The Soul Garden Part 3

"We are the Haluu! We were grown to serve the great Sythorr!".

Writer: Scott Gray
Format: Comic Strip
Released: 29th June 2017
Printed in: DWM 514

Featuring: Twelfth Doctor, Bill

Synopsis

The great Sythorr, ruler of the Haluu, has arisen once again and he means to spread destruction and chaos across the cosmos! He plans to spread the seeds that make him across numerous planets and reform and take what he wants. But can the Doctor and Bill, despite the latter's position in the Dreamspace, stop him in time?

Verdict

The Soul Garden concluded in a pretty good way and has served as a decent beginning to Bill's comic strip adventures! I'm not sure how much longer they will last given the events of last week's World Enough and Time but I imagine Christmas will be the last we see of her in Doctor Who Magazine. Speaking of the magazine, this looks set to be a fantastic issue and I must say that the cover is simply splendid! We got a brief flash of seeing both incarnations of the Master on screen at the conclusion of last week but this week's finale looks set to be something very special indeed! Not only will we have both Missy and the Master, but we're also going to have a number of designs of Cybermen. I am very excited for The Doctor Falls and I can't wait to read the preview in this month's issue. The interviews with Michelle Gomez and John Simm should be brilliant and I'm very intrigued to see what they have to say about working together on screen and the idea of two Masters showing up together. I've barely read anything other than the Letter from the Editor column but I must say that in itself has got me very excited for the future of the show as Tom seemed to think there was a chance we'd know the identity of the Thirteenth Doctor by now. That surely means that the arrival is imminent which is very good news. I think it's right to wait until the end of the series though before we take our focus off of Peter Capaldi. He's going to go out with a bang and I'm very excited to see it. The confirmation from DWM that the regeneration scene at the start of the episode last week was the actual regeneration was quite a shock I must say but it's just got me asking questions! I'm looking forward to reading Steven Moffat's column this month that's for sure. A Mark Gatiss interview will also be a good read following the broadcast of the excellent Empress of Mars. I don't usually read the Fact of Fiction but the fact that it's The Keeper of Traken may change my mind as that was my first Classic story and one of my all time favourites. I'm always looking forward to reading Galaxy Forum to see what fans made of the recent episodes and a more constructive review in the DWM Review should also prove to be a good read. The Coming Soon section also gets me excited and it seems we have another great issue on our hands here! Anyway, back to the comic strip story itself and despite the adventure as a whole scoring highly and being a good one, I thought this was actually the weakest of the three parts that made up the story. I'm not sure what it was but as I took a break between rereading each part, I just felt this was a little bit of a rushed conclusion which seemed unnecessary. I had expected this story to score a mark higher and whilst what I've given it is still excellent, I kind of hoped for a better ending! Bill didn't really do much which was a shame and we never really knew what the Doctor was doing but I did like how he just wanted to get on with saving the day and have people trust him. The revelation that Oksanna was actually Lady Tokashi's mother was a big shock and it injected the story with some needed emotion. The climax was pacy and I liked how Samuel Taylor Coleridge played a part in solving things. The Doctor's dismissal of Sythorr's warning at the conclusion of the story was interesting and the prospect of the unknown soldier stirring seems like we have a story arc of some sort which has been missing from the Twelfth Doctor's comic run so I look forward to seeing this pan out. Overall though, a very decent comic strip debut for Bill as companion!

Rating: 8/10