From Doctor Who Monthly #84, 86-87
A Review by Finn Clark 1/10/04
Yay! Steve's back! Steve Dillon had alternated with Dave Lloyd as back-up strip artist in the early days of the Weekly, but after half a dozen stories (including Cyberleader Kroton and Abslom Daak), he disappeared to fresh woods and pastures new. Those back-up strips were some of his earliest work, but The Moderator looks much more like the Steve Dillon we know and love from Judge Dredd, Preacher and more.
In fact this story has a very 2000AD style. [Note for Americans: 2000AD is the ultra-violent British weekly comic which has been running for donkey's years and famously spawned Judge Dredd.] Not only is Steve Dillon the most Dredd-ish artist to have worked on Who, but its script is also reminiscent of 2000AD. It has greedy mega-corporations, black comedy, guns, bombs and a high-tech setting. There's not a hint of Steve Parkhouse's trademark fantasy. This is a world of chain gangs and casual death. Even the Wrekka (a loopy robot not unlike the comedy janitor in Polly the Glot) is dangerous, dispensing bombs and bullets and even threatening to decapitate Gus.
...and into all this walks the Doctor. You know, now I come to think about it, Steve Parkhouse's 5th Doctor strips reflected the development of the Davison era on TV. The Tides of Time out-weirded the likes of Castrovalva and Kinda, even reflecting the poetic mood of those stories. The Stockbridge Horror and 4-Dimensional Vistas delved into continuity (Gallifrey, the Meddling Monk, Ice Warriors) just as the TV show did the same (Earthshock, the Master, Season 20 and more). Then finally The Moderator got brutal and hard-edged just as Season 21 did the same.
We all know that the Doctor is the main difference between seasons 21 and 22. Peter Davison portrayed an innocent struggling against the horror, while Colin Baker's Doctor jumped right in and gave the bad guys a taste of their own medicine. I'm a huge fan of Davison's performance and you couldn't ask for a better swansong than Caves of Androzani... but I don't think the TV show ever hit the clarity of what Steve Parkhouse did in The Moderator. Eric Saward's Whoniverse was bigger than the Doctor. It dragged him down and eventually killed him. He wiped out the Silurians, he tried to murder Davros, he let the Master burn and he shot Kamelion.
The Moderator puts the 5th Doctor in a world of utter bastards and shows us that no matter what the provocation (and boy, you wouldn't believe it) he's still Doctorish. The Moderator is a hit man who also kills for the hell of it. Dogbolter is a chilling son of a bitch. What happens at the end is a scene I don't think I'll ever forget... but its real power lies in the Doctor's response. I don't think Eric Saward would have even thought of it.
Despite everything I've said, this story is also witty. The Moderator's TARDIS-targeting raids are a laugh, while the Doctor and Gus have an entertaining rapport. Gus still reminds me of Frobisher in his irreverence and American idiom, while the Doctor's Doctorishness also comes out in flippancy in the face of danger. (Peter Davison would have loved delivering this dialogue.)
"Right. You've got just three seconds to put down those guns. One. Two. Two and a half..."It's a back-and-forth story, like The Usual Suspects. The Moderator's scenes (with first-person narration) take place after the rest of the story is over. There's a reason for that, which we realise as eventually the various plot strands come together. The only oddity is the Doctor's claim in episode three to have brought Gus back to the same place and time as they first met. Presumably he means the real Earth, not the WW2-infested parallel version of Lunar Lagoon? [It's 1983 according to the Doctor, but Gus said it was 25 July 1963 in part one of 4-Dimensional Vistas (DWM 78).]
Steve Dillon does a solid job. His work isn't pretty like Mick Austin or John Ridgway, but one thing Steve Dillon's always been good at is storytelling. [Mick Austin didn't always lay out his panels and word balloons in a particularly intuitive fashion, for instance.] Look at the last panel of episode one. That should theoretically be the lamest cliffhanger ever, but Steve gives us a big headshot of a worried Doctor vanishing into the blackness and somehow it's really dramatic. It's a shame that Steve never returned after this story, but the production glitch may have been a factor. [The strip took an unscheduled holiday in DWM 85, with episode two of The Moderator not appearing until DWM 86.]
I've always admired this story, but it's never had a particularly high profile compared with out-and-out fantasies like Tides of Time and Voyager. Hardly anyone seems to talk about it. However I'd go so far as to call it the DWM equivalent of Caves of Androzani. It's astonishingly rare for a Doctor Who story to be about the Doctor himself... usually he's a catalyst for the action, not particularly affected or defined by what's happening around him. This is different. It's the Davison Doctor's swansong in the comic strip and he's refusing to lie down and conform to the rules of this 2000AD universe.
Oh, and I don't think I'll ever be able to hear a certain song again without thinking of the Moderator's headpiece. (I swear, it's as if "blam blam" is hardwired into my brain as an addition to the lyrics...)