It’s time to cover the fourth and current only other Fourteenth Doctor story released, that being a Doctor Who Magazine strip that ran from post Power of the Daleks right up to the 60th Anniversary specials and indeed “filled in the gap” between those two parts of Doctor Who, complete with a post-regeneration scene. It also ran for a whopping fourteen parts, which honestly was a little too much in retrospect, but at least collected into one Graphic Novel it wasn’t too bad… Let’s take a look!
After The Doctor looks out across the ocean and then heads back into his TARDIS (and looks at his new old hand with a smirk on his face) the ship dematerialises and deposits him at Wembley Stadium in 1966, the day of the World Cup final. A brief walk around the audience and The Doctor finds some aliens in disguise… followed by a full-on Dalek invasion! The Doctor meets a girl named Georgy Gold and attempts to escape with her in the TARDIS but is shot by several Daleks, only for the blasts to have no effect which leads to him eventually discovering that the Daleks are all fakes, and that it’s only him that’s real. The Daleks seemingly destroy Earth to prove a point but despite The Doctor’s initial horror it turns out that’s fake as well and our titular Time Lord is brought to reality by some thugs in armour (leaving the Dalek Supreme to initiate a full scan of his Daleks to “prove The Doctor wrong”). The Doctor is shown to the “Dalek Dome” and given a tour by its head honcho Georgette Gold, the person the copy The Doctor met was based on. The whole facility is a tourist attraction that allows people of all species to “attend” Dalek invasions and watch without any danger.
Before you ask, no The Doctor doesn’t explain how his clothes regenerated with him this time.
As The Doctor explores the facility he finds out that the false realities people visit are sculpted out of “psychoplasm” via actual “dreaming” Dalek mutants kept locked away in tubes behind the scenes. The only issue is that thanks to The Doctor telling the Supreme Dalek that it isn’t real the Dalek mutant responsible for that particular dreamscape has woken up in reality, followed soon by the TARDIS arriving in the Dalek dome and inside is not just Georgy Gold but the Supreme Dalek and two of its minions. The Daleks soon show that their weapons now work in reality by destroying the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver (the 13th Doctor one made from “Sheffield Steel”, so that’s what happened to that if you were wondering!) but thinking its part of a performance the gathered audience start asking to be exterminated for a laugh, much to The Doctor’s panic. Luckily the psychoplasm constructs can’t survive in the real world and soon melt away, but this fact leaves Georgy in an understandable panic so she runs off and teleports into another simulation in order to survive. As The Doctor leaves the Dalek Dome in anger at the whole thing he pushes the TARDIS ahead in time expecting to get a distress call from the Dome after things naturally go wrong but instead is brought to Georgy in the command centre of the Golden Dalek Emperor from the old Century 21 comics.
Now there’s a cliffhanger!
The Golden Emperor and his Daleks are aware of the reality outside and use Georgy and Georgette’s connection to release a “hypno-pulse” to control all of the people in the Dalek Dome so they could construct a special gate that would allow them to permanently exist in the real world. Georgy breaks free and manages to stop the hypo-pulse but is killed for her efforts, much to The Doctor’s distress. The Golden Emperor plans to drain the other 11 false realities in order to power the gate that can make him real just as Georgette and some of her staff arrive to rescue the Doctor, the woman feeling Georgy’s death after they became linked being a good motivator to help him at last. They escape to another one of the realities where The Doctor comes face-to-face with the classic Dalek Emperor from the Second Doctor era…
It’s a pretty crazy story, as you can tell. The art is thankfully good throughout (minus a few Tennant shots that really didn’t look like him here and there…) but I will say that some of the set pieces and cliffhangers reeked of “we have to keep this going for fourteen months, so we’ll go around in circles a few times”.
The Continuity:
What do all those Zones reference? Well, why not look down below!
Obviously the big one is picking up directly from the end of the Thirteenth Doctor’s finale “The Power of the Doctor”.
Beyond that though there’s a lot of Dalek stuff to talk about! Specifically a lot of the false reality zones are based off of prior stories: The “Earth Invasion Zone” is presumably a reference to First Doctor story “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (although it’s far from the only Dalek Earth invasion!), the “Vulcan Factory Zone” is based off of Second Doctor debut story “The Power of the Daleks”, the “Skaro Civil War Zone” is based off of Second Doctor TV story “The Evil of the Daleks” complete with immobile Dalek Emperor seen in the comic itself, the “Jungles of Spiridon Zone” is a reference to Third Doctor TV story “Planet of the Daleks”, and the “Death Wheel Zone” is a reference to the Seventh Doctor comic “Nemesis of the Daleks”. The “Zeg Duel Zone” is the main one visited, and is as mentioned based off of the old “Century 21” Dalek comic strips that I’ve seen plenty of bits but never had the chance to actually read.
This is the third time The Doctor has appeared at the 66 World Cup (well, not that he was at the real one in this story…) as his Ninth’s self appeared there in the comic “The Love Invasion”, while his Eleventh self appeared there also in a comic called “They Think It’s All Over”.
Overall Thoughts:
There’s something very … off about The Doctor’s face here but I can’t quite describe it what it is…
“Liberation of the Daleks” is a fun tale and a far better celebration of Dalek lore than we got with “Asylum of the Daleks” on TV in the past. That being said it does run on long with a lot of chapters just being complete non-events in the grand scheme of things, 14 issues was definitely too ambitious. Still though, it was a fun continuity-fest and currently one of only four Fourteenth Doctor stories, so I’m sure I’ll read it again down the line…
The Doctor, with help from Georgette and her staff, link the classic Dalek Emperor with Dalek Emperors and higher ups from the other zones and tries to get them to ally with each other against the Golden Emperor but all they do instead is call each other false Gods and such. As the Golden Emperor’s fleet arrives in reality the older style Emperor creates an army of Dalek drones from all the other zones and a Dalek war breaks out, leaving The Doctor free to build a new screwdriver and head back to his TARDIS. The Golden Emperor attempts to send a rocket to the real Earth through the portal but thanks to his new screwdriver The Doctor redirects it to instead destroy the gate and therefore reduce all the pyschoplasm Daleks to nothing.
I’d love to know why the Century 21 artists thought having a Dalek with an immense round dome would be a good design idea…
The Golden Emperor destroys the new screwdriver (that was fast!) and demands to be let into the TARDIS in order to survive but its dome is too wide to fit in the door, and he soon melts along with his reality. The Doctor arrives back in what’s left of the dome and as Georgette asks if she has to destroy the last few imprisoned Dalek mutants The Doctor coldly walks away as she cries to his assistance, returning to the TARDIS and heading off for adventures new.
Hogan Reviews 