Before sacrificing herself to save everyone, Dorothy (the hand of Sutekh) tells The Doctor to give Cindy and Gabby some room. “Stop making them chase through the universe after you all the time and let them understand where they are,” she says. She then advises he not abuse their trust in him. So The Doctor decides to provide them with a little perspective from the best source possible - Sarah Jane Smith.

    VORTEX BUTTERFLIES allows The Doctor’s friends to take a breath, reflect, do some soul-searching. The story serves as a much-needed repose for readers as well. After so much intensity, it’s nice to just sit with these characters a while and go through these issues alongside them.

Everyone has their own method of working through grief. Gabby is taking art classes, desperately trying to cope with the sight of her dead best friend, a hard thing to do even if it was only a clone. Cindy is embracing life in London, developing a bond with Sarah Jane, and attempting to understand why Gabby is so distant. Adorable Anubis is discovering love on Aramuko. The Doctor is off, as usual, doing his own thing and trying to cure the Tardis of a mysterious illness.

    Thanks to the magic of time travel in comic books, we’re able to revisit The Doctor’s most enduring companion. Including the wisdom of Sarah Jane Smith was a stroke of genius. Who better to to teach these girls how to embrace the moment than a woman who had seen so many wonders of the universe and had to build her own life afterward? Georgia Sposito’s likeness of the character is perfectly spot on, and Rick Abadzis so captures Sarah Jane’s voice that one could easily imagine the late Elisabeth Sladen speaking his words.

    Legacy is important in Doctor Who. Having the latest incarnation face-off against classic foes like Daleks and Cybermen gives the franchise a sense of unparalleled continuity. Seeing an old friend takes things to the next level. It reminds the audience, even if they understand this on an intellectual level, that the person in the long brown coat is the same as the one in the frilly shirts or extensive scarf. The Doctor is one individual with many faces, and all of the Whoniverse is one place.

    If WAR OF GODS is about choices and consequences, VORTEX BUTTERFLIES is about acceptance. Gabby and Cindy have to accept that their magical lives with The Doctor is dangerous and exciting, but it won’t last, and it’s important to not let their personal lives pass them by. The Doctor must accept that not looking back isn’t always an option. Sometimes you get so busy running away from something that if you don’t take a quick glance behind you, someone you love might be lost.

There is no shortage of false gods in Doctor Who. Whether it’s the Osirans or Akhaten, cultures are often caught in the snare of an alien being powerful enough to manipulate them into believing in their divinity. Luckily one person is always there to break the spell, reveal the truth, and banish the alien overlords for all time. This person is centuries old and travels all of space and time with a myriad of friends picked up along the way. This person may be the ultimate false god of the entire Doctor Who canon.

    At first, it seems odd to epilogue a volume titled WAR OF GODS with a small story about The Doctor and Gabby getting stuck in London. They’ve just prevented the end of everything (again) by stepping in between a soon-to-be-resurrected Sutekh and Anubis. Why not end the collection there? Clearly, the war in question is between father and son - not to mention the splinter versions of Sutekh mucking up The Doctor’s plans at every turn. Once the war is over, wouldn’t it make sense to close out the collection with everything back to normal?

    Well, not really. Nothing in The Doctor’s life is normal. Not only due to his alien biology, time/space travel machine that’s bigger on the inside, and ability to rewrite every cell in a Time Lord’s body. All those elements factor into the lack of normality in The Doctor’s life, but what really complicates things is the fact that The Doctor is the smartest, quite often oldest, dangerous, and kind person in any given situation. Companions come and go, they help in a multitude of ways, but in the end, decisions have to be made and The Doctor is the only one capable of making those decisions.

    Usually, those decisions are correct and reality is saved. There is always a cost, however, and The Doctor’s long life requires the debt of endless decisions be paid with great pain over an exhaustive period of time. The Doctor may have saved countless lives, but the few lost in battle still walk with him across the centuries.

    A God could, perhaps, hold themselves above grief - see the bigger picture, comprehend that their course of action was the only worthy one worth taking and if the ends justify the means? Well…

    The Doctor, however, is not a God. One might think so at first glance. Look at all the incredible things The Doctor can do! Witness the bravery! Take in the wisdom! The Doctor is the smartest, most powerful person in the room, but The Doctor is just a person. People feel pain. People can’t take in the big picture. The only thing that matters to a person are the people they hold close. When the ones they love perish because of their own actions, it hurts, breaks the heart. The Doctor has two hearts, which means twice the capacity for love and agony.

    Nick Abadzis’ huge WAR OF GODS story opens with incredible art by artist Georgia Sposito, that transports the reader to impossible places. It is epic storytelling on the grandest of scales, leading to a bittersweet climax about self-sacrifice. The Doctor limps from this adventure physically intact and emotionally battered. It’s as if he’s wondering why does this always happen? Why can’t I do better? Why am I not perfect?

