A Review by Finn Clark 25/9/04
Might this be the most unlikely Doctor Who comic story DWM ever printed? It's not a side-step into surrealism like Voyager, Salad Daze or The Fangs of Time, but at least those have identifiable roots in the greater corpus of Doctor Who. However if you showed Peter Davison's TV stories to a hundred writers in 1983 and asked them to script a sixteen-page comic strip for a national TV tie-in magazine, I wouldn't expect even one of them to come up with Lunar Lagoon.
Specifically it has no robots, no ray guns and no villain to defeat. Despite a few crowd-pleasing trimmings, it's simply about the relationship between two men.
Admittedly it has enough whizz-bang to keep action fans happy. It's set in World War Two, with an added temporal twist that the Doctor thinks it's 1983 and so the war shouldn't be happening. (This has nothing to do with anything else we see and wouldn't be explained or resolved for another few months in 4-Dimensional Vistas.) World War Two has been visited over and over in Doctor Who, but this feels fresh since it's the Pacific arena. Offhand I can't think of another example of that. It's not British versus Germans, but Japanese versus Americans.
So we have airborne dogfights and the TARDIS getting bombed. That's all decoration. Irrelevant.
Lunar Lagoon is about the 5th Doctor and his relationship with Fuji, a simple fisherman from Okinawa. Fuji is currently a soldier in the Japanese army, though not a very good one. He finds the Doctor fishing and takes him prisoner, but the Doctor talks him around. (That's something the 5th Doctor got very good at... of all Steve Parkhouse's "more Davison than Davison" comic strips, this might be the best example.) They never quite trust each other, but they find themselves helping each other anyway. And apart from the ending (which I wouldn't dream of spoiling) that's the whole story!
Despite famous exceptions like The Tides of Time, I'd suggest that when DWM goes through a phase of publishing very long stories (Davison, McGann) it's the shorter fill-ins that tend to be more successful. Lunar Lagoon and The Moderator are two tales that I probably won't ever get out of my head. Admittedly I was young and impressionable when I first read them in the early eighties, but rereading them today hasn't reduced their power at all.
Mick Austin's art is perfect. His pencilling isn't anything special, but his inking is to die for. The atmosphere he creates... beautiful. Even Dave Gibbons or John Ridgway couldn't have created a more luscious Pacific island for the Doctor to be stuck on. Thinking about it, I suspect that Steve Parkhouse wrote his Doctor Who comic strips to suit his various artists' strengths. Look at how he unceremoniously dumped the Dogbolter arc upon seeing what John Ridgway did with The Shape-Shifter, instead returning to 'flights of fantasy' territory with Voyager. Both Lunar Lagoon and 4-Dimensional Vistas are perfect showcases for Mick Austin's artwork.
It's often said that John Ridgway's Colin Baker comic strips were better than their corresponding TV stories, but stories like Lunar Lagoon are a huge part of what defines Davison's Doctor for me. Understated tragedy. Sympathy for the enemy. A beautiful equatorial island. Oh, and the Doctor only came here in the first place because he wanted to go fishing in the sun...
But what's with the title? Lunar? What's so lunar about it, eh? And now I think about it, that's not a bloody lagoon, either...