The Doctor Who Ratings Guide: By Fans, For Fans


Doctor Who Magazine's
Sins of the Fathers

From Doctor Who Magazine #343-345

Script: Scott Grey; Art: John Ross, Adrian Salmon, Roger Langridge


Reviews

A Review by Finn Clark 25/10/04

NO SPOILERS... if DWM 345 hasn't yet come out where you are, don't worry. I don't give anything away about the last episode.

You know, I really enjoyed that. Sins of the Fathers didn't do much for me as monthly episodes, but as a complete 21-page story it's a fun, zippy read.

Firstly, it's drawn by John Ross! I'm a John Ross fan. This colouring job doesn't show him to his best advantage, but it's still dynamic drawing that pulls you through the story and makes the action scenes feel exciting. It may not be detailed and pretty like Dave Gibbons or John Ridgway, but he's perfectly suited to this kind of story. (It's still a shame about the colours, though.)

Plotwise, it's solid without being exceptional. We have clear good guys and bad guys in a distinctive space-age environment (Hippocrates Base). The Zeronites aren't particularly memorable villains, but we're never in doubt about the threat they pose and hey, at least they have prehensile feet. Had this story starred the Doctor and Izzy it would have been pretty boring, but fortunately it's blessed with a far better companion-figure: Destrii.

I think Destrii's great, certainly the best of the 8th Doctor's companions. (If judging on novelistic criteria like depth, realism and verisimilitude then Anji and Fitz are better, but they're also kinda boring. Destrii's so much more fun than them. Junior Cyberleader Kroton should have been a million miles better than anyone, but unfortunately I don't feel the character we saw in The Company of Thieves and The Glorious Dead has the class of the original from the days of the Weekly.) In many ways Destrii is a Leela-like character... sexy, impulsive, violent, in her own way strangely innocent and strong enough to disobey the Doctor and do her own thing without making the readers roll their eyes and write her off as an idiot.

Comparisons with Izzy are particularly interesting. Izzy was one of the Blonde Army, that identikit parade of generic blondes with whom the 8th Doctor was paired as soon as the Who industry got our hands on him. Reacting against the TVM made people self-consciously traditional. Admittedly Izzy was better than Gary Russell's Stacy and the 8DAs' Sam Jones, but one still got the feeling that DWM was using their minimal monthly page count as an excuse for not creating a proper character. Destrii blows that argument out of the water. She's brash, she's distinctive, she's everything a good character should be... and she doesn't mysteriously require any more comic strip pages than usual. I'm almost disappointed that 9th Doctor strips will presumably begin soon, since I'd have liked to see more of Destrii. Maybe she'll still be there (Frobisher-like) for the new Doctor, but I'm not holding my breath.

She's used well here, getting plenty to do and keeping the story alive when it's under seige from technobabble. It helps that she's not technically a companion, of course. She's more of a sparring partner; someone who's caused the Doctor plenty of headaches in the past, but whom he's helping anyway after the trouble she got herself into at the end of Bad Blood (DWM 338-342). Thus she's not constrained by any particular tendencies to do good or obey the Doctor, being more of a semi-redeemed baddie than anything else. I particularly like the relationship between her and the Doctor, which again is more interesting than any other Doctor-companion dynamic we've seen in eight years of McGann books and comics. (I exclude the audios from this comparison simply because I don't buy them.)

At the end of the day, Sins of the Fathers is a story of space monkeys shooting people. Human Nature it ain't. There's not much on Hippocrates Base that we haven't seen a hundred times before, but more importantly this is also the latest story starring the 8th Doctor and Destrii and for that reason is well worth your time.


A Review by Richard Radcliffe 1/7/05

This feels like a retro step back to the seventh Doctor strips. The time when they went all over the place, different writers and artists - and full of dodgy aliens and a story to gloss over. Quite a shock that, after the excellence of the stories from the last few years!

The writer is the same as usual - Scott Gray. He can do better, we know that. Artist is John Ross - and again, he has done better too.

The Doctor and Destrii arrive at Hippocrates Base. Destrii needs some urgent medical attention. Enter Dr Partho, a likeable sort with computer BOB to monitor the station. With holographic nurses, and a collective of aliens out for revenge (see the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica for this idea) - the story develops into a series of explosions and mass chaos on the station.

It's kind of nice to see the TARDIS used to tackle the problem - but I had lost a lot of interest by that time. The psychotic Destrii is probably the best thing about this story - and thankfully it looks like she is stopping with the Doctor.

It's mighty peculiar though. I always associate Destrii with Izzy. With Izzy and Destrii swapping bodies for so long, the two have become joined in my own mind. Thus it really feels like Izzy is still with the Doctor - especially as Destrii loves to culture quote like Izzy. That's fine by me. As the eighth Doctor strip comes to its conclusion, it is Izzy and Destrii which have become as much part of the strip as the eighth Doctor.

Sins of the Fathers is a decent enough revenge tale, but it is one of those comics that get too mired in bizarre aliens that interest me not at all. 6/10