The year-long chase is reaching its final straight! Amidst a terrible paradox, Alice Obiefune has returned to the TARDIS after her harrowing experience in the Time War! Armed with revelations from that conflict, but challenged by resistance within his own ranks, the Doctor faces his most difficult hour yet as he battles to clear his name! Having plunged into the depths of darkness in his quest for the truth, can he re-emerge triumphant? Will he even live to tell his tale…?

I hope you’ve been paying attention for the past year or so, because this issue takes us right back to where this arc began in issue #2.1 – back to the Palliative Ark of the Overcaste, where Psychic Moderators strive to keep the terrifying Malignant at bay, where the survivors of its previous attacks wait to pass judgement on the Doctor for his crime and unleash the Temporal Agoniser upon him, where a judge with a busted nose once swore that “Bengeance shab be ours, Doctub!” All of these things have a part to play in a scheme that has a horrifying sense of the inevitable to it.

There are some particularly gruesome depictions from Simon Fraser in this issue. There’s what happens to Abslom Daak, for a start, in a continuation of last time’s jaw-dropping cliffhanger. There’s what happens to the long-suffering Overcaste. But most of all, there are the hideous contortions of the Volatix Cabal sleeper agent, as various very recognisable Dalek appendages poke sickeningly out of her mouth, eye sockets, nose, and other parts of her body.

Things are looking truly god-awful for the surviving TARDIS crew, the Overcaste, and the rest of the universe as this storyline speeds, like a runaway train, inexorably towards its end.

9

Richard McGinlay