Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious: Defender of the Daleks by Jody Houser, Roberta Ingranata, et al.

 Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious: Defender of the Daleks

Collection published: 2020
Contents published: 2020
Read: February 2022

Story: James Goss

Writer: Jody Houser

Artist: Roberta Ingranata

Colorist: Erica Eren Angiolini

Flatters: Sari Chankhamma, Sabrina Del Gross

Letterer: Richard Starkings

Last year, I worked through all of Big Finish's Time Lord Victorious contributions, along with one novel; with this, I add one more piece to the puzzle, though I am coming to it as a Titan Doctor Who story, not a Time Lord Victorious one. This supposedly picks up from the end of the tenth/thirteenth Doctor story Alternating Current, the recap here telling us that at the end of that story, the tenth Doctor was sucked into a time vortex... only in Alternating Current no such thing actually happened. Oops! There's also a small thirteenth Doctor appearance here that takes place between pages of Alternating Current.

The stories of TLV are sometimes pretty loosely linked; while for the tenth Doctor this takes place some time prior to his TLV appearances and isn't really connected to them, it's a stronger connection for the Daleks. For them, this directly leads into the Big Finish audio drama The Enemy of My Enemy.

What actually happens is, as is so often true of Houser/Ingranata Who comics, not very much. The tenth Doctor is asked for help by the Daleks; he seems to be in a timeline where the Time War never happened. He helps them defeat a pretty bland threat from the "Dark Times." There's some okay back-and-forth between the Doctor and the Dalek Prime Strategist of the Dalek Time Squad (not to be confused with Big Finish's Dalek Time Strategist!), but this is two double-sized issues (clearly, though, originally scripted as four regular-sized one) where it just doesn't feel like that much actually happens. The elements of the story are good, but there was a more interesting tale to be told about the tenth Doctor having to help the species he thought had destroyed his people, and who (he thought) he had destroyed himself! Not as bad as Alternating Current, I guess, but not really up to much.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: Missy: The Master Plan