The Doctor and Captain Jack have tracked Rose down to the Fluren Temporal Bazaar, an illegal weapons fair hidden inside a supernova! Here the Doctor has discovered Gallifreyan weapons among the items for sale, dangerous relics of the Time War. Angrily offering his unique, Time Lord mind to the highest bidder, the Doctor hoped to lure out the Unon… only to have a group of armoured Lect teleport aboard and surround them, lasers at the ready! Now the time travellers are caught in a heavily-armed stand-off between the overpowered Unon and the Lect – as the nearby star threatens to go supernova…!

Things are hotting up (in more ways that one!) as the Unon and the Lect engage in a brutal ground assault. There’s a particularly vicious moment as one of the centaur-like Unon slices one of its enemies in two… though I have to admit that it took me a moment to make visual sense of exactly what was happening in artist Blair Shedd’s depiction of the event, as we see the Unon from an unfamiliar angle, and we were hitherto unaware that they had arrived.

When the Doctor gets zapped by an Unon, unlike Rose I didn’t think for one moment that he had been killed. Quite apart from the fact that we know he survives to participate in his final few television episodes, the ‘saved by transmat’ trick has been done a couple of times already in this miniseries, so forgive me if I don’t get too overwrought about the situation… or about the one that faces Rose and Jack at the end of this issue. That in itself is rather reminiscent of the cliffhanger from the opening comic book in this series. Cavan Scott’s story could do with having a bit more variety in its structure.

In a decidedly more deliberate flashback, we briefly see the Doctor’s previous two incarnations. These are really more like throw-forwards than flashbacks, though, because they are versions of our hero that we hadn’t yet seen during Christopher Eccleston’s time on the show: the older and less foppish Eighth Doctor and John Hurt’s War Doctor. Titan ought to give one of those guys his own series – oh, they have done!

6

Richard McGinlay