Doctor Who – The Glorious Dead
Issues: 287 – 296
Story: Scott Gray
Pencil Art: Martin Geraghty (parts one to four, six to ten)
Pencil Art: Martin Geraghty & Roger Langridge (part five)
Inks: Robin Smith
Lettering: Roger Langridge
Editors: Gary Gillatt & Alan Barnes
Doctor: Eighth
Companions: Izzy and Kroton
Episodes: 10
Summary:
The TARDIS, without input from the Doctor, brings the Doctor, Izzy and Kroton to Paradost where they are witness to a moment of religious history. Cardinal Morningstar, the Holy Leader of the Church of the Glorious Dead, is presented with the (up until now) missing last page of the Odostra, the sacred text of the Church. The Doctor, who seems to recognise some aspect of the final page, is unable to get a translation from anyone. It would appear that the only person who is able to actually read the Odostra is Cardinal Morningstar himself. Izzy is given a mnemonic crystal, which enhances her memory of a joyous night with Maxwell Edison back in Stockbridge. Kroton is also offered a crystal but declines. Feeling that he’s making people uncomfortable, the cyberman steps outside where he is met by several members of the Church called the Chosen. They accuse him of having a blasphemous existence and activate controls on their chests. The Chosen burst into flames and emerge from the ashes as Ash Wraiths. They attack Kroton who escapes only by flinging himself off a high ledge and landing on one of the flying “guides”. Meanwhile, the Doctor finally gets a chance to speak to Morningstar who informs him that, according to the beliefs of the Church of the Glorious Dead, everything is dead and exists only as a memory inside the Glory’s infinite mind. The Doctor sends Izzy off to try and find a translation of the Odostra and is then met by Kroton, still chased by the Wraiths. Morningstar makes a transmission back to his own world of Dhakan in which he informs his people that Paradost is an evil world, which must burn. The Doctor and Kroton make it back to the TARDIS just ahead of the Wraiths but the Doctor’s ship vanishes before they have a chance to enter. The Wraiths corner them but the Paradostrian Militia intervene. However, the Wraiths kill the Militia and the Doctor and Kroton are forced to use the massacre as a chance to escape. Izzy has sent one of the flying guides, called Jynx, to get them. As Paradost is destroyed around them by the Wraiths, more of the Chosen activate the controls on their chests and increase the numbers of the invaders. Kroton knocks one out just before they can activate their chest control though and the Doctor identifies the main component as a device to open a multi-dimensional portal, powered by the wearer’s own internal combustion. The Doctor is disappointed that Izzy’s not been able to locate a translation of the Odostra as he recognised the handwriting of the final page. Before he can tell them how to defeat the Wraiths though, he vanishes, only to wake up in bed with Grace Holloway. Izzy manages to work out the Doctor’s cryptic hint about walking on water and, with Kroton’s help, manages to get to the weather control centre on Paradost. She convinces the scientists there to reduce the temperature on Paradost down to freezing which kills the Wraiths. They then destroy the weather controlling equipment so that the Dhakanians can’t reset it but as soon as Izzy destroys the last of it, Cardinal Morningstar arrives and shrinks her with a Tissue Compression Eliminator. The Doctor finds that he’s not with Grace for long. In what appears to be a dream, he passes through a number of different “lives” that range from gunfighters to the characters from Peanuts but all with a “who-like” twist. Finally though he is shown the truth. Esterath, the controller of the Glory, the wheel upon which reality turns, has controlled the dream journey and tells the Doctor that the Glory is about to die. Kroton swears revenge on Morningstar for what happened to Izzy and hitches a lift on the Cardinal’s flagship. Esterath tells the Doctor that the Glory is the focal point of the Omniversal spectrum and that it keeps the spectrum of the omniverse whole. The problem is that the Omniverse needs a living consciousness to direct it and that the current “pilot” is dying. Esterath is merely the Gatherer for the Glory, he is the one responsible for finding a new entity to control it. The shrunken