Solitract

Story: It Takes You Away
Written By: Ed Hime
Length: 50 Minutes
Year: 2018

This episode begins with a seemingly run of the mill story about monsters from a mirror possibly haunting a young blind girl in a cabin in Norway...and then ends up with an idea and imagery so goofy you'd think it came right out of the Doctor Who comic strip.  That isn't a complaint by the way, that is why I loved it.
The TARDIS has landed in the tranquil fjords of Norway, and they begin to walk towards a cabin.  They find the cabin boarded up, and the aforementioned young blind girl is hiding inside.  Apparently her mother recently died, they moved from the city into this cabin, and now the father has disappeared. And you can hear monsters surrounding the place.  Soon they find a portal to another world or dimension hidden in a mirror.  The Doctor, Graham, and Yaz venture into the mirror, find a strange cave with a creepy alien and some flesh eating moths known as the "anti-zone," which is some kind of buffer created wherever time and space are threatened.

On the other end of the Anti-zone is a mirrored version of the Cabin in Norway. And there they find the girl's father, but also a version of his wife alive and well. The idiot abandoned his kid for his wife and never questioned the idea that she was cool with that! They also find Grace, and Graham is nearly hooked in as well.  But the Doctor pieces together that these are not the actual people, not even some alternate universe version of them...but may actually be a being called "the Solitract,"  a being from before the universe that had it's own plane of existence, a place it was forced to be when it kept all elements of our universe from coming together.

It's very bonkers stuff, and in the end the Doctor is able to get everyone out of the Solitract plane before it collapses in on itself...but the Solitract keeps the Doctor, and stops looking like the Mother or Grace, and is now just a little frog on a chair in a white void.  But the Doctor begins to unravel a bit, and the Solitract is forced to let her go back to her proper universe, leaving the Solitract alone yet again.  Man I loved that image of a talking frog in the white void. It was the most goofy way to end this story...and I loved it.  I couldn't help but think of all the wackiness I have read in the Doctor Who Magazine Comic strip...the kind of stories where the companions are talking penguins and the Doctor has to face off against evil space businessmen that happen to look sort of like frogs as well, or there is a giant musical instrument that organizes time and space, or they get attacked by a salad.  You know...the really weird stuff.

That is why in recent years I've really fallen for the comic strip, because it takes the basic concepts of Doctor Who and sometimes really stretches them in the weirdest of ways.  There is no TV budget to truly reign it in, and even though most writers and artists try not to take it too far...they rarely hold back when they get a truly insane idea.  And with episodes like this, it only make the comic feel that much more aligned with the comic version. And I think the show could, on occasion, really look at the comic and see the potential.

NEXT TIME: The Ux

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