Book #87 of 2017: Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time by Scott Tipton and David Tipton
Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time was a 12-issue comic book series written for the show’s 50th anniversary in 2013, telling the story of a mysterious enemy kidnapping the Doctor’s companions across all of the Time Lord’s incarnations thus far. It’s pretty episodic in its first half, but as the story goes along, each Doctor’s adventure becomes less self-contained until finally all eleven versions are teaming up to rescue their friends. (That team-up, and more generally the narrative build over the series, makes this venture far more satisfying than the audio series Destiny of the Doctor, another 50th anniversary production that simply has the Eleventh Doctor popping into each installment to procure the latest maguffin from an earlier self.)
Prisoners of Time is packed full of Doctor Who references from Zarbi to Judoon, and while most of the spotlight goes to the regular TV companions and their Doctors, there’s a special focus on shapeshifting penguin Frobisher from the Doctor Who comics and Big Finish audios and on short-lived companion Adam Mitchell from the first season of the 2005 television revival. It’s as gloriously mad as the best of Who, but there’s some real pathos as it resolves a lingering storyline that the TV show had seemingly dropped. Definitely a worthy celebration of the first half-century of this delightful universe of fiction.
★★★☆☆
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