Izzy wakes up to find Morningstar standing over her and he takes off his helmet to reveal his true identity, Katsura Sato whom she last met in Japan. Primus, the worldship of the Glory, takes the Doctor to Dhakan, which the Doctor recognises as an altered Earth. The TARDIS materialises behind him and the preacher from “The Fallen” steps out. He is the Master and survived being sucked into the time/space vortex because of an encounter with Esterath. Esterath had been curious to know how such a fury as the Master could have been born and took it to the Glory. The Master also soon realised that he had control over the Doctor’s TARDIS and took the opportunity to teach the Doctor a vital lesson. First he took the Doctor to London to show him the effect he had on people’s lives after he left them, then on back to Japan to see the Gajin and finally to Trionikus where only luck prevented the Doctor from killing Kroton. Katsura meanwhile is telling Izzy his own story. Once the Doctor had made him immortal he wandered the Earth, unable to feel pain. The Master found him in a dungeon and he was given the Odostra (a book written by the Master in an afternoon). Through Sato, the Master changed the course of history so that Earth eventually became Dhakan. The Master tells the Doctor of the final instalment of the story. Esterath had been searching for two polar opposites to fight for the Glory. The victor will take on the power of the glory and the other will simply die. Katsura arrives and the Master informs him that it is time and that Dhakan will soon be reborn. Esterath also appears to inform the combatants of the nature of the duel. It will be fought out in the Omniversal spectrum, both the Doctor and the Master will have equal powers fuelled by their own sense of purpose. Just as the Doctor and the Master are transported to the spectrum, Kroton makes his presence felt and starts up his own battle with Katsura. It looks as though the Master will win his battle very quickly, as the Doctor seemingly falls to his death weighed down by chains created by the Master but the Doctor breaks the chains and fights back with his own weapons. Kroton is having more problems though, he’s losing his battle against Katsura. Izzy, whom Katsura had been keeping in a test tube, manages to break the glass and restore herself to her usual size using the TCE again. However, she does so just in time to see Katsura seemingly defeat the cyberman. In the Omniversal spectrum, the Master wins the other battle. As the Doctor lays dying at the Master’s feet, Izzy attacks Katsura with the Mnemonic crystal. She shows him the pain she’s felt in the last couple of weeks and the result is that Katsura is knocked out. She also uses the crystal on Kroton who remembers his life before becoming a cyberman. The Glory arrives so that the victor of the contest can take his place as its new ruler but it rejects the Master. The battle between the Doctor and the Master was never the true battle, instead it was the battle between Kroton and Katsura that determined the Glory’s new consciousness. Kroton, the winner of the battle, takes his place as the Glory’s new controller and restores both the Doctor and the timeline to their correct state. Katsura finally dies and the Master is transported to… somewhere. The Doctor and Izzy head off into the restored London to relax and enjoy life.
Episode Endings:
One – The Ash Wraiths reach out to kill Kroton.
Two – As the Doctor reaches out the key to the door, the TARDIS disappears.
Three – Having vanished from Paradost, the Doctor seemingly wakes up in bed with Grace Holloway.
Four – Cardinal Morningstar opens fire with the TCE and Izzy ends up shrunken at his feet.
Five – The Doctor is shown the pattern of life as he stands upon the Glory.
Six – The TARDIS arrives and the Master steps out.
Seven – The Master informs the Doctor that soon one of them will rule the Glory and the other shall simply die.
Eight – Wrapped up in the Master’s chains, the Doctor apparently falls to his death in the Omniversal spectrum.
Nine – The Master runs the Doctor through with a sword and claims victory.
Ten – On a busy London street, the Doctor and Izzy head off into the night to enjoy life.
Continuity:
NOTE: Thanks to the reset switch at the end of the story, a large amount of the continuity in “The Glorious Dead” probably no longer applies.
