Doctor Who: Doom’s Day Hours 2-5 Disappoint; A Look at Sooz Kempner

Posted in: BBC, Comics, Doctor Who, Review, TV | Tagged: Audio Drama, bbc, big finish, doctor who, doctor who magazine, Doctor Who: Doom’s Day, russell t davies, Sooz Kempner

Doctor Who: Doom’s Day Hours 2-5 suffer from a less-than-impressive story & art; a look back at some of Sooz Kempner’s comedy highlights.

Doctor Who: Doom’s Day is a cross-media event that’s supposed to tide us over while we wait for the 60th-anniversary specials to hit television in November. The story follows a brand-new character named Doom, a time-traveling assassin-for-hire who has twenty-four hours to find The Doctor helping, who’ll be able to help her avoid dying at the end of that day. To do that, she has to take new jobs that give her an excuse to hop across Space and Time to locations where the Doctor might be.

The second chapter of Doctor Who: Doom’s Day covers Hours Two to Five of Doom’s hunt for the Doctor in the form of a sixteen-page supplemental comic story in the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine. In Hour Two, Doom visits a prison facility to talk to someone who knows The Doctor. In Hour Three, Doom finds The Sixth Doctor in a near-future Earth, where they fight off the Autons in a Nesteen plot to replace humans again. In Hour Four, Doom goes to the set of a Western movie in 1930s Hollywood, where she finds the cast and crew have been converted into Cybermen and has to fight through them to survive. In Hour Five, Doom travels to a medieval-style world where she has to find a creative way to fulfill her assignment – to kill a unicorn – while teaming up with the Third Doctor’s companion Jo Grant but finds like in the previous hours, it’s not the right Doctor who can help her.

When Bad Comics Happen to “Doctor Who”

The problem with Doctor Who comics, especially in Doctor Who Magazine, is they have a tendency to be perfunctory in writing and art. This second installment of Doom’s Day is, unfortunately, the latter. There is virtually no characterization at all in the characters, which is a big problem with Doom because we don’t know anything about her apart from her plot: she’s trying to outrun Death. In the opening prose chapter, we saw more characterization of Doom’s resentful, passive-aggressive booker who uses officiousness to torment the assassins in the organization.  So far, the writing fails to tell us why we should care whether Doom lives or dies. She kills people for a living, which means she’s not a good person no matter how much the writers try to convince us she’s more amoral and Chaotic Neutral (in “Dungeons & Dragons” terms).

Then there’s the art. It’s terrible and rough on the eyes. It adequately lays out the story but is shockingly unattractive. It took us about five minutes of re-reading to realise that in Hour Two, that’s actually River Song that Doom is talking to because the art was shockingly bad,d and that looked nothing like Alex Kingston. We know comics artists have to work hard to turn in their pages, but why did Russ Leach have to draw the ugly version of Sooz Kempner‘s face as Doom, a flat version of Colin Baker’s face as the Sixth Doctor, a barely recognizable Jo Grant and that horrible-looking and unrecognizable River Song?! There’s no grasp of body language in the art that might convey any of the characters’ personalities. It’s entirely reliant on expositionary dialogue as they explain to us what they’re doing and what they’re thinking.

Doom’s Actor is More than Just a Face

Sooz Kempner is a frequently hilarious comedienne and performer with an insanely versatile singing voice with an impeccable geek pedigree who can do a comedy routine about video games on the one hand and then a gleefully ruthless spoof of the worst politicians who ruined the United Kingdom. She’s like a British one-woman SNL… if SNL was actually funny.

If you’re familiar with her work, you can see why Russell T. Davies approved her casting as Doom. However, she doesn’t write her own material here, alas. Doom as a character only works right now if you imagine her with Kempner’s snarky, rapid-fire wise-cracking voice and comedy persona. If you don’t know Kempner’s work, you might be left wondering why you should care about this character or why The Doctor should bother to help her at all. We’ll probably get a greater sense of Doom’s personality when we hear Kempner play her in the upcoming audio drama chapters of Doctor Who: Doom’s Day.

We Need to Care about Doom – and So Far, We Don’t

This brings us back to the dubious prospect of following Doctor Who: Doom’s Day across different media. This comic installment does not encourage anyone to keep up with the story. Hopefully, the Titan comics might be better written and drawn. The prose novel after that might also be better. But the two phone-based video games? There has never been a good Doctor Who video game on any platform, and these don’t look like they’re going to break that record.

At the end of the day, Doom really needed to be written as a more compelling character we care about for her story to feel worth following. Till then, you’ll have more fun with a sampling of Sooz Kempner’s comedy videos.

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