The Eleventh Doctor, Alice, and the Sapling go on three random adventures.
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Transcript below:
More adventures with the Doctor, Alice and the Sapling in Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor: A Sapling Roots straight ahead.
Well it’s time to review another Doctor Who book, and I promise we’re not going to make the next two episodes Doctor Who reviews as well. I didn’t realize I’d recorded three straight reviews until I was thinking about it more carefully. This book collects Issues Three point Five to Three point Eight, or the Eleventh Doctor comic series. Issue Five is ‘Time of the Ood and it involves the Ood from the TV Series. The story on this, and this is somewhat important – probably more important than it should be, is that the Tenth Doctor met the Ood onboard a platform that was possibly in a blackhole. Ood were a servile race though they didn’t do anything to free them because he was dealing with a demonic bane who was taking them over. However, the Doctor did help free the Ood in Planet of the Ood in Season Four, and the Ood Song was released throughout the solar system calling for the Ood to return home. However, in Time of the Ood they find seventeen Ood enslaved at a place called The Devil’s Eye which is a resort and because of its unique position these Ood cannot hear the Ood Song calling them home.
A villain of the piece is Jonni Halliburton, formerly a member of the Friend of the Ood who were seeking to free the Ood. However, she took the view that the Oods who were on the planet who were being docile…seemingly happy slaves were making a mockery of everything she and her fellow activists had stood for. It’s an interesting idea that someone can be an activist and can actually become more concerned with their cause and the people they say they’re trying to help. But even with that interesting idea this story has way too much continuity in it, which is unusual for the Eleventh Doctor series. And it’s not particularly quite a bit of continuity for just a one-Issue story.
The next story is ‘The Memory Feast’ and it finds the Doctor, Alice and the Sapling landing on a mysterious ship that is known as a Memory Ark, and they stumble through odd landscapes, many of which are drawn from the Doctor’s or Alice’s memories. This story I found to be just a little bit confusing and busy. The art was pretty good but it was really hard to follow what’s going on. It was a one and a half Issue story and it feels like it wasn’t long enough to explain all the concepts. It’s not bad but like I said, a bit busy. The final story is ‘Fooled’ which has the Doctor, Alice and the Sapling heading to a fair – looks a bit like a renaissance fair was what we called it in the States – and the three of them are having a good time just on holiday. However, people around them start losing memories of key events, and the Sapling starts gaining them. What’s going on and why is the Sapling leeching these memories? This is probably the best story in the book. It’s a single-Issue tale but it has its…a good concept, it’s heart, and also has a character moment for the Sapling.
‘Something Borrowed’ is a short that was printed along with The Memory Feast. It has the Doctor going on a spaceship to get something that he had loaned to Drax – a character that he’s only ever met in his Fourth incarnation. So, this is something that he’s been wanting returned for seven lifetimes, which turns out to be somewhat anticlimactic and silly, but not silly enough to really actually be funny. Overall I was somewhat underwhelmed by this. This is not by any means a horrible book. There are some good moments and some good art, but more than anything else it felt like this book was kind of marking time until the next collection where we’ll see a proper resolution to the Sapling storyline. So overall I will give this book a rating of Not Classy and we’ll see if they can pick it up in the final volume.
We turn now to listen our comments and feedback, and I have a comment from ‘Dave’ regarding Episode Nineteen ‘How to Legally Read Comics for Free’. He says, “Thanks for the tips on reading comics for free. I’m lucky enough to live within a short walking distance from by branch of our County Library, so I often browse the shelves of the Graphic Novel and Comic Trade Paperback section there, and sometimes check out the County-wide online catalogue. I also have Comicology on my Kindle Fire and I really like their Guided View feature which lets me read panel by panel – a help to these old eyes. I will be looking for the Hoopla app you mentioned. And looking to getting a non-resident Library Card from the Philadelphia Library since I live just outside that fine city. I’m very glad you talk about these things and give the pros and cons of various methods. Stay Classy.”
Well thank you so much Dave, I appreciate your comments. And I will say that the Hoopla app does also have a similar thing for the Guided View where you can read through the comics one panel at a time. That is a nice feature, particularly because there are a lot of comics where the lettering is so small you can’t really see, as well as somewhere just the level of detail you get when you’re able to look at one panel is a lot better.
Be sure to listen to Episode Twenty-Nine as we’ll have some…discuss some ways to save money on comics that you do decide to buy. So, I hope you’ll be listening for that. Alright, well that will do it for now. If you have a comment email to me at classycomicsguy@gmail.com; follow me on Twitter @ClassyComicsGuy and check out my website classycomicsguy.com. From Boise, Idaho this is your host, Adam Graham, signing off.
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