Autopia

"We will be avenged."

Writer: John Ostrander
Format: Comic Strip
Released: June 2009
Printed in: IDW #3.03

Featuring: Tenth Doctor, Donna

Synopsis

The Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble arrive on the automated utopian planet of Autopia - a planet where robots do all of the manual labour. But things aren't quite what they seem when the Doctor meets Ixtalia, the wondrous and mysterious leader...

Verdict

Autopia was another decent comic strip adventure to continue my reading of the second volume of the Tenth Doctor Archives from IDW! It's a really weird little collection in that Martha is on the cover but she's only featured in the first of the three stories thus far. These standalone stories are jumping around the era of the Tenth Doctor which I'm absolutely fine with and I liked that we got a story with Donna as the companion. I'm very intrigued to see if she will remain for the rest of the stories in the graphic novel. But for this one, I thought Donna was pretty decent and I really liked her relationship with the Doctor, it was very reminiscent of what we saw on screen. The story did a pretty good job at capturing the era of Series 4 and I particularly liked that the Doctor wasn't quite letting on everything he knew about Autopia. Thankfully, Donna was asking all of the right questions and the Doctor did basically give all of the answers. It was certainly helpful to the storytelling. The setting of Autopia was decent but I have to admit, I was slightly disappointed that it had nothing to do with Autons! That was my expectation going in but it was actually just an automated utopia. That concept was really intriguing and worked quite well and I liked how things developed once the Doctor and Donna encountered Ixtalia. She was quite the ruthless leader and her thoughts towards the Automatrons were very heartless. The Doctor was fantastic in exploiting the programming of the Automatrons and when the one Donna dubbed as Sam was ordered to kill them, in a horrific method involving the sun, the Doctor plead to him for their lives and used language wonderfully well. He showed Sam that he had a choice and wouldn't be going against his programming too much. After hours of fiddling, the Doctor actually managed to make Sam a sentient robot, but it turned out he wasn't the first. Ixtalia had been killing off those that were developing sentience ever since the mission the Doctor was curious about had arrived but what followed seemed a little strange as the conclusion. Donna put forward a suggestion that was nothing more than common sense now that all of the robots were sentient and it seemingly ended a revolution and led to peaceful harmony, very quickly and very strangely. Overall, it was still a decent comic strip!

Rating: 7/10