The Doctor refers to the time when he wasn’t in full control of the TARDIS as “the bad old days”. He passes himself off as a delegate for the Hackney Empire. He claims to have (or at least tried to get) the signatures of Archduke Ferdinand, Queen Khodilista and Zodin the Terrible. In part five’s “dream”, the Doctor is living with Grace, a gunfighter, a cartoon cat, Lord Quiquaequod, a Peanuts character (alongside the Rani), a private investigator and a heavily armoured cyborg. The Doctor has been to the ovens at Auschwitz. He makes reference to the Master’s last “religious act” at Devil’s End (“The Daemons”) along with Sarn (“Planet of Fire”) and encounters with the Master on Qu’cadia and Mahtosttu Major. The last wise words the Doctor spoke to the Master were “If we fight like animals, we die like animals” (“Survival). The images he conjures up as weapons in the spectrum include Izzy, Kroton, Fey, the TARDIS, Max Edison, an hourglass, a sundial, several question marks and a pocket watch. Eight was his lucky number.
Izzy was found at a bus shelter just a few hours after being born. She didn’t find out till she was eight when Sandra and Les, her adopted parents, told her. Izzy makes reference to “Battlestar Galactica”. She and Max Edison once beat a team of Philosophy students from Winchester in a pub quiz back in Stockbridge. She still cares about Max. When she’s shrunk, it’s to a height of somewhere about two or four inches.
Kroton is still partially organic. His wife’s name was Shallia.
The Glory has done something funny to the Master’s eyes (we’re never really told what). He was consumed by the Doctor’s TARDIS and eventually learned to control it. The Master organised the (bad) end of term party for his and the Doctor’s university days.
The TCE isn’t “instantaneous”, when you press the button to activate it, the beam stays on for a short period of time after the button is released. It has two buttons (shrink and grow) plus presumably some other control for the setting. Fortunately the TCE also skrinks Izzy’s Mnemonic crystal as well as her.
Katsura Sato, left immortal by the Doctor, drifted to the Caribbean where he became a pirate. Eventually he allowed himself to be captured and he was imprisoned for fifty years before the Master visited him. The Master gave him the Odostra and Katsura led the masses in a holy crusade. By the start of the nineteenth century, he was the ruler of the world and Dhakan was born. Mankind had interstellar travel by the twentieth century and the Master returned to him to give him his blessing.
The final page of the Odostra was “discovered” by an archaeological expedition in the Salius cluster.
Members of the Church of the Glorious Dead all have the symbol of the Glory on their foreheads. When Morningstar makes his transmission to Dhakan, the people there receive it in the form of a projection several hundred feet high. The Church members all wear warp-subtraction circuitry on their chests to activate the multi-dimensional portals through which the Ash Wraiths arrive.
The Ash Wraiths are in full control of when their forms have substance and when they can pass through things. They live in celestial furnaces and are, in reality, psionic parasites that can only enter this reality if another life-force willingly sacrifices itself for them.
Paradost is a planetary museum and celebrates the life experiences of over a million sentient species. The climate is fully regulated by an environmental impulse web in the upper atmosphere (the base for which is near the equator) and the technologies on the planet have all been donated by an alliance of worlds. Personal memories are stored on Paradost along with all kinds of artistic, scientific, religious and emotional achievement. The presentation ceremony is held in the Nexus Gallery. The flying guides generate a gravity-denial field so that their passengers are virtually weightless. The guides were bred specifically for their tasks. Buildings on Paradost go up to at least three thousand feet. Paradost is protected by thousands of star faring worlds. There are hyper-transit tunnels under the surface of the planet and the wanted posters are all in 3D.
Equadrox Major is quite a distance from Paradost.
Could that possibly be Alpha Centuri in the gathering for the ceremony (part one, last frame of third page) and is that Gary Gillatt standing by the phone box in the final frame of part ten?
Comments:
Oh boy, where to begin. “The Glorious Dead” is the longest comic strip that Doctor Who Magazine has ever run. Seventy pages in length, readers had to wait ten months to see the climax of the battle. Was it worth the wait?
