Product Description: The legendary Doctor Who is back, with the first-ever stories created exclusively for the US market! The Doctor is currently the Tenth Doctor, the last of the Time Lords, survivor of a Great Time War and, along with his loyal friend and companion Martha Jones from London, they stop oppression, darkness, and evil spreading throughout the galaxies. They're also on the hunt for the best chocolate milkshakes in the cosmos... and while they track that down, someone else has the Doctor in their sights. As the very last Time Lord out there, he's highly collectable, to the right people!
Starts okay, but quickly loses steam The only reason I didn't give this one star is that the first couple of chapters are fairly good. Not great, mind you, but fun and I liked the art. Both chapters are essentially one-off adventures with hints of things to come. Unfortunately, the glimpses of things to come are rather disjointed and whenever they pop up, you get the feeling that maybe a couple of pages of the book had gotten stuck together.
With chapter three, the main story begins in earnest. It's still almost holding it together as a passably decent read, although, again, it feels disjointed and you start wondering if maybe some of the pages got reprinted out of order or something. Even by the end of the fourth chapter, there's hope that the story will pull itself together in a moderately interesting fashion.
Which brings us to the last two chapters of this six-chapter story. They're nearly unreadable as the author attempts to weave together a grand, epic adventure with the universe at stake... and then has to resort to pages and pages of exposition to "explain" what's going on. And, trust me, the quotes have to be around the word "explain", because even after you wade through that turgid prose, you still don't have much a clue what's going on and, even worse, aren't the slightest bit emotionally invested in the people its happening to.
And it's not even any fun to look at either, as the funky style of the cover art is replaced by fairly generic comic book art. Give it a pass.
What's worse than a falling helicopter? This trade paperback collects "Agent Provocateur", Gary Russell's storyline published in the first six issues of IDW's "Doctor Who" comic book. It's a story that's -- how can I put this politely? -- not very good. It's a shame, really, because I can see what Russell was aiming for: a spectacular, epic tale set in multiple places and times, providing a fresh insight into the Doctor and Martha's relationship. But it all goes rather badly wrong, especially in the last two installments.
The complexity of the story's plot made it somewhat difficult to follow on first publication, with month-long gaps between chapters. That wouldn't be so bad now that the story has been collected, except that there are also noticeable inconsistencies in the plot. The Doctor claims that events clearly indicated as occurring in the year five billion took place in "the 51st century". One of the villains sends the Doctor and Martha to Earth to find a "leash" -- but it turns out he was really after the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, and the "leash" is never mentioned again. The populations of ten planets disappear as the planets' gravity opens a tear in space-time and lets in an evil entity from outside our universe. Then it turns out a different process opened the tear; the planets have actually been aligned to use the inhabitants' psychic energy to **close** the tear, and all ten populations have been transported to one of the planets for that purpose. So why did **that** planet's people vanish in the first place? Was **anyone** editing this story?
That's not all. The frequent changes of artist in the course of the same storyline, nearly unprecedented in my experience of comics, create a disorienting and dispiriting effect. (A page of recap at the beginning of Part Four reproduces panels by three different artists!) Perhaps worst of all, though, is Russell's slavish recreation of the Doctor's manner of speech as heard on television, resulting in extremely verbose speeches that go off on frequent tangents. Such speeches are delightful when David Tennant delivers them, but they are unfeasibly long for the comics medium, resulting in ludicrously large and full word balloons. By Part Six the artist has to resort to using extraordinarily tall and narrow vertical panels just to fit the word balloons in. When Martha's message to her mother shows that she has caught the Doctor's verbal diarrhea, the story dies. Then the Doctor, Martha and a 51st-century man start discussing "ER" -- and go on discussing it for several panels -- and we discover a fate worse than death.
"Agent Provocateur" isn't quite all bad. Martha is well-written overall, and there are some nice moments between her and the Doctor. The Doctor even tells her he loves her, which he never quite said to Rose, although he clearly means he loves Martha as a friend. But that's not enough to save the story. I was amazed that Russell actually had the audacity to end the script with the Doctor saying he hopes he never again sees, hears of **or reads about** its main guest characters. He must have known that readers might well say the same.
I have great respect and admiration for Gary Russell. He has done yeoman work for "Doctor Who" over the years: as the original producer of the fantastic Big Finish audios which helped revitalize the franchise at the turn of the century, as a script editor at BBC Wales, and in many other capacities. He deserves a dozen golden TARDISes, but the time may have come to point out that he's a less-than-excellent writer.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
