Doctor Who “The Lost Dimension Book Two”

Well, here’s my thoughts on the second volume, and as with the previous book, I used the banner image for the first Doctor to appear in the trade.  In this case, it’s the Fourth.

Much like the first book, the second seems to start off with some one-shots showing how different Doctor Who characters are dealing with these interdimensional rifts.  The Fourth Doctor, with Romana, is up first.  His TARDIS gets sucked onto an alien warship, but the thing is, there’s a threeway battle going on.  The Doctor does figure out pretty quickly what’s happening:  the three armadas each come from a different universe, and each is represented by an alien race the Doctor recognizes, but none of them are major powers when he encountered them.  He soon realizes the reason for it:  each came from a universe where the Daleks never existed to keep them all in check.  As such, pointing out he, by himself, managed to defeat the Daleks sends the armadas back where they came from.  That seems rather clever.

Then there was  River Song story.  It felt the longest, didn’t really connect to the rest of the story, and bored me the most.

But then came the conclusion, filling out most of the volume, and showing how the Twelfth Doctor got himself, Jenny, and his companions away from the possessed horde of people chanting about “peace” and saying “doctor” quite a bit.  In short, he didn’t.  When he finally got the TARDIS’s door open, he finds he’s not in his TARDIS.  He’s in the Tenth Doctor’s TARDIS, and the Twelfth would rather not deal with that guy.  Since the two TARDISes are more or less occupying the same spot, neither can move, but if the Doctors can get to Jenny’s bowship, they can fly into the white hole and maybe figure out what’s going on.  They’re joined by the Ninth Doctor, and again, no one is glad to see him either, but he does have that Silurian weapon that can temporarily shock whatever has infected everyone’s consciousness out of them.  But they still need to get to the bowship and into the white hole before it swallows the Earth.

Enter the Eighth Doctor to call them all children, say he’ll cover them with Jenny and the companions, and that they need to go immediately since all the other Doctors are already in the white hole.

By the by, if this story did anything right, it was reminding the reader the Doctor absolutely does not get along with himself.  Favorite line:  the Ninth Doctor says he always wanted to fly a bowship as the Twelfth takes the controls, to which the Twelfth replies that as long as he gets to fly it, the Ninth Doctor eventually will.

So, what went wrong?  Well, when the Eleventh Doctor took the baby TARDIS into the wider universe, he tried to share his explorations with the thing, but the TARDIS was more frightened than amazed and decided to use the white hole to bring perfect peace and quiet to the entirety of spacetime.  The Eleventh Doctor was there doing his best to keep the TARDIS company and calm, but once the other Doctors show up, and I mean all of the other Doctors (including one that I guess was the War Doctor with dark hair because I had no idea who the evil-looking guy with the bowlcut was otherwise), it’s easy enough to calm the baby TARDIS and put everything back the way it was.  The different Doctors can go back to where they were before, picking up companions left behind for one reason or another, and that was that.

So really, fun story for the most part.  Sure, most of the stand-alones were maybe only so-so, but I had fun with this one.

As for tomorrow…another different look at a Doctor I long since stopped covering.