Script: Dan Abnett Art: Lee Sullivan & Mark Farmer
A Review by Jamie Beckwith 5/10/12
The Mark of Mandragora was the first ever Doctor Who comic strip I ever read, when I first discovered Doctor Who Magazine in 1991 (Issue #170, Colin Baker on the cover). At that point, I was still a fan newbie, having only seen the two seasons of Sylvester McCoy and three classic stories (Death to the Daleks; The Five Doctors, which I'd painstakingly saved up my pocket money up to buy on VHS; and The Robots of Death which a school friend had on video). However, I had discovered the Target novelizations and, although I'd not read it, I remember seeing one called Doctor Who and the Masque of Mandragora, so I understood this was a sequel. That was in no way daunting, however, as the story swept me in so quickly that I didn't feel I was lacking in special knowledge to follow it.
It has been a long year waiting for Doctor Who to come back on TV and I was really, really missing the Seventh Doctor and Ace so much, after they'd walked off in to the sunset in Survival. Seeing them together again, even if it was in comic form, was a joy, and they were just as I remembered them; smart, funny and heroic. The story was also achingly hip and modern (insomuch as I, having just turned all of 9 years old at the time, understood the terms to be) as the Doctor and Ace, with the assistance of UNIT - represented by the pretty hot Captain Muriel Frost - investigate a brand new drug, Mandrake, in a nightclub. The Doctor deduces that Mandrake is the means by which the Mandragora Helix plans to re-manifest itself on Earth and it's a race against time to stop this happening. This leads to one of the best cliffhangers, and one which has always stuck in my mind - as though it were one from the TV show - where, out of options, the Doctor hurls himself heroically from a gantry and into the blaze of Mandragora energy in hopes of just somehow stopping it. Right up until the very end, the Doctor's victory is far from assured; death for him, Ace, Frost and everyone on planet Earth seems a certainty right until the very last moment.
Some might find the final resolve a bit of a copout (I won't reveal it here), but I didn't and felt it made sense in the context of the overall plot. That the day is saved, seemingly at very high cost for the Doctor, showed that for all his mystic and appearance of being the cosmic chess player, how much of it was really just smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand to dazzle his opponents? The very final scene when, against all hope, the Doctor triumphs has me grinning from ear to ear.
It would be another couple of years until I saw The Masque of Mandragora finally and, whilst I enjoyed it, it wasn't as good in my mind as the next show down between the Doctor and the Helix. However, it did teach me how to correctly pronounce the name of what had become one of my favorite villains, so that's something!