Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #8 - Titan Comics

DOCTOR WHO: THE THIRTEENTH DOCTOR No. 8, June 2019

“Having already tracked the Stilean Flesh Eaters throughout time”, and incomprehensibly then left them to feast upon the human blood of the vulnerable for generations to come, Jody Houser’s snooze-fest of a script for Issue Eight of “Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor” must have come as a great relief to this title’s slowly-dwindling 5,252 strong audience, by finally bringing her humdrum “Hidden Human History” multi-part narrative to a most welcome end. In fact, it is arguably hard to recollect a more soullessly mundane conclusion to a comic book serial than this particular twenty-two page periodical, whose most dynamically-charged, action-packed highlight simply consists of the Gallifreyan and her time-travelling friends sat drinking tea with the aged Bethany Brunwine in the aged alien’s quaint little modern-day house; “I was very young when I met you. Young and foolish. But I was the oldest who survived when my people crashed on this planet.” 

Surprisingly however, the “Cupcake POW!” web-comic creator does at least somehow manage to imbue this publication with a brief element of intrigue at its very start, courtesy of Roberta Ingranata pencilling a disturbingly dark funeral scene set in Nineteenth Century Canada after the Battle of Ridgeway. But whilst this solemn ceremony is brimming with all the mysterious menace a reader might expect regarding the death of a war veteran who “stood with the Welland Field Battery against impossible odds” only to be suspiciously “taken by fever so soon after”, the smirkingly-smug Doctor’s utter apathy to the dead soldier’s demise, and his very recent attack from the band of forever-hungry extra-terrestrials, quickly rids this sequence of any lasting menace.

Indeed, the “confident explorer” is seemingly portrayed as being a big admirer of the insatiable horrors skulking in Mankind’s shadow so as to feast upon the dangerously sick, and even jokes with the TARDIS crew that due to the monsters’ ability over the centuries to change their physiology to something more humanoid in looks, their “great, great grandchildren might have a Stilean classmate or two in school.” This complete disregard to the fact that the ghoulish creatures have infiltrated society simply to bite and drink the blood of their victims makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, especially when the fizzing” Time Lord could have repeatedly put an end to their salacious shenanigans, and debatably soon reaches the point where “the first woman to play the character in the series” is utterly unrecognisably unheroic in the role.

The regular cover art of "DOCTOR WHO: THE THIRTEENTH DOCTOR" No. 8 by Giorgia Sposito & Adele Matera