There’s a trick to good plotting. You should, if you do it just right, give just enough clues to the tuned-in audience, to allow them to get jussssst a little ahead of your reveal. One of the greatest things about Earthshock, Episode 1, was that it did that – you worked out who the Big Bads were just moments before they were first shown on screen, and then you went a bit nuts for the next week running around going “Oh my god, they’re back! AND I worked it out before they appeared. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I am SuperFan!”
Ahem – just me, then?
The same was true to some extent in Utopia – the clues were there, and if you picked up on them, then right before it became obvious to even the moderately clued-in fan, you knew they’d gone and done it.
It happened again with Dark Water – all the speculation over who Missy was added up just before she spilled her bananas beans.
That’s the territory we’re in here, with Spiral Staircase, Part 2. And yes, it’s that big a Big Bad.
It’s on Page 6 that everybody finally gets what’s going on. Panel 3. But there’s a declaration in Panel 2, and if you haven’t got it already, Superfans (it was cooler than you think – there were capes and everything) will get it there.
From there on in, you know what you’re dealing with. Not, by any stretch who you’re dealing with – that’s the reveal saved for the final panel cliff-hanger – but what you’re dealing with, absolutely.
But before we get there, we have to give credit to Rachael Stott and Leonardo Romero on artwork duties this time out. For those just tuning in, there’s a big black flat triangular obelisk in the skies above New York, like the darkest chunk of Toblerone in history. As it begins to bark out its orders to the ‘primates of Earth,’ Stott and Romero borrow a trick from the TV show, and give us reactions from various viewpoints, all looking at the same thing. Page 4 is one great page full of reaction shots, with a background of what it is they’re reacting to – cops, newscasters, and several key people in the story, all looking up at the speaking slab of darkness in the sky. If you tried to do this on TV, it would look confused, and you’d miss things. Sometimes on screen, even the linear progression of reaction shots looks rushed and overplayed. But Stott and Romero take advantage of the whole-page format of comic-books to really deliver a reaction shot that really gives the sense of scale we’re dealing with here.
Once we know what we’re doing, is the excitement blown?
No more than it was in Power of the Daleks, Day of the Daleks, Death To The Daleks and so on. Knowing what you’re up against, if you’re up against something cool and deadly – as we are here – just allows the writer to ramp up the tension, throw us curve-balls, develop character and take us to unusual, unexpected places, both geographically and dramatically, en route to the inevitable, tingling cliff-hanger. Nick Abadzis is good at this sort of thing, and here he takes the time to really develop the characters of both regular Tardis-traveller Gabby Gonzalez, and more especially her bestie, Cindy Wu, who here comes into her own, tackling the Doctor to the ground when necessary, and providing the hip, flip likeably sarcastic guide to what’s going on, while also revealing what she thinks about her friend, and what she’ll do to anyone who hurts her – it’s enough to almost make us want her to go traveling with the Tenth Doctor herself. Gabby, meanwhile, is handholding the person everyone wants a piece of – faded, but now markedly reinvigorated movie star Dorothy Bell, who’s bonded with a piece of alien kit that the Giant Toblerone In The Sky is looking for. It’s a solid representation of the other side of the companion coin, the caring side that tries to make sure as few people are hurt or frightened as possible, and it’s enough to make us remember what it is the Doctor sees in this daughter of New York that makes her worthy of all of time and space.
There’s conflict and drama, space phenomena to put the Medusa Cascade to shame, the Janitor of the Gods, some great colourful art that shows us a key piece of historical information, and the Doctor, mouth as ever set to 90 words per minute, being massively disrespectful to just about all and sundry before the denouement of this issue, and even though you know what it’ll be, there’s enough entertaining hoop-jumping on the way to make the reveal when it comes something of an ‘Oooooh!’ moment.
The joy about that is that while it’s not exactly a returning villain, it is the product of a very rich backstory that’s been touched on recently in other areas of the Who universe, and which clearly still has much to give. And while the cliff-hanger here is not as gasp-worthy as some of those seen earlier in the Tenth Doctor’s comic-book run, it’s one to make you run around for a bit, pondering all the potential it holds for story development going forward.
Get issue #14 and you can be assured of artistic richness, sumptuous character development, a fun, quirky take on the ride with Cindy, and a new iteration of an old, highly exciting villain. What’s not to love?
Tony Fyler lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the 70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By day, he runs an editing house, largely as an excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book. With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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