Doctor Who – Junkyard Demon
Writer: Steve Parkhouse
Artist: Mike McMahon and Adolfo Buylla
Issues 58-59
Doctor: Fourth
Companions: None
Episodes: 2
Summary:
The Doctor is meditating in the TARDIS when it’s salvaged from space by Flotsam and Jetsam, two scrap dealers. In amongst all their other scrap they have a “de-activated” cyberman who captures the TARDIS and uses it to find the Cybernaut Zogron. Jetsam, however, reprograms Zogron to be a butler and the cyberman is defeated with a paint spray.
Episode Endings:
One – The Doctor is showing Flotsam and Jetsam the TARDIS when they are attacked by the re-activated cyberman.
Two – The Doctor departs in the TARDIS leaving Flotsam and Jetsam with a whole new planet of scrap to salvage from.
Continuity:
The noise of the drill is audible inside the TARDIS. The Doctor meditates. A high-speed diamond tipped drill gets bent when used to try and break into the TARDIS. The Doctor keeps things inside his hat. The TARDIS has a drinks dispenser (or a new food machine maybe) that can dispense hot chocolate in striped cups. However, to work it needs a non-variable oscillator that runs at 400Hz. It’s at least two and half meters tall (or attached to something that is). The buttons, when pressed, go either “beep” or “meep” (a nod to “The Star Beast” maybe?) The TARDIS console room in this story is absolutely HUGE. The Doctor, Flotsam and Jetsam have to walk several meters from the entrance doors before they even get to anything else in the room. Interestingly the TARDIS console doesn’t appear in this story, except for one small part of the central column in the second part. Temporal Grace definitely doesn’t appear to be working. The salvage ship is called Drifter. It has grabber claws for salvaging from space etc. along with a table/parasol and chair and a skip full of rubble (so one presumes that it has some kind of gravity bubble around it to stop these things flying off into space when it accelerates and an air bubble so that the chair and table can be used!). The builder/pilot is called Flotsam and the engineer is called Jetsam. They have a robot (sorry, “living sculpture” called Dutch that’s powered by a windmill. Flotsam has several badges on his outfit including a smiley face, one that reads “No Nuclear Energy” and one that reads along the lines of “Save the Zy…” (it can’t be Zygons as the fourth letter is clearly not “o”. It also loses the “the” in a later frame.). The boiler that powers the ship is an Acme 5. Solar power or ion-drive motors (or both) can power the Drifter. The cyberman featured in the story has the head of a cyberman from “The Tenth Planet” but the body of a cyberman from “Tomb of the Cybermen”. It has four fingers on each hand though, in common with the “Tenth Planet” cyberman. It can be reprogrammed to be a butler, implying that it’s more machine than organic. It has its weaponry on its wrist. Dutch’s energy weapons have no detrimental effect on the cyberman, they make it grow stronger. The cyberman can pilot the TARDIS exactly where it wants it to go. Cybernaut Zogron is one of the pioneers of the cybermen’s interstellar empire. The entire remains of the cyberfleet are on planet A54 in the Arcturian system (somewhere near quadrants 747 and 746 of the system). Planet A54 has at least two moons. Excessive amounts of polymer plastics are not conducive to the normal functioning of a cyberman… or, in plain english, if you fire a paint spray at them they seize up, their circuits fuse and their brain cells deteriorate.
Comments:
There’s a part of me that really likes this story and a part that really hates it. I like it because of the plot and because Flotsam and Jetsam are the sort of stupid comic strip characters that seem to appeal to me. However, unfortunately the artwork in this story really gets on my nerves. The cyber presence in the story is exceptionally bizarrely realised and the fourth Doctor varies from looking vaguely like Tom Baker to looking like a scarecrow (the first panel of the second part being the worst version of Tom I’ve seen!) The interior of the TARDIS also seems to get a raw deal in this story, basically consisting of a very large empty space with a drinks machine and a bean bag/chair for the Doctor to sit on. The ending also is a direct copy of “The New Avengers” episode featuring the cybernauts, they also used sprays to disable the enemy.
Basically, your feelings on this will probably boil down to your opinion of the artwork. It’s such a stark contrast to the artwork in the previous strips that it will either leave you pleading for more or mumbling with disgust.
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