Or “Continuity Goes To Hell”…
I don’t know what it is about the comics. With the TV series you could usually be fairly sure of the quality of a season. Admittedly everyone has a different opinion of what quality actually means but people usually still have the ability to rate entire seasons without worrying about the stories that make them up. The comics, not having seasons, are much harder to sum up and none more so than the early 7th Doctor strips. Having lost one long term companion, then ditched the replacement after just one story, the seventh Doctor had spent most of his time bouncing through a succession of short stories with little continuity (save the gratuitous appearance of all the past Doctors and a handful of companions in Planet of the Dead). However everything changed in the pages of issue 152 as suddenly we don’t just get the Doctor against the daleks (a battle last seen in the days of the weekly… issue 35 if you must know) but the return of Abslom Daak! Or, as I distinctly remember thinking when I read this first time round…. Who?
Change the Doctor and this story could almost have found a home for itself in season twenty. Take the return of a really well known baddie (and don’t forget that the daleks were supposed to end the season) and then throw in the return of a character that hasn’t been seen for about 9 years and only the real geeky fans would remember. It almost works… in the same way that season twenty almost works. The first problem comes with the end of part one. Daak brings chainsaw death to a few daleks and then hovers menacingly above the Doctor. He even says his name in bold print to make it clear that he’s important. I’m sure there were fans of a certain generation who whooped with delight at this. I just sat there with a baffled look on my face, knowing this was clearly supposed to mean something but feeling left out. Part two spends a page trying to make us feel sad that characters we’ve not seen for nearly a decade are apparently dead (including a woman in a tube who the Doctor seems to think is genuinely dead) and the rest of the instalment is pretty much standard evade the daleks, kill a few daleks and then discover there’s a plot. Part three’s the standard padding episode (run them through a few corridors) with the added bonus of the faces of the past Doctors (more of which in a bit) then part four has more dalek death, a big band, a noble sacrifice and the Doctor going on about how the daleks are evil and always seem to be around. Actually hold on, didn’t we get this anyway in “Resurrection of the Daleks”? There’s a lot of double page style artwork and there really isn’t much in the lines of plot. So by now, you probably think it’s not one of my favourite stories…. You’re wrong, I love it. We’d just suffered “Invaders from Gantac” and “Doktor Conqueror” so it wasn’t hard for the stories to get better. At the time, okay so there was this weird Daak guy but who cares if I don’t know who he is. He kills daleks with a chainsaw. Lots of daleks. Then he says cool sounding things about them (look, I was a teenager, it was fun). There’s a huge reactor room and did I mention the chainsaw?
Skip forward a decade or so. I know all about Abslom Daak these days, if anything it was this strip that persuaded me to start hunting down old issues to find out what I’d missed. The sacrifice at the end is far more moving and it feels as though the character finally gets to complete his story. Everything seems to feel right. It’s the first comic strip for quite some time that almost deserves to be made into some kind of film because although Doctor Who isn’t really about blowing things up and mindless violence, Abslom Daak is. The new TV series seems to thrive of characters having stories and journies and this could fit in exceptionally well. We had the Star Tigers (his “family”), we had the love interest… and for the kids we had a guy killing daleks with a chainsaw. It wouldn’t even take much to adjust a dalek ship from “Parting of the Ways” to make it their Death Wheel.
Speaking of the TV series, let me draw your attention to the interrogation scene in part three. As is standard for daleks, they feel the need to probe the Doctor’s mind and look at pictures of his past lives to confirm that it’s him. Unusually for Doctor Who, there isn’t the exact number of display screens, there are three left over. When I saw this I just had the overwhelming urge to add in McGann, Eccleston and Tennant, just because I could. Would be great though if the daleks could just bend the laws of time a little and show us fans the future…
Anyway, it’s a hack and slay job. Plot light but explosion heavy. Normally I wouldn’t really condone such a story in Doctor Who but really this isn’t the Doctor’s story. This one’s Abslom’s and a whole new generation of fans suddenly wanted to be DKs.
Leave a Reply