Doctor Who Classics “Changes”

Alright, here we go.  The Sixth Doctor.  A companion from the show and not a problematic one that the comics creators whipped up.  A famous companion that didn’t appear on the show for obvious reasons.  Artwork by John Ridgway, someone whose work I know but not overly well.

And a story by one Grant Morrison.  Yes, comics fans, that Grant Morrison.

Well, in terms of story, there isn’t much here.  But honestly, that could describe most of the stories in this volume.  They’re fine, but they’re light.

This one just gave me a different Doctor.  Now, like an self-respecting Doctor Who fan, I do love the Fourth Doctor.  But I pretty much love all the different Doctors for different reasons, and the Sixth never got the right amount of respect from fans until after his time on the show ended thanks to stuff like whatever Big Finish is doing.  Here, he’s on the TARDIS with Peri…and Frobisher.

Ah, Frobisher.  I’d heard of this guy.  A shapeshifting alien whose most common form was a talking penguin.  What a ridiculous concept, but having seen how the show handled Kameleon, they sure as heck weren’t going to be using Frobisher.

Anyway, the story itself:  the Doctor thinks there’s something on the TARDIS and he asks Peri and Frobisher to stay put in a room where he stored all the missing work from long dead writers and artists he knew like Shakespeare and VanGogh.  Now, if they did, there’s no story.  But they decided to head into the bowels of the TARDIS and find the intruder.  Said intruder turns out to be another shapeshifting alien, this one more hostile than Frobisher, who had stowed away in the Doctor’s “zoo” where he transports endangered species to safer places.  Said intruder had disguised itself as one particularly cute animal and then broke out to cause trouble.

There are a couple clever moments here, the TARDIS even appears so big that even the Doctor finds places he didn’t seem to remember, and the shapeshifter disguises itself as Peri at one point, but Frobisher notices that the fake Peri’s clothes are actually part of her flesh and not clothing.  That felt like a very Morrison-ish touch.

Anyway, the three work together to shove the thing out of an airlock before it killed somebody.

So much for that guy.  Anyway, two more by Morrison for me yet to come before going back to the Fourth Doctor.