That is the true war being fought in this volume seven of Titan’s Tenth Doctor line. Sutekh and Anubis are not Gods. Their conflict is immensely spectacular, but it is hardly a war. Wars are never so neatly resolved. Wars have casualties. The Doctor’s struggle to keep moving in the face of all his personal tragedies, the companion casualties sacrificed by his heroism, rages constantly, and that is what this volume is really about.

Through that prism, it is easy to see why it is crucial that the final story, REVOLVING DOORS, is included here. By bringing him back to London, the Tardis has put him at ground zero, forcing him to face the loss of his friends in order to rise above the pain and do what only he can, save someone and keep moving forward.

An unapologetically slight tale, The Switching jettisons having much of a plot at all in favour of some fun character moments grounded in the UNIT family dynamic.

Though the blurb makes a half hearted attempt to play coy, and the script takes its time to say it out loud, it’s pretty clear from the off that we’re getting a classic Freaky Friday scenario with a Time Lord twist. In a way, it’s such a perfect idea it’s almost a surprise we never saw a version from Letts and Dicks on screen though I’m not sure Jon Pertwee’s pride could have taken playing across from another actor doing their best impression of him. As it is, we get Duncan Wisbey doing a remarkable job of capturing the Third Doctor’s sibilance and that slightly ragged edge to his voice. Except this isn’t the Third Doctor, of course, but the Master.

Surprisingly charming and pragmatic as he makes a nuisance of himself at UNIT HQ, it’s a reminder that, back in the day, the Master didn’t tend to kill unless it actually advanced his agenda. Instead, quickly discovering that the Doctor’s TARDIS is in parts all over the place and not fit for making an escape from Earth in, he restricts himself to having a bit of fun at his best frenemy’s expense.If there’s a flaw, it’s the Master’s surprise that the Doctor is clearly so habitually rude and disrespectful to his UNIT colleagues (everyone reacts with slight suspicion as to why ‘the Doctor’ is being so nice and pleasant to them). It feels like the Master should know the Third Doctor better than that. All the supporting characters are perfectly drawn, however, with Jo in particular note perfect.

Essentially a throwaway novelty, it’s nicely wry humour and talented and flexible reader this is well worth the handful of coins and half hour of your time it will cost you.

 

The second and final Volume of Fourth Doctor's run in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine (or as it was known then Doctor Who Weekly) strip, is Dragon's Claw. The Doctor, K9, and Sharon continue their adventures in Space and Time, traveling from 1522 China and then to spaceships and futuristic societies. 

With Sharon having been aged at the end of "The Time Witch" (which was the final story in the previous collection The Iron Legion), she is reluctant to return home when the Doctor manages to get her back to her own place and time. But luckily for her, they end up plucked from her home before they can leave the TARDIS, and eventually, she decides to leave the Doctor in classic Doctor Who style, by falling in love with a man she hardly knows and deciding to stay with him forever. It's kind of a shame they dropped Sharon from the strip, but I am sure with the show changing styles fairly drastically at the beginning of the 80s, and with it clear Baker would be leaving soon, they wanted to clean up the continuity a bit before the strip changed it's lead to Peter Davison.

The rest of this book features the Doctor solo or with just K9, and as they feature him in his Season 18 costume, it clearly takes place later in his timeline. There are some good stories featured throughout the book. The opening story, the titular "Dragon's Claw," is quite excellent. "The Free-Fall Warriors" and "Junkyard Demon" are also fairly memorable, and the closing story, "The Neutron Knights," is a solid final strip for the Fourth Doctor that also manages to set up a few mysteries and characters that would be picked up on during the Fifth Doctor's tenure. 

I would say that this collection is fairly notable for planting the earliest seeds of the internal continuity the strip has had in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine over the years.  There are characters, themes, places, and ideas that would continue through other Doctors and eras, and the earliest elements to that long and storied continuity begin in the strips featured within this collection. 

This book is another fine collection from Panini, who once again do a high quality job restoring the black and white strips to their former glory. There are a lot of stories within, in terms of quality of storytelling it can be a bit of a mixed bag, but overall it is a fine collection of stories wonderfully restored. 

An update of the previous Time Vortex 360 game, now fully deployed for VR, Time Vortex isn’t going to change the world but it doesn’t intend to. Based on the single line elevator pitch “Imagine you could play the Doctor Who titles,” it’s a fun, if slight, idea well executed.

A brief tutorial requires you to play through the basic elements of the game while huge block capital instructions on what to do fly down the vortex in true 2005 style and gets you up to speed quickly, though thankfully, unlike some games, it only appears on your first play and you did have to sit through it over and over. Those elements are pretty straightforward – as you fly the TARDIS down the vortex, you have to hit glowing balls flying towards you, dodge asteroids, and pilot your way through the gates of force fields that block your way. Each energy ball collected, or hazard avoided, gets you points.

