“Oi! I’m talking to you! How did you get my number?” “Forget it, Doctor. I wanted the other one. Not you.” The Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack, bouncing back from their most recent adventure with a destructive doppelgänger, run into a most unexpected face! It’s Mickey Smith – but ten years older! As the Doctor struggles to keep Rose apart from an element of her future she must not know, Jack discovers another twist on his missing past that complicates his present…!

It’s all very well having new adventures with the Doctor and his companions, but don’t you sometimes wonder what happened to the likes of Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith and Martha Jones (the latter two last seen battling a Sontaran in The End of Time) after they parted company with the Time Lord? It is unlikely that these characters will ever be revisited in the television series, because they are creations of the previous showrunner, Russell T Davies, and the current production team has its own set of toys to play with.

That’s what’s so great about the storyline that begins here. It not only features a 2016 version of Mickey (as was revealed in the dramatic cliffhanger ending to last issue) but we are also brought up to speed regarding the current status of his wife Martha. An opening recap, which features both the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, reminds us how much the Doctor and Mickey changed over just a few years, with Mickey transformed from inept zero to action hero.

We also get a more subtle foreshadowing of the TARDIS crew’s future as Rose gains glowing orange eyes and some dangerous new powers…

The style of incoming artist Cris Bolson is very similar to the realism of Blair Shedd, who provided the artwork for Titan’s Ninth Doctor miniseries. Bolson provides good likenesses of the Doctor, Mickey and Rose. His Captain Jack, on the other hand, is merely not bad.

And there’s a lovely in-joke reference to Chris Achilleos’s cover illustration for the novelisation Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion in the sound made by a flying monster encountered by the Doctor and Mickey: “KKLAK!” Now, that’s what I call taking the Mickey!

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Richard McGinlay