Fountains finished where Dorothy becomes young again. You’re in Spiral now.
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Oh right! How are we supposed to know these things?!
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Index?
The Fountains of Forever / Spiral Staircase / Sins of the Father is the full title of the arc. It’s a monthly comic thing. I read them as single issues, so I had a leg up.
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Tenth Doctor #11-#12 - Fountains Of Forever
I was glad to see that they picked up on the way Gabby hadn’t checked back in with Cindy (which I had previously regarded as a negative in Echoes since she was obviously in trouble when the phonecall got cut off.)
The degeneration was an unexpected surprise at the end of Part One, but then they didn’t actually bother to do anything with it! Was this the inspiration for Once & Future I wonder!
All in all though, as has already been said above, it is not a complete “story” - more like episode 1 of a Nu-Who multi-parter, so hard to rate individually. I did enjoy it but have to rate it down for that reason.
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This is probably why I didn’t realise I had finished this story and was already reading Spiral Staircase!
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Yup, the collected edition doesn’t make it very clear where one story ends and the next one begins. It doesn’t help that it’s all one big story anyway, and it’s just been given three separate titles (as if they were three separate “episodes” of the TV show, forming one complete story). I also had to look up online where each new story begins.
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With a mind to spoilers (although I’m not too fussed), where does Spiral Staircase end?
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It ends with Cindy and 10 stepping out of the TARDIS and big character showing up
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I found this story arc kind of meh, personally. I found “The Weeping Angels of Mons” to be a better story. For me, the comic books are harder to enjoy than the audio dramas. I don’t really know why.
I liked “Laundro-Room of Doom” because I find doing laundry difficult, and it made me happy to think about how the Doctor would do his laundry.
I found some of the individual elements of the main story interesting, but for whatever reason, they didn’t seem to blend together in a memorable way. I liked the auction room, and I thought that the fusion between the movie star and the artificial intelligence was facinating. I wish it could have been explored in more detail. Perhaps the story was trying to do too many things at once, and would have been better focusing on one or two elements.
Coincidentally I had watched Pyramids of Mars recently,
without knowing that it was heavily referenced in this book. While small allusions to the story made me smile, the fact that the grand finale was based on that serial just made me think about how much better that story was.
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Tenth Doctor #13-#14 - Spiral Staircase
Well that was exciting! Great to see that Dorothy became benevolent and not a monster. Cleo is becoming an interesting character - even if she is part of the cult, she definitely has a mind of her own.
Cindy finally gets to understand what is going on & travel in the TARDIS.
And as for the shock reveal at the end - wow!
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Finished this last week and was a bit underwhelmed by the second half. There’s a fair amount of just standing around talking about things. I love the Osirian lore in Doctor Who and I did enjoy its inclusion here but overall this seemed to be a very long story where not a lot actually happened.
I’m also not a fan of Cindy at all.
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Yeah, Cindy is rather abrasive in this arc.
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Tenth Doctor #15 - Sins Of The Father
Well I really enjoyed this one. The Osirians were fleshed out much more than in the TV series and there was plenty of high-stakes tension throughout - though I wish it had been Erik who got killed rather than the inoffensive Hanif.
The shock ending totally blew the rug from under me though - poor Dorothy! I’m assuming there will be a sequel at some point? (I genuinely don’t know, as I am completely new to these comics.)
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Laundro-Room of Doom: 8/10 - This story is pretty simple due to its short length but this doesn’t harm it much. I like the silly premise and Gabby and the Doctor are both pretty good here. I also like seeing a lot more of the Tardis which we don’t see much on Tv.
Fountains of Forever/Spiral Staircase/Sins of the Father: 7/10 - This story started out pretty great with a really intriguing cast of characters like Dorothy and Cleo. The story was consistantly interesting but once Anubis comes into the picture, I was a bit confused because I have never watched Pyramids of Mars. This led me to be slightly bored during the latter part of the story which is unfortunate. Cindy was actually pretty good in this story and I like how she is thrown straight into the wildness of the world of the Doctor.
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There, finally finished this one. Reading the PDF from that Humble Bundle on my laptop, so read about half and then never got back to it. This was a lot of fun. Bringing Cindy on board the TARDIS, introducing the Osiran/Anubis arc that will extend into the next year, a big bombastic RTD-style season finale that leaves a lot of threads for the next season. This was a lot of fun. And, even knowing what comes next, I can’t wait for more. Plus, the art is really good and enjoyable too.
Then there’s the Laundro-Room of Doom, which is just a fun little story that doesn’t really have much to it, but is a nice light-hearted little piece before the big season finale.
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Fun to see a bit of normal life in the TARDIS in laundro-room of doom.
The other stories were very cool, I liked seeing a bit of Gabby and Cindy interacting, and how it looks for outsiders when someone starts traveling with the doctor. Very cool to see more of the osirans, especially with having seen sutekh recently in empire of death, and also having watched pyramids of Mars last week or so.
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Silly me thought for the whole 100 pages that he was reading The Fountains of Forever. Agree that it’s a bit ridiculous to have them split up. It’s just one story, so I’ll talk about it like that.
The art throughout is consistently really good, until somewhere around the 70-80 page mark where I personally found a very noticeable drop in quality. I thought the artists had gotten tired or something, but no, it was just an entirely someone else apparently. But all the differing styles blend well enough together thanks to the colouring, which was a lot steadier.
Same as with the drawings, I also think the story is better at the beginning. Once it gets around that 80 page mark it starts going very downhill for me. Especially what’s apparently the “Sins of the Father” part, is just a repeat of the same kind of story beat again and again. And the beats are fueled by set up character motivations, so like, they make sense. I can see the fun in after following this nonsense for a long time, finally getting the payoff of these bozos their emotional journeys, but also; ‘If i go in here it will be fine’ ‘No it won’t’ ‘Yes it will’ ‘No it won’t’ ‘Yes it will’ PLEASE STOP GOSH. How long can you sustain your story with characters discussing by using the exact same argument again and again.
Like it honestly really reads to me like stretching the page count. Especially because the entirety of the setup is absolutely stellar. I was thinking 10/10 material. My mind was going: ‘holy shit holy shit Nick Abadzis is the greatest writer ever’, for a loooot of pages, and then it slowly dies down until there’s only corporate wishes to sell more issues left.
But I’ll write what I like about it all in another trademark long winded review. Until then y’all can have this one about the FCBD thingy that was also there. Review of Laundro-Room of Doom by Owen · TARDIS Guide
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