Black Powder

"This was the best Bonfire Night ever, arresting Guy Fawkes.

Writer: Joy Wilkinson

Format: Short Story

Released: August-September 2021

Printed in: DWM 568-569

Featuring: Thirteenth Doctor, Yaz

Synopsis

Verdict

Black Powder was a great little adventure to finally give us some long overdue new content for the Thirteenth Doctor within the pages of Doctor Who Magazine! One of the biggest setbacks of the pandemic has been the temporary suspension of the comic strip within the pages of the show's magazine, and even when we were lucky enough for it to come back temporarily with Monstrous Beauty, that was a Ninth Doctor story as part of the Time Lord Victorious epic. Thankfully, we've managed to find a way around the restraints that come with the costs of a comic strip with a brand new text story! It seems an awfully long time since I have blogged a text story, but it was just terrific to get new content from the current era of the show. That does seem to have been lacking, and I'd even argue that the magazine's coverage of the current era could have been a lot more. I do hope that will change going forward as we look forward to Series 13! However, before we get there we seem to have an adventure here set after the events of Revolution of the Daleks given that there was no Graham or Ryan featured. I thought that it was very exciting for an adventure within the pages of DWM to be the most recent chronological story. Joy Wilkinson as writer is a solid choice given that she wrote The Witchfinders as well as its novelisation. She followed her theme in this story by taking the Doctor and Yaz to the past and encountering the Gunpowder Plot and Guy Fawkes! Of course, Doctor Who has tackled this before, notably with The Plotters, but having history go wrong before they'd even arrived was fun. It was a good historical setting and having the whole story from Yaz's perspective was a nice touch and something I don't think has happened in the Thirteenth Doctor era. I don't think we've had enough of Yaz from her first two series so getting an insight to her thoughts here was fantastic. I really enjoyed how she has clearly developed on her travels with the Doctor and she seemed really mature here. Bookending the story with an encounter she experienced when faced with a gun was great and the Doctor emerging at the end to reveal she had passed the test was a nice touch. The entire focus on the first and last gun was intriguing and I really felt for Schwarz with him just wanting to die. His efforts to try and concoct the Gunpowder Plot and make it successful was fantastic. Yaz getting to experience hisory was good and I liked how she still thought it was fun. The cliffhanger was good, but considering Yaz actually did get shot I thought that should have been established at the end. It was quite a shocking way to start the second part though, but the Doctor managing to fix Yaz up was nice. I thought Schwarz's older self being the one to prevent his younger self from altering the timeline and causing chaos was a good way to bring things to a close. I have to say as well, the illustrations that accompanied this adventure were sublime! They really added a lot to the story and were just great to be honest. Overall, a really good and welcomed adventure!

Rating: 8/10