While we won’t likely see new episodes of Doctor
Who on TV until much later this year, Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth
incarnation of the venerable Time Lord shows no signs of slowing down on the
pages of Titan Comic’s Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor. In
fact, the latest issue, #5 in the continuing run, delivers the fastest paced
adventure we’ve see yet from this title.
This issue picks up where the last one left off. The Doctor,
along with badass, revenge-minded Amazon warrior Rani, and Prinyanka, the
daughter of one of the Doctor’s old time travelling buddies, search for a way
to defeat the ancient Indian death cult that is currently trying to crash a
continent sized spaceship into the surface of the Earth, killing millions of
people in the process. That’s the kind of thing secret death cults are prone to
do we guess, but someone has to feed the necro-cloud we suppose.
Dealing with four-dimensional monsters and sprawling
conspiracies is bad enough, but Clara is having some problems of her own. As you
remember from last time, she’s now playing host to Kali, the goddess of death
and ruin, and she has morphed into a stories-tall, multi-armed deity, and turned
blue in the process. Not to mention she has an insatiable lust for murder and
destruction. Good thing she’s tough as hell, it’s hard to keep the Impossible
Girl down for too long, even for a goddess.
Because this is the concluding chapter of the latest story
arc, it reads like a final act, as a climax. All of the primary character work
and the story development that needs to be done already happened in the
previous issues, and as a result, issue #5 unfolds at a high-speed, rapid pace.
You straight up run from start to finish, and it’s fine, and necessary, but as
a standalone issue this feels a bit light on substance. It’s best if you read
it with the earlier chapters—you have to imagine this arc will be collected in
a single volume at some point, which will probably be the ideal way to consume
this. And you should, because there’s a lot of cool stuff to this story, but
this last piece of the puzzle is simply all go, without much else.
There are themes of revenge, and overcoming those dark
impulses, woven into the story, especially with Rani, who, even flung hundreds
of years into the future, is still bent on enacting a bit of vengeance against
those who killed her lover. But, like so much else with this arc, most of that
groundwork was laid before this issue. You also briefly touch on the dangers of
religious extremism, and in true Doctor fashion, he cautions against any and
all overly zealous interpretations of faith, no matter what doctrine you
follow. But that’s all pretty light.
Overall, if you’ve been keeping up with The Twelfth
Doctor, issue #5 is a fast-paced, satisfying conclusion to this
particularly adventurous storyline. However, if you’re looking for a place to
jump in, you might want to go back a few issues to get the whole story, or
perhaps just wait until issue #6, as this isn’t representative of what this
particular title is doing in a narrative, character, or emotional sense.
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