By Rob McCow

4-Dimensional Vistas

A mean Ice Warrior, winter 1983

The Collector

This was a 6-part story for the Doctor, running from issue #78 to #83 of Doctor Who Monthly, making the months of July to December of 1983 ones of sheer joy. It was never reprinted in the US Marvel Doctor Who Comic, because that ceased publication in May 1986 with Lunar Lagoon. All 6 of the 4-Dimensional Vistas are reprinted in the Doctor Who graphic novel ‘The Tides of Time’, published in 2005 by Panini Books.
 

The World Shapers

Writer – Steve Parkhouse

Art – Mick Austin

Letters – Steve Craddock (1) Jerry Paris (2-6)

Editor – Alan McKenzie
 

Fellow Travellers

Gus is a no-nonsense American Soldier, but John Wayne he’s not. He takes up the Doctor’s offer to travel in the TARDIS to escape the war. His reactions range the gamut from ‘Holy Smoke!’ to ‘This is crazy!’ incorporating ‘Holy Mackerel!’ and ‘Doc… I hope you know what you’re doing!’ on the way. He’s quite amiable, but don’t forget that he’s the guy who shot poor old Fuji in the previous story, Lunar Lagoon. The Doctor hasn’t forgotten, but lets him travel in the TARDIS anyway.

We also get re-acquainted with the lads from SAG-3, the mysterious group of militia and psychics who caused a bit of trouble for the Doctor at the end of The Stockbridge Horror.
 

The Deal

Still on the non-specific Pacific island, the Doctor is accosted by Gus, the American pilot. Gus wants to know what the Doctor is doing on the island. Gus says the year is 1963, which the Doctor realises is long after the Vietnam War should have ended. The Doctor surmises that he is on a parallel Earth and realises he may never get back to the real Earth. Dazed, he wanders into the sea and Gus has to rescue him.

Gus takes the Doctor back to his TARDIS. Gus was conscripted and would do anything to get out of the war, so the Doctor takes Gus with him on his travels. The first port of call is the birth of the Galaxy, where Gus and the Doctor observe the creation of the Earth.

On the real Earth, a passenger plane is brought down in the Arctic Circle by a mysterious weapon. The remains of the craft are examined – by an Ice Warrior! He is accompanied by a man in a winter survival jacket who says that at maximum power, the weapon could destroy a TARDIS.

The Doctor realises that a temporal distortion is throwing off echoes of the real Earth, creating parallel worlds like the one Gus comes from. By cranking the TARDIS up to ‘Full throb’ the Doctor is able to match the frequency of the time field and head for the real Earth.

Back at the North Pole, the weapon, which is a gun attached to a big snow track, is ready for firing again. The Ice Warrior Autek suggests to the man in the jacket that they try it out on his TARDIS. The man is horrified, but just as the weapon fires, the Doctor’s TARDIS lands in the path of the ray. The TARDIS is battered by the weapon, but remains intact. The Doctor dematerialises and escapes.

The Doctor gets a proper perspective

Meanwhile a supersonic jet marked ‘SAG-3’ drops a probe nearby.

The Doctor and Gus, dressed appropriately for cold weather, head out from the TARDIS to investigate. They hitch a lift on the back of a snow prowler to a huge dome-shaped base, where the Doctor recognises Ice Warriors on patrol. They sneak into the base. Inside, they find an enormous shaft, 30 miles deep. Autek lowers a crucible of molten silica into the shaft. Suddenly, a TARDIS lands by the hole. Gus shouts in surprise, which attracts the attention of the Ice Warriors who open fire. The Doctor is injured, but Gus escapes.

In the base, the Ice Warriors take the Doctor to meet the man they are working with, who the Doctor recognises as The Time Meddler! The Doctor describes the Meddler as a failed Time Lord and throws a device into the shaft.

The Monk / Ice Warrior tag team celebrate their victory

Ice Warriors in Snow Prowlers are hunting Gus, who is lost. Gus is bewildered by the shifting lights of the North Pole and runs into three spectral figures. He hears their voices in his head and is then taken away by a helicopter.

The assault from SAG-3 begins. Human soldiers take out the Ice Warrior patrols with a mixture of heavy weapons and grenades. A running commentary of the battle would be:

‘THONK!’