The real selling point here is the gameplay, which involves tilting your device left or right to steer, or tilt forward or back to pull up or dive down as you hurtle onward. If you have a full VR set like Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR or HTC Vive, or even a cardboard set up to slot your phone into, it’s better again as it’s actually moving your head as you look around the environment which directs your course. A particular delight is the fact you get ‘attacked’ from behind by asteroids that are travelling up the vortex faster than you – requiring you to turn around on the spot to face them so you can avoid them, meaningly you wind up flying backwards with the ‘past’ receding away from you.

These things can be tough to play, and we’ve all seen VR environments where the program gets easily confused and insists the walls are on the floor or slight turns of your head cause you to spin madly through the virtual world like a top, but none of these problems are apparent with Time Vortex VR. It’s responsive, but not annoyingly oversensitive and all the movements you make result in what you instinctively expect to happen. That’s important as there’s few things worse than a game that has a good idea but is infuriately difficult to actually control. In contrast to that, this is an easy joy to play and should be especially embraced by younger kids getting to swish their way around their living room in the TARDIS.  That’s particularly impressive as this is presented up front as a “Taster Experiment” with the warning that “Ideas May Break.”

All of this is accompanied by a suitably jaunty and enthusiastic version of the Doctor Who theme, while the Police Box itself probably looks most like the 1980s prop but is plainly intended as a compromise version that simultaneously resembles, to some degree, all and none of the TV incarnations. This ties in to the game’s take on the vortex itself which regularly transforms itself in a flash of light from one era to another. Not designed to be exact, they still raise a smile of recognition of the decade they represent. So there’s a distinctly 2005 looking one, one that’s in more open space with lots of asteroids ala 1987, and a rainbowtastic one that’s very Colin Baker. There’s also a 1960s inspired one, though it’s effectively a modern vortex rendered in black and white rather than the sweeping horizontal sheets of the Hartnell titles. It also creates the only slight quibble with Time Vortex VR, as it can be devilishly hard to tell the difference between the asteroids and the walls of the vortex itself when both are in black and white.

Time Vortex VR won’t be anybody’s idea of the big Christmas present under the tree, but it’s a perfectly judged stocking filler sure to provide kids from six to six hundred with a fun diversion as they jump around the house, getting under the feet of Mums, Dads and guardians as they try to serve up the Christmas dinner this year. Plus, it’s free to play for the first three months (what exactly happens after that is a little… vague) so there’s literally nothing to lose by giving it a literal spin.

 

The Iron Legion is the first of two Volumes of the Collected Fourth Doctor strips from Doctor Who Magazine, it also happens to be the earliest comics from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine version of the strip. It is a good read, not as strong a run of stories as the strip developed into, but these are the early days of the DWM strip, so while they are often entertaining, they hadn't quite developed their voice as a strip yet. That is a minor complaint really, because when you get down to it these early strips in DWM capture a huge leap for the ongoing comic strip adventures of Doctor Who. 

The book also features the debut of DWM's first original companion, and the franchise's first companion of a race other than white, Sharon Davies. I rather liked Sharon, she has a good personality and works well with the Fourth Doctor.  Tom Baker's voice is most definitely captured within these stories, and that is really why, despite telling tales that are bigger and more sweeping than anything the show could have ever done at the time these were written and released, it somehow still manages to feel like they belong within the world of the show. 

The often beautiful Black & White artwork by Dave Gibbons is the most notable uptick in quality from what I have glanced and skimmed at of the TV Comic version of the strip that immediately proceeded it. One look at the opening page of "Doctor Who and The Iron Legion" and it far surpasses nearly anything TV Comic did in all the years it ran the strip.  From his depiction of the Fourth Doctor (for the most part, there are occasions where he can look a bit off) to the big sweeping pages of armies and spaceships...Gibbons really managed to draw something special within this book. 

The stories are also pretty solid, though I believe the strip only got better as it went along, there is no denying that these early stories are quite good. From the titular opening story, to "Doctor Who and the Star Beast" and "The Dogs of Doom," it has some pretty solid stories underneath all the beautiful art. 

This is the early days of Doctor Who Magazine's strip, so much so that the magazine wasn't even yet called Doctor Who Magazine, but Doctor Who Weekly.  It may not reach the same heights that the strip would under the Fifth, Sixth or Eighth Doctor runs, but there are some solid storytelling and great artwork, and despite the fact that Doctor Who has been living in comic strips nearly as long as he has been off adventuring on TV, it says something that one could easily, and happily, start reading the strip from the moment the magazine took over. Panini has also restored the strips beautifully in this collection, being released in their original Black & White forms for the first time since they were originally printed, along with some commentary from the people who made it...it's a collection that comes highly recommended.