From The Incredible Hulk Presents #6; Reprinted (coloured) in DWCC #25
"A Waste of Time?" by Tim Roll-Pickering 21/10/98
A Switch in Time narrowly rivals Technical Hitch as the worst ever Marvel Doctor Who strip. Once again, a tiny plot that would last no more than a couple of pages in a greater Doctor Who epic has been stretched out to provide five pages of meaningless rubbish. A Switch in Time has the further disappointment of being written by John Freeman and drawn by Geoff Senior, both of whom have proved elsewhere that there work can be so much better.
There is nothing wrong with the Doctor finding himself in an extremely bizarre situation, but there has to be a point behind it. Here, the Doctor finds himself hijacked into what turns out to be an alien television shown, but hasn’t been given the script. This idea could just about work in a larger epic to provide a cliffhanger where the Doctor has to get somewhere soon, but gets hijacked enroute and the chapter ends with the Doctor facing a menacing alien, which has cut him off from the TARDIS and unable to reach crucial events elsewhere. However, when used as a plot in it’s own right, the pointlessness of it is clearly demonstrated, even in the mere five pages available in The Incredible Hulk Presents.
Freeman’s script is just as bad, with the Doctor’s dialogue totally outrageous, with lines like ‘You can’t go around pointing weapons at just anyone!’, whilst Thyron and the Gherax are totally bizarre. The ONLY line of any real interest is the last, with Freeman reusing the ‘and now... the first episode in a new series of D--’ gag from Remembrance of the Daleks. It says a lot about a story that has to steal a joke from elsewhere to get it’s best moment. Senior’s artwork is so far removed from his normally excellent work, making me wonder if this was actually drawn by his evil twin!
An entirely forgettable story. 1/10