six episodes have only flying beachballs and no other obstacles for Dr Who and John... though not Gillian, who's absent for almost the whole story after getting kidnapped. Dr Who's tactics are ingenious (e.g. smashing the Gyros's mechanical eyes and then climbing on to the damaged robot as it flies back to base for repairs), but they're hardly thrilling. This story potters along sleepily, rather than barrelling along in the style of earlier thrillers like The Therovian Quest (TV Comic 684-689).
Random observation: the TARDIS can emit electric shocks! (Well, the Master's TARDIS did it too in Castrovalva...)
There's some purple prose at the start of the story... "Through space and time, through a million nowheres, past a billion whirling, unnamed starlights, across the darkness that holds the mysteries of science and life - travels Doctor Who's spaceship the Tardis." Overall, this is a modest tale without much immediate impact but with a surprising amount of Whoishness underneath. DWCC 17 reprinted it if you want to see for yourself. I wasn't particularly impressed on first reading, but the more I think about it, the more appreciate it. 'Twas probably just a writer's goof, but I like that ending!