The Doctor, Rose and Jack are caught up in a temporal war between the power-suited Lect and the angelic, centaur-like Unon! The time bubble around Fluren has been deactivated, the world burned up in the heat of a supernova! Has the Doctor just seen his friends die? Jack is alone in a vortex-stranded TARDIS, surrounded by the hostile Unon! Rose is taken prisoner, and finds out the truth about the armoured Lect! Shocking secrets from the Time War are revealed, as the Doctor plays both sides! Causality collapses, and the Doctor must put it right! And there’s a last-page cliffhanger that will shock you to your core…!

We get some much-needed answers in this issue, as Rose learns the secret of what resides inside the Lect’s immense battlesuits and the Doctor discovers what motivates the Unon.

When we see inside the Lect suit, I think we are supposed to recognise the creature within. We did see his kind in one frame of the opening issue, but that was several months ago, so I failed to make the connection. This miniseries is probably best enjoyed in one go (either by building up your comic-book collection and then having a binge-read, or by waiting for a graphic novel compilation to appear) rather than as separate issues read over a long period of time. Or perhaps I’ve just got a poor memory. What was I writing about again…? Oh, yes, that’s right – much-needed answers!

Unon commander Arnora explains that a temporal power vacuum has been created by the absence of the Time Lords following the Time War. This is a notion that was rarely touched upon during the television series, and is well worth exploring. The Unon have set themselves up as time’s new champion (a phrase first coined during the Seventh Doctor New Adventures novels), not to control time, but to prevent others from seizing power over it for themselves.

Further enlightenment is provided by an insight into the creative process that goes into the making of a single page of the comic – from black-and-white digital drawing to coloured and finished art – which is included towards the back of this issue.

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Richard McGinlay