Last year, I worked through all of Big Finish's Time Lord Victorious contributions, along with one novel; with this, I add one more piece to the puzzle, though I am coming to it as a Titan Doctor Who story, not a Time Lord Victorious one. This supposedly picks up from the end of the tenth/thirteenth Doctor story Alternating Current, the recap here telling us that at the end of that story, the tenth Doctor was sucked into a time vortex... only in Alternating Current no such thing actually happened. Oops! There's also a small thirteenth Doctor appearance here that takes place between pages of Alternating Current.

The stories of TLV are sometimes pretty loosely linked; while for the tenth Doctor this takes place some time prior to his TLV appearances and isn't really connected to them, it's a stronger connection for the Daleks. For them, this directly leads into the Big Finish audio drama The Enemy of My Enemy.

What actually happens is, as is so often true of Houser/Ingranata Who comics, not very much. The tenth Doctor is asked for help by the Daleks; he seems to be in a timeline where the Time War never happened. He helps them defeat a pretty bland threat from the "Dark Times." There's some okay back-and-forth between the Doctor and the Dalek Prime Strategist of the Dalek Time Squad (not to be confused with Big Finish's Dalek Time Strategist!), but this is two double-sized issues (clearly, though, originally scripted as four regular-sized one) where it just doesn't feel like that much actually happens. The elements of the story are good, but there was a more interesting tale to be told about the tenth Doctor having to help the species he thought had destroyed his people, and who (he thought) he had destroyed himself! Not as bad as Alternating Current, I guess, but not really up to much.

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(3.5 out of 5)
Like most of the Doctor Who comics from Titan Comics, “Defender of the Daleks” is a solid, if simplistic, Doctor Who story—but that doesn’t mean it’s not good. "Defender of the Daleks" is a pretty bog-standard Doctor Who comic. It's well-written, well illustrated, and a bit forgettable in the vast scheme of the Time Lord Victorious event.

At first glance, it’s difficult to see how “Defender of the Daleks” ties into the larger Time Lord Victorious storyline. Sure, the thing the Doctor is defending the Daleks from is a horror from the Dark Times—the setting of most of Time Lord Victorious—but aside from that, there doesn’t seem to be much of a connection. “Defender of the Daleks” acts as more of a sequel to a recent arc in the 13th Doctor comics where she and the 10th Doctor fought the Weeping Angels (during the events of the classic episode, “Blink”). It picks up for the 10th Doctor where that comic ends while the rest of Time Lord Victorious is set after “The Waters of Mars,” an episode from later in the 10th Doctor’s era. Still, I guess it’s introducing elements that will be important to the Time Lord Victorious story—particularly how the Daleks play into everything, a throughline that gets picked up in the Big Finish Eighth Doctor audios.

As its own story, “Defender of the Daleks” is solid. It's almost entirely stand-alone, requiring little knowledge from the reader other than a basic understanding of Doctor Who's premise and who the Daleks are. Jody Houser’s writing is as good as it always is. She has a knack for perfectly capturing the voice of whichever Doctor she’s writing and that’s no different here. Her Tenth Doctor feels like it lept directly from the TV show to the comic page. The plot moves at a good pace, never leaving a boring moment. However, that comes with the caveat that I often have with Doctor Who comics—“Defender of the Daleks” also never slows down enough to explore its ideas with any depth. Roberta Ingranta’s artwork is, as always, great. Her depiction of Skaro feels both true to what’s been shown on the show but also uniquely her own and it’s so fun getting to finally see the Daleks in a Doctor Who comic. Ultimately, “Defender of the Daleks” is a fun story that’s well-executed and should please fans of the Tenth Doctor. ( )