Top Five Titan Comic Stories: The Twelfth Doctor (Doctor Who)

*Spoilers.*

The Twelfth Doctor was in a different position than his predecessors when it comes to the Titan comics. While earlier Doctors were getting new adventures after the fact with mostly new companions, Twelve’s comic run started during his TV run, so many of his stories stuck with ongoing TV companions like Clara and Bill. That’s nice too—I love characters like Gabby, Cindy, and Alice, but it’s always nice to get new stories featuring TV characters. The Clara-to-Bill gap, however, does leave room to sneak in a few oneshot and short-term companions.

 

“Gangland” (2015)

What’s not to love about fighting alien gangsters in Las Vegas in the ‘60s? The Doctor and Clara head out to Vegas to catch a show by an obvious Rat Pack stand-in, and they get embroiled in an extraterrestrial criminal conspiracy. Throw in a little Time Lord history and a stolen weapon, and you’ve got yourself a comic! Did I mention that the Doctor plays craps and calmly gives a history lesson while sitting at a Russian Roulette table?

 

“Clara Oswald and the School of Death” (2016)

Creepy boarding school on a remote island? Check. Teachers and a good swathe of the student body who aren’t what they seem? Check. Clara working undercover as a teacher while the Doctor investigates behind the scenes with a few students who are weirded out by everything that’s going on? Check and check. You can see some parallels with “School Reunion” and “Human Nature” / “The Family of Blood,” but this story brings its own eerie, fantastic style to those tropes!

 

“Terror of the Cabinet Noir” (2016-2017)

I’d never heard of Julie d’Aubigny before this story, but she’s fabulous and makes a great combative companion for the Doctor. I love this creepy adventure in 17^th century France, where the Doctor meets the dueling, opera-singing bicon Julie and they’re thrown together to investigate some sinister goings-on led by a theocrat who’s supposed to be long dead.

 

“Beneath the Waves” (2017)

Gotta love a sleepy little seaside town full of secret terrors! This story features Hattie, a comics-only companion. The 40^th century rock star bassist makes for a fun recurring friend for Twelve, and there’s both mystery and thrills as they investigate what’s lurking in the deep. Bonus points for baddies that feel like something straight out of a classic Who serial.

 

“The Wolves of Winter” (2017)

There are a couple Twelve-and-Bill stories that combine two tangential iconic baddies in interesting ways. This one already starts off with a winning premise, as the Doctor and Bill are caught between a group of Vikings and a group of Ice Warriors, two proud warrior cultures who aren’t looking to back down. But when you throw in the Flood, the virus from “The Waters of Mars”? Forcing everyone to band together to avoid getting infected? Top marks all around!

Relationship Spotlight: The Doctor & the Master (Doctor Who)

*A few Doctor-Master spoilers.*

I’ve now done write-ups for nearly all the Masters—I’m holding off on the Dhawan Master, as I am with Thirteen, since I don’t like to do a full Favorite Characters/Character Highlight post on a Time Lord until their regeneration is “in the can,” so to speak. There will be some Master-related Top Fives trickling in gradually as well, but for now, let’s talk about the Doctor and their “best enemy.”

Note: the pronouns will be a little all over the place here. I’ll use “he/him” and “she/her” as fits when I’m talking about specific regenerations, and “they/them” when talking about the characters as a whole. Gotta love Time Lord gender dynamics!

It's weird to think about, but pre-“The Timeless Children,” the Master is probably the Doctor’s oldest acquaintance on the show, excepting possibly Borusa. The Doctor knew the Master before they stole the TARDIS, before Susan. The two were at the Academy together, childhood friends. They were both different in a Time Lord society that valued rules and staid tradition, so that naturally brought them together, two outsiders with a distaste for non-interference. But somewhere along the line, it went sour. As Twelve explains to Bill, "We had a pact. Every star in the universe, we were going to see them all—but he was so busy burning them, I don't think she ever saw anything."

