Doom’s Day
Doom’s Day
Doctor: First Doctor, Second Doctor, Sixth Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Ninth Doctor, Twelfth Doctor
Companion: Charley Pollard, Brian, Jackie Tyler
The follow up from Time Lord Victorious goes in an unexpected direction featuring a brand new assassin Doom trying desperately to find the First Doctor.
The Review
Doom’s Day had one brutal rollout. The main criticism of Time Lord Victorious was its rollout was confusing, things came out of order (though covid could largely be blamed) and some things like most of the Victorious Days stuff were late adds that were folded in. This time, there are 24 hours to the story and they’re coming out sequentially. The introduction being an extremely low-budget fourth-wall breaking video by Sooz Kemper, the avatar of Doom, was cause for immediate ridicule. Still, I was willing to give it a chance, but it started painfully slow. Fresh off a triumphant achievement in Torchwood, James Goss’ first hour was incredibly underwhelming and more confusing than anything. Then hours 2-5 came in Four Hours From Doom’s Day, a Doctor Who Magazine supplement that rushed through the hours. Seriously, in hour two we don’t even know what Doom’s job was but she chats to River. Oh, did I forget to say: the badly named Doom is an assassin who only has one hour to complete a job lest Death catches up to her. Literal Death.
Things were marginally improved in Hours 6-9 taking place in a Titan comics two issue miniseries called A Doctor in the House? featuring Missy. Missy was in her ‘trying to be the Doctor’ phase and was mainly just getting irritated by Doom getting to do all of the killing. While I’ll never complain with Missy (and even a Twelfth Doctor cameo), the actual overall storyline seemed frustratingly unclear. As well, every Titan Comics EU release and this one have had the exact same writer and art style team, and they’re serviceable but it’s B-quality work. Also, Doom’s actual personality seemed elusive. Hour 10 was AI Am the Doctor, told in slides in a limited time weekend event only in a predatory mobile game called Lost in Time. The first event I didn’t even realize would be limited time and I started a day late, relying on the generosity of someone who uploaded the slides on YouTube. Believe it or not, I don’t hate the limited time events as it made it feel like Doom’s Day was an ongoing saga, but there need to be opportunities if you miss them. In this one Doom supposedly meets the Thirteenth Doctor and K9, but the Doctor turns out to be Kamelion, who K9 saved from Planet of Fire I guess. If the Master survived that story, why not them too.
Thankfully, things picked up with the book Extraction Point, written by MG Harris. Finally, there was space to give some more explanation as to what was going on: somehow Doom’s timeline is collapsing, and she specifically needs to find the First Doctor. The others won’t help her (presumably because they remember being the First Doctor and meeting her again), but will assist in saving the universe. Doom actually gets some much needed characterization, revealing her conflicted thoughts about being an assassin (thinking sometimes it does help society, other times not so much), and that maybe her really talent is being a singer? The book turns out to be a love letter to Series 1 and the Ninth Doctor, with the overarching villains of the Slitheen and checking in on good ‘ol Satellite 5. Hour 14 brings in the Second Doctor (who never meets the Ninth), which comes off as a bit random, but since he’s close to the First does allow Doom to wring some more info out of him. It was a fun book that made Doom into an actual character. Hour 15 was back to mobile game events with Wrong Place at the Right Time being a little vignette about Doom killing a man who will become a martyr inspiring a revolution to overthrow an authoritarian regime. Again, limited time event not necessarily bad, doing it in that game was rough. So many ads for Merge Mansion.
BBC Audio’s contribution was Four From Doom’s Day, four half-hour read stories. The first one united Doom with Ian and Barbara aboard a cruise ship in some Cold War intrigue, which was…fine. The second story was about an ancient Ice Warrior queen which was also perfectly fine. I got some more enjoyment about the return of Time Lord Victorious‘ break-out character: Brian the Ood. Set in San Francisco 1999 but on Halloween this time, hearing Ood dealing with Doom did some to make this feel part of the TLV-verse. The highlight was the final story featuring the Twelfth Doctor called Dark Space with Doom meeting a time-sensitive who has visions of the Doctor constantly stopping their dreams of conquest. This boxset exemplifies the crossover, the stories all work, but with the overall plot still frustratingly a mystery it doesn’t feel like the story is moving in any propulsive direction.
