The Fallen

"They all drown within me."

Writer: Scott Gray

Format: Comic Strip

Released: December 1998 - March 1999

Printed in: DWM 273-276

Featuring: Eighth Doctor, Izzy, Grace

Synopsis

The Doctor is reunited with Grace Holloway, but soon finds out that her career has taken her and her colleagues down a dark path, and a dangerous one... though the results of their experiments may not be the most deadly thing in the area...

Verdict

The Fallen was a decent comic strip adventure to continue my reading of The Glorious Dead graphic novel! This was actually the first time I felt like I was doing a proper story within the collection after all of the one-part comics that have preceded it in release order of course, so it was really nice to have a fleshed out adventure of more than eight pages or so and to actually have cliffhangers too! It was a solid story and I didn't think that there was anything particular wrong with the adventure, it didn't fully grasp my attention for the four parts to a level where I would say it was great. It was very much good though and a lot of that had to do with the ending of part one and the surprise cliffhanger of Grace's return! I had no idea whatsoever that she would be in this story so that came as a great surprise to me and would have been as if I was reading back in the late 1990s! I thought the idea of bringing her back after all that went on between her and the Doctor in The TV Movie was excellent and I wasn't expecting the relationship that was presented in the comic strip here. She had moved on a lot since that fateful New Year's Eve night in San Francisco and with us now being in 2001, Grace had arrived in England and was working for MI6 that was headed by the mysterious Leighton Woodrow. His relationship with Grace was intriguing, but it was her past with Stark as the doctor that really interested me. The continuation from her first televised appeared was good and I liked how she still had some of the Master's DNA on her, except that by this point he was far from being a Time Lord so her efforts to hold back death and bring regeneration to the human race was quite something! The Doctor was appalled and really went to town on her which I didn't see coming. It seemed a little uncharacteristic for the eighth incarnation to react to Grace in that way, but the fact it caught me off guard quite excited me. The fact that Stark was an egomaniac was presented quite amusingly and I found it to almost be in mock fashion over Doctor Who villains of the past with the Doctor realising that his personality meant he knew exactly what splicing DNA with the Morphant meant. That being a creature from Skaro was good, but I wasn't a massive fan of what it resulted in with the fluid and liquefied state of Stark. His appearance opting to be a wave just felt weird and whilst that was a fun advantage of the comic strip format, it just didn't quite have a factor of seriousness associated with it for me. It was humorous though! I thought Izzy was left behind a little in the story which wasn't a huge surprise given the appearance of Grace, but I did love her comment at the end by the TARDIS where she referred to herself as the kid while the Doctor was off kissing his girlfriend. For the companion to have her life flashed before her eyes at some point, it really is something that she felt like such a minor character. The resolution with her thoughts of the Doctor saving her didn't work well for me either. I thought the ending was really intriguing and a great way to keep readers coming back as we apparently have the use of a tissue compression eliminator which could only mean one thing! And in a brand new incarnation. Well, that is awfully exciting and definitely ended the comic strip story on a high. Overall, a good read!

Rating: 7/10