That’s the split. Both grow up to be renegade Time Lords who flout the rules and run away from their stuffy culture. But as the Doctor gradually breaks from his learned values of studying other planets in a detached manner, his companions teaching him the value of getting involved and helping others, the Master sets off into the universe with dreams of conquering and/or destroying. The next time we see them meet, Three and the Delgado Master already have an established antagonism that’s somewhere between Bond-and-villain and Holmes-and-Moriarty.

And yet, despite their now diametrically opposed views, despite all the terrible things the Master does across their lifetimes, the two can’t fully quit each other as friends. As the saying goes, hatred is too strong an emotion for someone you don’t care about. The Master lusts for power, but they’re also specifically obsessed with blowing up the Doctor’s spot, going after targets the Doctor is going to take personally and prompting yet another titanic clash between them. Even though the Master’s villainy is all very real and countless people get killed in the process of their exploits, there’s often this slight sense that the Master is performing for an audience of one, that on some level, the whole thing is a never-ending game they’re playing across the cosmos.

For the Doctor’s part, they can’t bring themselves to end it once and for all with the Master, either. This is especially true after the Time War. For a long time, the Doctor thinks that he’s the only Time Lord left, and to discover that another survived, even if it’s the Master, makes him paradoxically desperate to hang onto their fractured friendship. “Don’t you see?” Ten begs the Simm Master. “All we’ve got is each other.”

The Doctor-Master relationship was always intense, but from this point forward, it’s even more charged. For as much as the Master provokes the Doctor and the Doctor fights against the Master’s evil schemes, they still need each other in some way. There’s a moment where the Simm Master panics when he thinks he might’ve actually killed the Doctor, a moment where Missy alternately taunts and pleads with Twelve when it looks like he might have no choice but to kill her. These two are tangled up with each other in ways that no one else can really understand.

For a time, Twelve tries to rehabilitate Missy, attempting to instill her with a conscience as he guards over her in the vault. This season is probably when their relationship feels the closest to romantic, and even though it’s no coincidence that it’s also the first time we see the Doctor and the Master in regenerations of different genders, there’s always been just a hint of that in there. The dynamic tends to shift a little from one regeneration to the next, and changes in gender are a part of that, but at the core, the relationship stays the same. Missy seems to genuinely change for the better during this period, even as she teeters on the brink of being pulled back in by one of her previous regenerations, and even though her move to stand with the Doctor in the end is thwarted, the fact that she was going to do that right thing can’t be discounted.

At present, the Dhawan Master has rejected those past efforts to reform, throwing himself back into wholeheartedly villainy, but the tug and pull between him and Thirteen remains. I love the scene where she reaches out to him over the telegraph in occupied Paris, using the four-beat pattern they both know so well. This latest Doctor-Master dynamic almost buzzes with the twists and turns of the long history between them, and I love to see it.

There are showrunners who play at teasing game-changing moments, claiming the Master is about to die with no chance of regeneration. But that’s never been true, no more so than the idea of the Doctor dying for good. Even though we didn’t meet the Master until the Third Doctor era, they’re now utterly entwined with the series. There may be seasons where we don’t see them, long stretches before the next regeneration shows their face. But I’m confident that, for as long as the Doctor travels through the universe trying to make it better, the Master will be out there too, causing trouble and trying to get their attention.

Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: The Twelfth Doctor (Doctor Who)

*Spoilers.*

Man, I love Twelve. I feel like it took a while for the show to fully appreciate that blunt, slightly-curmudgeon Time Lord, but I could always tell he was still the Doctor. Even if the writing frequently let him down during his seasons, he still managed to pull it out with aplomb on numerous occasions. Here are my favorites.

