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Wormwood
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First Published
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1998
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Script
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Scott Gray
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Original Publisher
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Marvel
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Reprint Publisher
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Panini
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Artist
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Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks)
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Letters
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Gary Gillatt and Alan Barnes
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Featuring
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The Eighth Doctor (the Ninth Doctor, for a time), Izzy, Fey and Shayde
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Previous Doctor Who Magazine Comic
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Next Doctor Who Magazine Comic
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Wormwood is a Doctor Who comic strip. It has been printed through various publications.
Synopsis[]
Fey and Izzy struggle to come to terms with the new Doctor, when the TARDIS is almost struck by a Tellesian Cruise Liner. Seconds later, the craft explodes forcing the TARDIS to make an emergency landing on the moon. Except that they appear to be in a town in the 1880s American West... They soon meet Abraham White, who is driving a car not developed for another twenty years. The Doctor sees through White’s charade, and White reveals himself as creator of the Threshold.
The Doctor forces the TARDIS to dematerialise to keep White away from his property. White returns the favour by transporting Izzy and Fey deep inside Wormwood, the Threshold base. In his car, which is capable of flight, he takes the Doctor on a tour of his domain, showing him human monuments such as the Great Wall of China and the Empire State Building which he has had transferred to the moon. Izzy and Fey, meanwhile, meet a familiar face in the form of Chastity (see Fire and Brimstone above), now twenty years older, who reveals that Fey has been an unwitting spy for the Threshold thanks to a perceptual relay unit that they planted in her mind. Furious, she goes to confront White, striking him down. Immediately, White transforms into a savage creature called the Pariah.
The Pariah and White are two creatures sharing the same body mass. When White takes control again he explains how the Threshold began. In Autumn 1879 he was a poor bible salesman when he discovered a strange sphere crash to Earth. Touching it, he made contact with the Pariah who told him of her enemies, the Time Lords. The Pariah tried to take control of his body, but she was weak, so White struck a deal with her; he’d carry her inside him and she would help him make a profit and slow the ageing process. Together they jump-started the Twentieth Century, pushing the right people in the right direction to speed progress. But the ultimate progress came when they applied the principle of industrial reproduction to the Pariah, reproducing her basic sphere form and placing it in a dimensional void. They recruited people of ambition and transformed them through the void into living gateways - the Threshold. They hid from the Time Lords by never time travelling. Izzy, meanwhile, sees a member of the Threshold called Gracie Witherspoon and follows her. She discovers a vast device called the Ziggurat and, just as Gracie grabs Izzy from behind, White uses the device to destroy outer space.
White explains that he has changed every speck of dark matter, every virtual photon and every quantum particle that exists in the vacuum of space into entropic holes that convert anything they collide with into basic energy. Anyone unlucky enough to be outside a planetary atmosphere is now dead. Izzy struggles with Gracie - and receives a shock. White, meanwhile, explains how the Threshold plan to advertise their services to the universe - but they need the Doctor’s gift of universal translation (which was what the box of secrets from Gallifrey seen in Fire and Brimstone contained). This will kill him. However, the Doctor points out that Chastity saw the contents of the box before the destruction of the Cauldron and, as his mind is still clouded from regeneration, she would make a better translator. White agrees and Chastity dies. With space a deadly minefield, White tells the citizens of the universe that the Threshold can provide them with an instantaneous means of travel through dimensional portals... for a fee. Gracie arrives with Izzy as her prisoner, offering to take both her and Fey to a more secure location, but the Pariah speaks out - Gracie is not one of her progeny. Indeed she isn’t - she is the Eighth Doctor in disguise.
The Doctor used a personal chameleon circuit to disguise himself. The ‘new’ Doctor did likewise - he is really Shayde. White switches into the Pariah. The Pariah and Shayde do battle while the Doctor, Izzy and Fey escape through a Threshold portal to the TARDIS. The Pariah reveals herself to be Shayde’s forebear - a Time Lord agent who rebelled, found true life and slaughtered a few thousand Time Lords. Rassilon believed the Pariah dead after their final battle, but she escaped and has planned the ultimate revenge. The Doctor, meanwhile, tells Izzy and Fey that he knew Fey was being used as an unwitting spy by the Threshold and decided, to make them relax their guard, to give them what they wanted: a vulnerable Doctor fresh from regeneration. He hands Izzy a baseball bat and they rush out to stop the Threshold while Shayde keeps the Pariah busy. But Shayde has lost and the Pariah appears before them with his body in its claws. It crushes Shayde’s head.
