Doctor Who “The Lost Dimension Book One”

So, I had a trade that I thought, judging from the cover, was just a Tenth Doctor story, but as soon as I flipped it open, I saw it was set after another trade I have with the Thirteenth Doctor, so I opted to put that aside for later and go for a pair of trades on The Lost Dimension story that featured, well, all of the Doctors.

If you’re wondering why I used the Twelfth for the banner image, I just picked the one that appeared first, but honestly, he has the smallest role in this particular trade.

Apparently, a massive white hole is swallowing everything in its path, including a planet currently being visited by Jack Harkness and Tara Mishra.  Tara first appeared in those Ninth Doctor trades I looked at before, a UNIT officer who tagged along as a new companion to the Ninth Doctor.  As it is, the Doctor can’t come get the pair, but his genetic clone/daughter Jenny is there to try.  She fails, and she only manages to keep herself out of the white hole thanks to a rescue from the Fifth Doctor in his own TARDIS.

Yeah, there are a lot of Doctors here, and it does seem like each “classic” Doctor is set up with the right “modern” character, and giving Jenny a brief chat with the Fifth Doctor certainly counts given, well, who played both Jenny and the Fifth Doctor since she calls the Doctor “Dad” no matter what face he wears.

She opts to then take a trip to find the Doctor, but the only place in all of time and space where the Doctor actually sat still long enough to find was when the Twelfth Doctor was guarding that vault at the university with Bill and Nardole.  It’s the sort of situation where Bill has more questions, and UNIT needs to be called in because Jenny’s bowship destroyed the university library.  But then energy from the white hole starts infecting people, starting with Kate Stewart, Osgood, and the UNIT people, turning them into some kind of zombie types chanting about “peace,” and that weird energy knocks Bill down when she tries to get into the TARDIS.

So, that’s a good set-up.  How did the rest of this crossover go?

Um, with a bunch of special issues.

The Ninth Doctor and Rose find Madame Vastra (with Jenny) sailing the high seas in search of lost Silurians.  That confused me a bit about Vastra’s timeline since I thought she met the Eleventh Doctor first.  However, the mind whammy thing happens there too, and the Doctor gets a Silurian psychic gun that can temporarily free people’s minds of the effect.  He has a conversation with the Fourth Doctor, and leaves Rose in Victorian times to try and fix things.

By the by, the Ninth and Fourth Doctors?  Good combo.  If there was one Doctor the Ninth would find too much, the Fourth seems like a good pick.  The Ninth is mostly a hard-nosed and sarcastic guy.  The Fourth is just utterly ridiculous.  Of course he objects to seeing his former face before learning much.

The Tenth is next, and he also has a pair of comics-only companions, but in his case, the dimensional rifts lead him to a space station in the future trying to mine resources from a neutron star.  There’s a Cybermen attack, but these Cybermen are acting weird because, ta da!, the energy is infecting them.  The Doctor gets as many people as he can away, learns time travelers are immune to the energy, and leaves in the TARDIS.  His encounter is a brief flash of the Third Doctor, and yeah, the swashbuckler would be a good match for the Tenth.

The Eleventh Doctor, with yet another comics-only companion named Alice, lands in ancient Gallifrey where they are trying to develop TARDIS technology.  He can’t stay hidden forever, but he does show a knack for talking to baby TARDISes.  That gets the attention of Rassilon, and the Doctor is soon tapped as a test pilot for a TARDIS, but something goes wrong and he never comes back.  Alice gets a flash from the Second Doctor, the other childlike Doctor, and she soon takes a TARDIS of her own to find the Eleventh.

And then there’s a short Jenny story showing how she got her bowship and discovered the dimensional rifts.

So, aside from the dimensional rifts angle, there isn’t a lot here that seems to be advancing the overall story.  These were more like disparate one-shots, fun in their own way, but not much of an overall coherent story.  Maybe Book Two will find a way to fit all these ideas together.