The Twelfth Doctor: Hyperion

I'm of two minds about Titan's Twelfth Doctor ongoing. I find the plots very uninteresting. Evil fire monsters who are ancient enemies of the Time Lords invade the Earth, blah blah blah. It's Doctor Who at its most generic, which is a shame, because on screen, the Peter Capaldi era was Doctor Who at some of its most inventive and clever. In his three seasons, we only got three alien invasion stories by my count, and all of them (the 2014 Missy/Cyberman two-parter, the 2015 Zygon two-parter, and the 2017 Monks trilogy) did really interesting and clever stuff with the concept, and mostly used alien invasions as a way of exploring other issues: mortality, xenophobia, compliance and resistance. The Hyperion storyline does nothing like that; these are just stompy alien fire monsters who want to burn down the Earth and drain the sun, and the human guest characters are about as complex as a bad drawing. Plus there's this really clunky bit where the Doctor leaves in the middle of a crisis to get the stuff he needs to defeat the aliens from other times and places, which I think creates more problems than it solves.

But writer Robbie Morrison really gets the voices of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor and Jenna Coleman as Clara. I can imagine Capaldi saying these lines, and can hear how he would balance warmth and coldness in that way only he can do. So even if the experience of reading the overall story was meh, the experience of reading any individual page was usually pretty enjoyable, so long as the Doctor was on it. (On the other hand, George Mann, who pens a single-issue story about Victorian vampires, writes a pretty generic Doctor.) So far the best this series has been is the Las Vegas story in vol 2, which was fun and inventive just like the twelfth Doctor's era on screen. If Morrison can do more stuff like that and less stuff like this, he can do something really interesting, I reckon. I hope so.

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In Volume 3 of the Twelfth Doctor’s comic adventures we get two stories: travelling to 1845 Derbyshire in “Unearthly Things” and travelling to the nearish future in “The Hyperion Empire”. Of the two, the Hyperion story has more to it: the Hyperion empire is a race of sentient suns that suck stars dry and doom the planets orbiting these stars to cold and starvation. This story features UNIT, a hilarious Chris Hadfield reference, and some possibly gratuitous art of a female Hyperion “fusion angel”. The historical story is one of these “meet famous people” ones that I am a sucker for. I figured out pretty quickly who the mystery famous person was, but it was still a good story.

Of these two stories, the storyline was stronger in the second, but the art was better in the first (Twelve looked more recognizably like Peter). I continue to enjoy the Twelfth Doctor’s adventures in comic book form, especially when Robbie Morrison is writing them. He gets Twelve so well. ( )