Discarding Shayde and physically taking the TARDIS, the Pariah goes to meet her ultimate destiny with the Ziggurat. Shayde lacks the ability to repair himself, but Fey refuses to let him die. The Pariah, meanwhile, uses the energies of the TARDIS and the Ziggurat to shift the moon a split second forward in time. She drains all the energy of the Threshold into the Ziggurat. She will destroy not just outer space, but planets, suns, everything. White is horrified and manages to split from the Pariah - both will now die, but the Doctor points out that he will survive inside the Ion Shield of Wormwood. The Pariah gives chase, but this is merely a distraction while Izzy destroys the Ion Shield. It will collapse completely in sixty seconds. The Pariah catches the Doctor, but Shayde appears - now merged with Fey - and blasts her. The Doctor, Izzy and ‘Feyde’ escape in the TARDIS as Wormwood and the moon are destroyed.
The Regeneration Game[]
When the Eighth Doctor apparently regenerated in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine the following issue’s letters page was ablaze: ‘I’m in shock. I’ve read and re-read it but it’s always the same...’ (Lucy Shaw, Skipton), ‘I can’t remember the last time Doctor Who stunned me into silence like this... My first reaction was one of utter disbelief. You can’t just do that sort of thing, can you?’ (Mark Davies, via email), ‘If you were looking for a way to draw attention to your comic strip, you’ve certainly succeeded... It’s a bold step and I look forward to reading the stories of the Ninth Doctor, although I feel we haven’t got to know the Eighth Doctor yet.’ (Simon Catlow, Lichfield), ‘I don’t like change and I really can’t see how we can be convinced by a Doctor that we’ve never seen in the flesh, never heard talk, and never watched.’ (Stephen Bray, via email), ‘How could you possibly consider replacing Mr McGann after only two years of Doctorliness? It is the shortest reign any actor has had in the role. Bring back Paul McGann, I say. The new Doctor seems extremely annoying... Please do something about this, the new Doctor just isn’t right.’ (Ben Goudie, via email), ‘What on earth have you done with the comic strip? What possessed you to regenerate the Doctor with no TV or film model to base him on? I feel, rightly or wrongly, that without an actor having portrayed your new Doctor in any production, he will lack the core and substance that even the brief screen life of the Eighth Doctor had, and your comic strip will end up falling flat on its face.’ (Paul Hayes, Clapham). Two issues later, reaction was rather more positive: ‘I have just read Wormwood and it is absolutely brilliant. The new Doctor is rather sketchy but this is only Part One of his first story’ (Charles Smith, via email), ‘Many congratulations on the first oart of Wormwood - it really felt like the first episode of a new Doctor... Stick with the new Doctor even when the TV series returns - you’re creating a unique new piece of Doctor Who’ (Simon Burt, Wakefield), ‘I’m just writing to say that I think that the new Doctor is going to be very good’ (Stephen Oakes, via email). The letters were still coming in the following issue: ‘Are you people utterly mad? I mean, really? The Eighth Doctor was just hitting his stride in the comic strip, Izzy was becoming tolerable, and Fey was a nice addition to the strip. Ah, but what a way to go...’ (Kelly Hodge, via email). In his editorial in Issue 271 (the final part of Wormwood), Gary Gillatt claimed that an entire Doctor Who local group had cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine, and said that ‘The regeneration was been dismissed as no more than a cheap stunt by some critics, but I think that’s a little unfair. It was the result of ongoing efforts to make the strip ever better, all the time thinking about the biggest surprises we could offer.’
Notes[]
- The Doctor Who Comics website, had this to say about the strip:
Of all the Eighth Doctor’s epics, few stories come close to being quite as epic as this one. Bringing to an end a complex cycle of linked stories that began back with The Curse of the Scarab more than three years previous, taking in Black Destiny, Ground Zero, Fire and Brimstone,Tooth and Claw, and The Final Chapter, this tale provides a satisfying, exciting and convincing conclusion, and it is especially nice to see Izzy destroy Wormwood and the Threshold’s power using Ace’s baseball bat. The character of Fey, who has been a striking and effective companion over the past three adventures, and the surprising development the character undergoes, sets things up for the future, but just for the moment we are free of complicated arcs. It’s been quite a ride, but as the Doctor says, ‘This body’s just getting warmed up’.
Prints[]
- Doctor Who Magazine
- Issue 266
- Issue 267
- Issue 268
- Issue 269
- Issue 270
- Issue 271
- Panini Graphic Novels
Other Images[]