There are a lot of bad points about the story, as well as a few good ones. Lets start with the bad. It’s definitely too long. Reading it over the ten-month period was difficult, I found myself constantly having to dig out past issues to find out what was going on. Reading it in one sitting turned it from a difficult experience into a painful one. The pacing of the plot is very uneven, we get the highly condensed plot of part four, the bizarre part five where the Doctor gets to experience different lives is basically padding and sadly we’re then treated to almost two complete instalments worth of info dump with the plot hardly advancing at all after which point we’re left with a fairly standard Doctor versus the Master plot line. The Omniversal spectrum is a complete mystery to me, even after several readings of the story. It would appear that the spectrum covers the whole of reality but we’re not just talking multiple universes or parallel universes or other dimensions. Apparently these only make up a small part of the spectrum. Now, such concepts might have been fine in a BBC book where there was far more time to explain them and clue the reader in on what was going on but in the comic strip where space is limited, I thought that the nature of the spectrum was glossed over way too quickly and it felt like an excuse to have experimental forms of artwork and nothing more. It’s clear that the people behind the strip desperately wanted to do something new with the Master and, for maybe half an instalment it looks as though they might have done so. However, very soon the Master is doing very little that’s new and sadly being very wordy about it. These points could have been over looked had the ending of the story been any good. Part ten has to count as one of the biggest disappointments ending as it does with the reset switch being thrown (one of many predictable elements to the climax). Out of the four Eighth Doctor streams (TV Movie, BBC books, DWM comic and Big Finish audios) we’ve now had three of them throw the reset switch to end a story line. The use of the Mnemonic crystal is clearly signposted throughout the story and some of the dialogue is pure corn (Izzy telling Kroton that it’s been epic meeting him). If the Glory rejected the Master when he tried to enter at the end, I’m not exactly certain how he got all his powers in the first place (changing the course of history to such an extent isn’t something you do casually). The scene of Kroton walking off into the Glory had me screaming it was such a cliché and I was left very disappointed by the whole thing. Kroton’s inclusion itself left me a bit mystified. This is a character who was last seen nearly two decades ago in a backup strip that didn’t feature the Doctor, resurrected for a quick one part reminder then thrust into the limelight in the same way Abslom Daak was with the seventh Doctor. I found it very strange that the Doctor didn’t question the fact he had a cyberman travelling with him, let alone an emotional cyberman. Back when the Doctor discovered emotional daleks in “Evil of the Daleks” he was deeply suspicious of them, yet here Kroton is accepted straight away without any real doubts or concerns. The reset switch ending also has implications for “The Road to Hell”. Are we to assume now that it never happened or do we assume that when Kroton threw the reset switch he dealt with Katsura once the Doctor wasn’t around to see it? Finally, for the bad points (and compared with the problems over plotting, length and the ending I suppose it’s only a minor problem), the Ash Wraith’s “We get to be on the winning side” just didn’t do anything for me as to their explanation of why they sided with the Master.
Now I’ve got the negative out of the way, I suppose I should point out that “The Glorious Dead” isn’t all bad and does have its moments. Admittedly they’re few and far between but they are there. There are some wonderful cliff-hangers that are completely unexpected. The image of the Doctor waking up in bed with Grace is one that will surely be remembered for a long time. Izzy being shrunk is another classic and the first appearance of the Ash Wraiths is also fairly memorable. Izzy is given a few nice character moments and we get to learn a little more about her past (or lack of) which leads me to think that one strip soon we’ll probably get a continuation of this. The first four parts are very good, they rattle along at a fair pace and the bluff that Morningstar wasn’t the Master was well handled.
Sadly, “The Glorious Dead” is an experiment that didn’t quite work as far as I’m concerned. If the story could have maintained the pace of the first four instalments then it would undoubtedly have been a classic. Had something new actually been done with the Master then things would have been better. Had the Omniversal Spectrum been better explained then the story would have worked better. Sadly though, none of these things happened and as soon as the Master finally put in an appearance the story pretty much collapsed on itself. The Threshold saga probably won the comic strip a few fans, “The Glorious Dead” probably turned them away once more.
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