Doctor Who and the Dogs of Doom
Writer: Wagner and Mills
Artist: Dave Gibbons
Doctor: Fourth
Companions: Sharon and K9
Episodes: 8
Summary:
The Doctor saves the New Earth system not only from the Wereloks but also from their masters, the Daleks.
Episode Endings:
One – The TARDIS has materialised on the Spacehog and the Doctor is talking to the crew when suddenly the tractor beam of a much larger craft catches the ship.
Two – Brill, the leader of the Werelok troops, advances on the Doctor, claws ready for the kill.
Three – Scratched by a Werelok, the Doctor transforms into one of the creatures…
Four – The Werelok’s aren’t the real problem, they work for the evil ones… the Daleks!
Five – The Doctor is on the Dalek ship and the Daleks begin to open fire on him to the cry of Exterminate.
Six – The Doctor is trapped in an alien zoo when K9 fires on the cages to release the animals. One of them towers over the Doctor…
Seven – The Doctor is has moved the TARDIS to within a sealed room on the Dalek ship, unaware that the Spacehog is about to ram the ship and destroy it!
Eight – The Daleks defeated the Doctor returns to the TARDIS with Sharon and K9, planning on returning Sharon home. Sharon has other ideas though and persuades the Doctor to keep her on as a companion.
Continuity:
We join the story in the year 2430 just as the Wereloks attack (and wipe out) the Davy Crockett base in the new earth system. The landing area for the Day Crockett base is called the Jim Bowie strip, the meteor dome is called the Alamo. The commander of the base is called “Big” Bill Brewster. At 4.37 all communication between the base and the rest of the system cuts out. The Wereloks land at 5.41, attack at 5.45 and by 8.12 all human life has ended at the base. If the vertical hold in the TARDIS breaks down then it can materialize half way through the floor. When it leaves, it leaves a TARDIS shaped hole. The TARDIS should have a service every ten thousand years. It’s most unusual for a TARDIS to interfere with signal transmissions. The Doctor carries a photo of himself with Goom, the Prime Vlag of the planet Vorlag (the crew of the Spacehog accept this as a guarantee that the Doctor is a good guy) and also marbles. The Doctor instantly recognises the Wereloks as being a wolvine race and orders K9 to open fire on them. As with his TV counterpart, the K9 of the comic strips is helpless when not on its wheels. It takes the Doctor three months to find a cure for the Werelok poison but just ten minutes passes for the others as he hides himself and the TARDIS out of time and space whilst he works on the cure. The Doctor, at some point in the past, has presumably been dragged through a Velusian torture wheel as he knows what it feels like. As with previous stories, the presence of the randomiser doesn’t stop the Doctor piloting the TARDIS where he wants it to go. K9’s blaster is capable of destroying daleks. The Spacehog is towing 15 pods, two of which carry poison of some sort. The pilot/owner of the Spacehog is called Joe Bean. Joe is heading back to the New Earth System from Gamma One. The co-owner and engineer of the Spacehog is called Babe Roth. Her robotic childminder is called Mr Benton and her son is called Filbert. She also has an unnamed daughter. They live in an area called Lutine Bell on New Earth. There is a Lutine Bell Roboservants Club. Sharon is the same size as Babe’s daughter and fits her clothes perfectly. New Earth is a lot smaller than the original earth and there are under a million people in the whole system spread over thirty in habitable planets. New Earth was settled in 2380 (old Earth time). The planet before New Earth is called High Serra, the ice planet. It takes the Spacehog two hours to get from High Serra to New Earth. The two outlying planets in the system are called Davy Crockett and Little Yugoslavia. Queen Victoria is also a planet in the system. The system has a president. The leader of the “Festering Forty-ninth” pack of Wereloks is called Brill. Wereloks have venom ducts in their fangs and claws that are kept clean with a regulation number four brush. The slightest scratch from a Werelok is enough to turn you into one when subjected to moonlight. Werelok’s guns can kill or stun and they can blow a dalek up. They also have net guns. It’s possible to hypnotize them as the Doctor successfully manages to do it to Brill. The Wereloks think of the Daleks as the Evil Ones. The Daleks are wiping out the planets with Neutron fire as it sterilizes them. They don’t exterminate the Doctor once they know who he is, instead they plan to question him. The daleks are using the sterilized planets as breeding grounds. They intend to breed in qualities from the specimens in their alien zoo to make the dalek race stronger. The contents of their zoo includes the Xxarqon (a sly creature), the Tentrax (a cruel creature) and the Shrieking Glarosus (a creature capable of insane hatred). (The contents page of Issue 32 also lists the zoo as containing Tyrannosaurus, the Winged Warthog Man). The creatures in the Zoo turn on the daleks when they’re released. The daleks keep time travel technology (including a time-space rationaliser) on their ship in a room that Brill refers to as the room of many centuries.
Comments:
Yuck. Joe Bean speaks pure trucker talk, the plot is a less than glorious mess and this is one of the daleks’ worst ever appearances. Things might have been okay if it weren’t for the presence of the daleks whose dialogue is more than just a little ripe (“Daleks are incapable of love! Fool! Do you not yet understand why we are here? Can you not see the Dalek Masterplan?”). They’re destroyed exceptionally easily and just happen to have time travel technology on their ship. Sharon get almost nothing to do, the role of companion effectively being taken by Brill for this story. The artwork is nice though, with the Werelok Doctor being well executed. Oh yes, the Daleks’ surprise appearance at the end of part four is only slightly given away when, for the listing of part ONE there’s a picture of a dalek next to it.
Not a good story by any stretch of the imagination.
“Next issue: The Doctor, Sharon and K9 meet the… Time Witch!”
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