Herald of Madness Part 5

"The ends always justify the means."

Writer: Scott Gray
Format: Comic Strip
Released: 30th May 2019
Printed in: DWM 539

Featuring: Thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Ryan, Graham

Synopsis

Castle Houska is revealed as an entry point into reality for the Children of Chaos. Dagmar has been trying to prevent this from happening, but her failure to reveal her true intentions caused the Doctor to go against her. Danger is everywhere, and the consequences could be fatal...

Verdict

Herald of Madness concluded in a pretty decent way, but I'll get onto that roughly halfway down! Now, this looks set to be a terrific little issue of Doctor Who Magazine and whilst I'm a fortnight late from release date, I'm actually not behind anymore! I managed to catch up on the flights to and from Budapest and this one has a quite wonderful cover. I'm slightly irked that as a subscriber we did not get the option of the deluxe edition for a little extra cost as it looked quite splendid but I'm grateful to have obtained the free download of Tales From New Earth that was a bonus in that edition, so I look forward to that! Jodie Whittaker being the guest this month for the Out of the TARDIS feature should be splendid as it is a delightful feature and I'm sure she'll be on hand with some characteristically whacky answers. David Tennant getting interviewed is always welcomed too and I'm very excited to read what he has to say about Jodie's Doctor and the recent series, as well as hopefully some thoughts on the upcoming third volume of the Tenth Doctor Adventures audios. It should be a great read. Malorie Blackman should also be a good subject for interview following Rosa and I'm also very intrigued to read the continuation of the Eric Saward interview as I thought the first instalment was excellent! I'm also excited to see the results of the DWM Survey and see how far the common opinion differs from my own. I always enjoy some poll results! The Time Team this month also sounds very interesting with the title of 'Is Doctor Who a Kids' Show?' so I look forward to see what is actually being watched there. The Long Game being the subject of The Fact of Fiction will also be a highlight as that's a very underrated episode in my opinion. Now, onto the comic strip and I can't help but feel slightly underwhelmed. After four parts of build up, everything seemed so sudden and rushed in just one part of eight pages. It was exciting but didn't seem like a worthy pay off, especially as I had just re-read the previous four parts. One big positive though was the characterisation of the Doctor with the likeness of Jodie Whittaker really well captured. I thought the relationship between the Doctor and Dagmar was good but it could have been explored further with another part. The cliffhanger revealing that Dagmar was actually trying to prevent the Children of Chaos from manifesting in this universe was nice but could have been so much better if this had another part. At five parts in length, one more was hardly going to worsen things! It was quite a contrasting part to what came previously with the shift in who we thought was the enemy but the only saving grace was the impending notion that they would cross paths again. The group joined forces, along with the meeting of the minds, to lure the chaos entity likened to the Doctor back into the castle and down into the hole which was then sealed with a sacrifice from Tycho, but the Doctor was quite displeased with the actions which seemed actually quite contradictory. Overall though, across the five parts, this was a very decent comic strip but it just needed a better balance.

Rating: 7/10