Doctor Who Series 3 Volume 1: The Hypothetical Gentleman (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
This collection contains two Doctor Who stories, which are very different from each other. First is "The Hypothetical Gentleman", a story about a being causing strange goings-on shortly before the opening of the Great Exhibition. It opens with a bizarre and random bit featuring a Nazi time-traveller which seemed randomly shoe-horned in. The story itself is OK but we never get the full truth about what was going on. Doctor Who stories should really have their mysteries solved unless the story demands otherwise (like The Satan Pit two-parter) and here we really should have been given some answers. I really liked the art on this one, it capture a decent likeness of the characters whilst still managing to give the comic book feel. The second story, entitled "The Doctor and the Nurse" is rather different. It's almost a comedy story and is unlike what we'd ever see on the screen. The tension between Rory and the Doctor in the TARDIS is unbearable so Amy demands they get together to bond. Inevitably they try to skip forward in the TARDIS and end up going all across time and space before they make it back, although they certainly do bond. Amy meanwhile gets caught up in a bizarre historical event which involves an agent of the Silence. The story just wouldn't work as an episode but as a comic book I think it does work. It's good fun and still has some great Doctor Who moments in it. The cartoony art-style doesn't worry too much about character likenesses but it fits the story perfectly. Across both the stories I must say that the writers really did a good job at capturing the voices of the characters and putting in some sometimes quite subtle Who references. I also really liked how they dealt with some problems largely ignored in the show itself, like the tension between the Doctor and Rory and the feelings Amy has about losing her daughter. It could have gone very wrong but I think these bits really work here and give us things the TV series just didn't have time for (as far as I can gather these stories are set somewhere in between episodes of Series 6). Not an essential collection by any means but an enjoyable read for those who liked Series 6 of Doctor Who. When my daughter and I got hooked on the Doctor last winter, we had years of TV episodes to catch up on. We’re still not quite there, but caught up enough that the space between episodes feels really long. So when I discovered IDW publishes a monthly DOCTOR WHO comic, I grabbed the first issue for her without hesitation. That was issue #5. We had missed the first 4 issues.Luckily, not long after I started collecting the comics for her--it really was for her, I only just recently, 5 months later, read them myself--I found the collected edition of those missing first 4 issues, DOCTOR WHO: The Hypothetical Gentleman.This was a really good collection, a very Doctor Whovian story, with some really impressive art.The story takes place in London 1851, with Emily and Charles. Emily works as a medium, only she doesn’t really commune with spirits. Instead, she is able to read a person’s past and future and use that information to tell them what they want to hear. Then one day she’s stricken by a presence she thinks is an angel and, using angelic knowledge, drafts plans for a machine that Charles is then able to build. Finding themselves out of money and in danger of winding up on the streets, they sell the machine to a museum, which is where the Doctor and the Ponds come in.The Doctor decides to take Amy and Rory on a trip to see The Great Exhibit at The Crystal Palace. There they discover this mysterious machine is affecting those who come in contact with it, freezing them in time. The Doctor sets out to solve the mystery and discovers it wasn’t an angel giving this information to Emily but an other-dimensional being who is stealing time from people in this dimension in order to cross over. And since the Tardis is one big time-battery, the “hypothetical gentleman” sets his sights on her.This was a very good story and typical Doctor Who, however my one and only problem was it was too short. Originally spanning 4 monthly issues is fine, but when read all at once, it takes less time to get through this story than a typical episode of the TV series, and this compression of story-time shows. It felt at times as if we were skipping over things like character development, plot points and logical revelations in order to make sure we’d reached a satisfactory conclusion by the end of the allotted pages. I know the Doctor is one for making leaps in his thinking to get from point A to point D sometimes, but this was stretching things a bit thin for me.Still, the characterization was on-point for the Doctor and the Ponds, even down to Amy’s frantic scream in the middle of an action sequence. The Doctor’s dialogue didn’t come across as too flippant or jokey, just the right amount of eleventh Doctor in there. Andy Diggle can definitely write a good Doctor Who story.Mark Buckingham provided the art and while I wasn’t sold on the first couple of pages as it felt a little rustic and crude, once the story started moving, Buckingham began to shine. The bottom left panel on page 23 is spot-on Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor.The collection is backed with another story, “The Doctor and the Nurse” by Brandon Seifert with art by Philip Bond and Ilias Kyriazis, originally published in DOCTOR WHO SPECIAL 2012. In this one, Amy decides the Doctor and Rory haven’t had enough bonding time and they need a boys’ night out, so they go to London 1814. She orders them to have a few drinks and get to know each other better while she’s out seeing the sights. The Doctor and Rory, not keen on the idea of having to sit and bond for several hours, decide to jump ahead in time a few hours and meet up with Amy again and bypass the entire bonding thing.But, as usual, things go awry and they wind up in 1940 instead, saving Ian Fleming (who goes on to base James Bond on Rory Williams) during the Blitz before trying again to get back to 1841 and Amy. Meanwhile, Amy spots a very curious sight: a old man wearing an eye drive heading into a brewery moments before the brewery explodes, causing he great beer flood of 1841. The Doctor and Rory are further delayed when the Tardis basically runs out of gas, but eventually everyone reunites just in time.This was another good Doctor story, but I don’t think Seifert has quite the grasp of Eleventh Doctor characterization that Diggle does. The art was also lacking in comparison to Buckingham’s portrayals in the first story. That’s not to say it was bad art, it just didn’t capture the characters quite like the other story. In fact, it looked more like an issue of a DOCTOR WHO: THE ANIMATED SERIES comic, if such a thing existed.All in all, this was a good trade paperback collection and I definitely think it was worth the money. Then again, I could have thought it sucked and as long as my daughter liked it, it was worth the money. However, I did enjoy it and it only made me more eager to read the rest of the monthly issues she had collected. While it’s only a temporary substitute for the Doctor Who TV series, IDW always turns out quality work--what I’ve read of their output, that is--and the Doctor Who comics are no exception. “The Hypothetical Gentleman” is top quality work and is sure to please any Whovian.
What do You think about Doctor Who Series 3 Volume 1: The Hypothetical Gentleman (2013)?
First half: great story, great art. Second half: okay story, not-so-great art.
—Veggieman
Easy to read. Finished it in a day! More enjoyable if you watch the tv show
—devin
This volume is a lot better than some of the others - the artwork too.
—Imani
