Silent Night

"A happy Christmas to all of you at home."

Writer: Tony Lee
Format: Comic Strip
Released: December 2011
Printed in: DW11 #12

Featuring: Eleventh Doctor

Synopsis

Landing in a snowy landscape, the Doctor meets Santa himself, battles robot Santas, rides a sleigh through the skies of planet Earth and accompanies Santa as he travels the world delivering gifts. But not by sleigh - by TARDIS.

Verdict

Silent Night was a pretty awful comic strip story, I'm afraid to say. It was honestly just full of nothingness and sadly goes down as one of the very worst things I have ever blogged, from any format. It's such a big shame that this is the case as the Eleventh Doctor's run in the IDW comics thus far has been pretty fantastic but it seems that this adventure became victim of the lame Holiday special and just wasn't very good. The whole thing was just a pun on the story's title and it was a whole story featuring no dialogue. That just can't work in comic strip format, can it? I mean, it has been done before with Onomatopoeia but that wasn't literally 22 pages of just artwork. Thankfully, this story did have one line of dialogue at the end to allow me to actually have an opening quote for the blog entry but it was a forced reference to The Feast of Steven from The Daleks' Master Plan with the Eleventh Doctor breaking the fourth wall in a similar way to that of the First Doctor back in the 1960s. The one major talking point for me of this comic strip was the return of the Roboform Santas but without any dialogue, we didn't really know their purpose or who might be controlling them. The Doctor met Santa some time before Last Christmas which was somewhat intriguing but again, the lack of dialogue made things very difficult. I'm struggling to think of things to mention here because there wasn't much of a story without words! We saw the Doctor and Santa delivering presents via the TARDIS which was actually okay because the time travel element could be utilised to actually give Santa the ability to visit every child on the same night - but there was no bloody dialogue to discuss this! I just can't comprehend how a story can be told without any words. There's an appreciation of the difficulty of putting together a (barely) comprehendible story. I did quite like the image of the Doctor and Santa in the sleigh and I have no doubt that would have appealed to a younger audience, but surely even they would have found a whole adventure without dialogue just boring? I really don't think it was worth the clever play on words for the title and it just didn't work at all for me. The ending was even a bit random with the Doctor receiving a sonic screwdriver as a present, but surely he'd have an abundance of them given their link with the TARDIS that we saw in The Eleventh Hour? It was a bit of a shambles. The moment the Doctor crossed out Pond and replaced it with Williams on Amy and Rory's joint gift was nice but these comics have shown complete affirmation that the Doctor insists they be called Pond! Ugh. It was a mess. Overall, not good. Not good at all.

Rating: 3/10