A Review by Philip Alderman 26/11/02
Oh deary me, what went wrong with this? I'm sorry to say that The Seventh Segment - the comic strip which comprised the centre pages of DWM's 1995 Key To Time Special - is a disaster on just about every level.
The title refers to a mysterious briefcase found by the Fourth Doctor and Romana, after getting caught up in a feud on a planet full of gangsters. It is later revealed to be an experimental weapon owned by a local crimelord called The Boss.
Although potentially interesting, what follows is an outing of the most generic kind, one which is way below the usual standard of DWM comic strips. There's some running about, capture, escape, men waving big guns around, and lots of people dying horribly while the Doctor glibly announces "Never mind that Romana, we've got a Universe to save!"
Apart from the use of the Tracer (which for unexplained reasons leads the TARDIS to the briefcase) there's no real attempt to link the story into the Key To Time arc, which in the middle of a magazine devoted to the subject, makes it seem a bit silly and irrelevant. And even worse it's written not just by any old hack, but Gareth Roberts for goodness sake! It's sad to see a talented writer so obviously slumming it in this way. As for the dialogue, it's unmemorable at best, inane at worst. The crims all talk in cliched gangsterspeak, and the Fourth Doctor is a rather bland caricature. Romana doesn't get many lines, but then she doesn't get to do very much other than react to things and occasionally look worried.
And I haven't even mentioned the plot holes, like why the Tracer mistakes a non-key object for the real thing, or why a dangerously unstable weapon is kept in an unlocked briefcase (which also instantly kills anyone in the vicinity once opened). And why does the Doctor seem unconcerned about leaving so many people to die, even if they are all criminals?
And then we get to Paul Peart's artwork, which, not to mince words, is shockingly bad. I can only assume that he was rushing to meet the deadline and didn't get the chance to finish it, because there's surely no other excuse for submitting something of this standard. It's got this kind of scribbly, half-done quality about it which may be a stylistic gimmick, but it just looks messy and quite appallingly ugly. There are also several technical glitches, such as art overlapping the text and making it unreadable, but I suspect that's down to a printing error rather than the artist's fault. He can probably take the blame for the Doctor's legs disappearing on page 7, however.
So, um... good points. Are there any? Well, K9 is quite well drawn. In fact, he's just about the only character who comes out of this mess with any dignity. Everyone else looks like a doodle in the back of Paul Peart's sketchbook. Is this the worst Doctor Who comic strip ever? I'm not really qualified to say, but it would certainly be a contender. 1/10