The idea of returning to the delightfully alien and weird galactic council of The Daleks’ Master Plan is a good one, except this story doesn’t entirely do that? (Full disclosure, I had a nasty headache listening to this one). Dawn of an Everlasting Peace is really the story of Doom helping a poor woman in her three year old son who has been aged by taranium into an old man and is trying to expose the conspiracy. Too much of the story is spent dealing with Fynix, the annoying cat-voiced leader of the Sixth Galaxy. On top of that, if I wasn’t super versed in lore, it would be super easy to completely forget that this is supposed to be about the Master Plan. We don’t even get a Mavic Chen or Daleks reference! Additionally because we know the First Doctor saves the day, the best Doom can do is make that woman and her kid’s life better. Also, still frustratingly lacking on Doom related character development.
I was very happy to get to A Date with Destiny, because it meant I could now point to at least one thing that was high quality form this whole adventure. There are two reasons: one, Doom tangles with Destiny, who is also an assassin. We get some more exploration of the culture of assassins, and find that many of them have stupid names, which is all great fun. There was also the ominous hint that maybe Doom’s laconic handler Terri is the true villain, which I actually hadn’t considered. The second is Camille Coduri is somehow even better now as Jackie Tyler as when she was on tv. She perfectly nails the portrayal of someone who isn’t book smart, but is street smart and independent. Having her in this story was a delight. There were a few small references too, Jackie’s neighbor Peggy is mentioned in Army of Ghosts, and a mission Doom turns down is to kill legendary EU character Abslom Daak who made a cameo in Time Heist too. This story actually gave some development to Doom and leaned into the stupid world of the Lesser Order of Oberon. Pleased to say: good job.
The Howling Wolves of Xan-Phear I think runs into the same issue that hurt Dawn of an Everlasting Peace and really this whole arc: we still don’t know enough about Doom. Structuring this crossover around an original character might’ve worked, but we still have very little backstory to Doom and her only motivation for meeting the Doctor is just not go get killed. This story is perfectly fine, we meet a race of wolf people with an insanely powerful howl who have manipulated by the Silence, because they want to be able to literally shut up the Doctor at Trenzalore. The audio design is good, Sooz Kemper’s performance is good, but at this point I’m desperate for some answers and we get zero in the story arc. This story does do some interesting things with the Silence in finding a way to mute them to stop their psychic suggestion, but when Doom wishes the Doctor were hear to save her, we wish for it too. We do get a bit farther (maybe) on the evil Terri plotline. I hope this actually goes somewhere.
The last of the Big Finish quartet is The Crowd, where Doom meets the iconic pairing of the Eighth Doctor and Charley. Again, this raised questions about how much the different writers of Doom’s Day were communicating because Doom is a lot more casually amoral here while the Doctor utterly despises her. The setting in 1170 Canterbury is fun, and the idea of the Crowd, a mysterious group feeding off national tragedy is a good invention for a villain. Still, Doom repeatedly is fine killing tons of people as casual crossfire in her fight, and compared to how generally amiable past Doctors has been, Eight hates her guts. Also, we got no pay-off from the mysterious Terri hint by Destiny, though her and Doom’s relationship is stretched to its limit. While a fun enough listen, there’s only one story left and the idea of ‘why’ is still there. Doom wonders why the Doctor has led her on this day, and honestly, so do we.
The story ends with Out of Time, another short story and thankfully significantly more well-written than the opening chapter. Surprisingly, it’s a relatively satisfying ending: Doom’s dying because she was sent to assassinate her past self. The whole time the First Doctor has been waiting patiently in order to settle the mess, and it turns out the Terri hint was true: she scheduled the assassination of everyone else in the Order of Oberon (except Brian, surely!) after being tired of being disrespected. The Doctor has Doom go back in time and stop her from killing herself, and ‘death’ kills Terri instead.
Ultimately, Doom’s Day suffered from a critical lack of focus: it was often confusing what the plot line was supposed to be and especially the first half often had cheap throwaway stories. As well, the idea of making an assassin the main character was a weird choice for Doctor Who, and I was often confused on how much sympathy we were supposed to have for Doom. I would’ve tried to reveal the mystery about Doom sooner too. Still, being one of five people to follow this story through, I do have some attachment to Doom and would like to see her show up again. The story at least came out in order, but I still think this was just a weird framing narrative to ostensibly celebrate the 60th anniversary. Due to largely negative fan reception (mainly to the cringe fourth-wall breaking inter-story updates, I doubt many people actually read or listened) this might be the last multi-platform story. I hope not, as during the year-long layoff from Doctor Who this kept something in the conversation.
7/10 Ultimately, I can’t go higher than a seven, it was too uneven and often mediocre. The best stories were Dark Space and A Date With Destiny especially for leaning into the very stupid world of time-traveling assassins.
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