Somehow the artist has managed to capture exactly how I think Matt Smith would differentiate the role.
Loved the stuff with the two warring species (and the reveal that one lot are hamsters inside space suits) was great fun. Not sure about the weird focus on Jones gaining weight though.
The bit with Alice’s Mum and how she realised it was a trick and the whole Talent Scout stuff was great.
I am struggling to get a handle on Jones though. The dressing as a David Bowie tribute act is all a bit odd but I quite like the dynamic in the crew and Alice is awesome so I can live with it.
I thought the final part didn’t live up to the promise of the middle sections but overall, I’m really enjoying these. And I must have read these once before but didn’t remember 90% of these issues.
Well this was better - back to a normal story and picking up Alice’s story again. I still don’t know why this was a “single episode” story though since it appears to actually be Part 1 of a longer story. Some interesting ideas here - how did Jones get overweight so quickly, what has eating the alien food done to him - and the unexpected cliffhanger with Alice’s mother came completely out of the blue! I’m guessing she is actually a shapeshifter, but how did they get into the alien spaceship - wouldn’t Alice have questioned that?
I really enjoyed this one. Although the speed with which Alice found what she was looking for in the Library was incredibly unrealistic, I loved the way she figured out that her “mother” was an impostor and how this was then the direct cause of her surviving the trip through the gateway. I was also intrigued by the developing symbiosis of Jones & ARC first signposted much earlier.
Looking forward to the next issue now that the Talent Scout has been unmasked.
Once again this one was all set-up and no payoff (yet). This single-episode thing really isn’t working for me. This and the previous story are clearly two-parters and I would rather have rated them as such.
Having said that, I did enjoy the issue and am intrigued to see where this is going. (What did the Doctor want?)
This left me a bit disappointed TBH. It had its good bits - for example I really liked the way Alice saving the day herself turned out to be “Plan Two” and the fact that all the innocent people got rescued and rehomed - but I found it a bit confusing - why couldn’t Jones see the holographic Doctor? How was ARC suddenly OK again at the end? And we still don’t know what it was that the Doctor wanted so badly that enabled the Talent Scout to trap him. I’m guessing this may not be the final end of the story as we still have another 5 issues to go though.
I liked space in dimension relative and time, it’s a really cool concept, and one that I don’t think would have worked in any other medium.
I liked the idea of the eternal dogfight/the infinite astronaut too, but the execution felt a bit odd at times.
With rise and fall/the other doctor, I like the characters, Alice especially is super cool, and I’d like to examine a bit more what ARC is but I’m just not a fan of the talent coach or the corporation as villains so these fall a bit flat for me.