 

Assembling the Time Heist (Series 8, Episode 5 – “Time Heist”)

The Doctor comes through twice here! First, he plans the heist of an impenetrable bank for altruistic reasons, planting key supplies he’ll need, gathering the experts who can help him do it, leaving clues for the crew, and then wiping everyone’s memory, including his own, so the psychic alien “Teller” won’t know their intentions. Everything is meticulously plotted out for the Doctor, Clara, and co. to reach the bank vault at a key moment, and once there, the Doctor is able to infer despite his wiped memories that he was the architect of the heist. Furthermore, he realizes they were never there to rob the bank at all. It was a rescue mission, freeing the Teller’s imprisoned mate that the bank’s owner was using to coerce the Teller into doing her bidding. Clever, intuitive, and compassionate—everything I could want in a Doctor.

 

Facing the Mummy (Series 8, Episode 8 – “Mummy on the Orient Express”)

A great moment from my favorite series 8 episode.  It’s hard for the Doctor to study/defeat the Mummy when it can only be seen by its victims, so he uses a little technological cheat to put himself in the Mummy’s crosshairs. With only 66 seconds to solve the mystery, he puts the pieces together and realizes the truth: the Mummy is the remains of a cybernetically-enhanced soldier from a long-forgotten war, with its tech forcing it to stay in the fight long after it’s over. The Doctor’s “defeat” of the Mummy, at the last second, is to tell it they surrender, which shuts down its programming and finally allows it to rest. I love the compassion of that resolution, and I also love how thrilled the Doctor is to come up against this legendary boogieman; I just adore his enormous grin as he announces, “I’m the Doctor, and I will be your victim this evening!”

 

Decoding the Coordinates (Series 9, Episode 3 – “Under the Lake”)

Two-part brainy-Doctor move here. They need to work out what the “ghosts” on the base are saying, but their words aren’t audible. The Doctor lures them into the Faraday cage where they can’t harm anyone, then records them so Cass can work on reading their lips. Then, once they get the message—“The dark, the sword, the forsaken, the temple”—the Doctor deciphers its meaning. They’re not just words, they’re coordinates, a rather poetic way to pinpoint their location across space. The “ghosts” are a signal, beaming the coordinates out through space, calling who-knows-what to them. A clever idea to discover their message, and plenty of Doctory intuitive leaps of logic to determine what it means.

 

Presenting the Osgood Box (Series 9, Episode 8 – “The Zygon Inversion”)

A radicalized group of Zygons is on the brink of war with humanity. Both sides literally have their hand on the button, but the Doctor has made it a little more difficult than that. The “Osgood box,” a.k.a. the Zygon version of a nuclear football, isn’t one box, it’s two. And inside each box is two buttons: one that will give the pusher all the war and destruction they want, and one that will blow their plans to hell. As Kate Stewart and the rebel Zygon leader Bonnie stand over their respective boxes and try to get the Doctor to tell them which button to press, the Doctor uses the setup to force them to stop and think about war. In a “just engrave Peter Capaldi’s name on the BAFTA right now” marathon speech, the Doctor draws on his own experiences in the Time War to get Kate and Bonnie to reflect on the consequences of what  they’re about to do. The speech is full of gems, but it culminates in the Doctor admitting that he sees the dead every time he closes his eyes, and then this is what he says. “Do you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it? You hold it tight ‘til it burns your hand, and you say this: ‘No one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to feel this pain, not on my watch!’” Mic drop!

 

Freeing the Creature (Series 10, Episode 3 – “Thin Ice”)

Lord Sutcliffe’s family has gotten rich exploiting a mysterious creature they’ve imprisoned in the Thames, and now he plans to orchestrate an explosion during the Frost Fair to feed all the fairgoers to the creature, which will help him maximize his profits. The Doctor pulls the classic move of turning the baddie’s plan against them—he dons a diving suit, steals Sutcliffe’s explosives, and plants them on the creature’s chains under the ice. So, when Sutcliffe tries to blast the ice, he blasts the chains instead, freeing the creature. Bonus points for the Doctor’s discussion with Bill beforehand, wherein he acknowledges the risk in setting the creature free, knowing that it might attack innocent people on the banks. “I don’t know the answers,” he admits. “Only idiots know the answers. But if your future is built on the suffering of that creature, what’s your future worth?”