‘KA-CHOW KA-CHOW’

‘WHOMP!’

‘WHAMF!’

The SAG-3 team place two magnetic mines on an Ice Warrior snow prowler.

‘CLANG! CLUNG!’

The Martians fire back.

‘FWAB! FWOM!’

The mines detonate!

‘WHUMP!’

And so on and so forth.

The soldiers decimate the Ice Warrior guarding the pit under the base. They find the Doctor, strung up upside-down over the pit. Unable to reach him, they fire at the ropes holding him up as a larger force of Ice Warriors approach. Autek’s mission, however, is over and he activates the take-off which wipes out his own warriors. Autek and the Time Meddler escape in their TARDIS, which is disguised as a Police Telephone Box.

The Monk's TARDIS is on the right

The soldiers finally sever the Doctor’s ropes and he falls towards the pit. One of the soldiers uses his psychic powers to deflect his fall and he lands at the edge of the pit as the Ice Warrior base takes off.

Back in the Doctor’s TARDIS, the Doctor explains the Ice Warrior’s plan to the SAG-3 team. Get this. The Ice Warriors superheat silica in a crucible. They bury it under the arctic wastes. Then they nip forward five million years in the Monk’s TARDIS and collect a huge and perfect silica crystal. This crystal they can use for their super-weapon, a sonic cannon capable of destroying a continent.

Oh yes. There’s more!

The Doctor was sent by his ‘superiors’ to investigate the possibility of this scheme. He hid in an English village and began his investigations.* He made some disastrous mistakes, but got to the bottom of it in the end.

SAG-3 got involved because they had been investigating time anomalies and a number of aircraft that the Ice Warriors had shot down. It was also SAG-3 that investigated when the TARDIS became imprinted in a quarry rock face in The Stockbridge Horror.

With exposition covering the last two years of the comic strip under his belt, the Doctor heads through The Corridors of Time after the Time Meddler. They wait for him at a point of stasis, but the Meddler and Autek evade them. The two TARDISes zip through the vortex and the Doctor takes a short cut between dimensions.

The Monk's TARDIS is on the left

He lands fractionally before the Time Meddler in the same location. The Time Meddler briefly appears in the Doctor’s console room, before the Meddler’s TARDIS is annihilated. The displacement destroys the Ice Warriors spaceship – leaving the TARDIS orbiting serenely above the Earth!

At an Arctic military base, the Doctor waves goodbye to SAG-3. His stay on Earth is over and he leaves with Gus. After they leave, one of the soldiers complains that clairvoyance is a double-edged sword.

‘How can you tell a man, even a man from another world, that he’s going to die?’

*This is covered in the comic strips from The Tides of Time to The Stockbridge Horror.
 

TV Action

With the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who, there was an increased awareness of the show’s history. Hence, we get two monsters not seen for nigh on ten years. The Ice Warriors are very appropriate for a story set in the Arctic, what with them loving the cold so much. They’re rather faithful to their TV counterparts too, being interested only in war and developing great big sonic weapons.

The Time Meddler is perhaps less successfully portrayed. He seems to lack the roguish charm and wit that made him such a memorable character. Although his reasons for teaming up with the Ice Warriors aren’t clear, he’s messed up in a scheme that is just as violent as killing Vikings with heavy weapons.

SAG-3 are completely different from UNIT, they’re far more mysterious and efficient, wiping out Ice Warriors left, right and centre.

As for the fifth Doctor – he’s the same as he’s always been in the comic strip, hapless, frequently at the mercy of others, but with a strong sense of justice.
 

4-Dimensional Vistas

The art of Mick Austin is more endearing here than in the preceding stories. Mainly because he is really, really good at drawing Ice Warriors, Peter Butterworth and Peter Davison. 4-Dimensional Vistas appears to be another story that was crafted to allow an artist to shine. The Ice Warriors are awesome in black and white, although they retain some of their cumbersomeness from the TV show. The Time Meddler is also very successfully captured. Although it isn’t instantly clear who it is, once it’s revealed it’s easy to appreciate what a good likeness it is. There’s lots of the military kit that Austin seems quite fond of as well, with planes, snow-prowlers and guns. It’s possible that Austin would be more at home drawing WWII comics.
 

End of The Line

If there’s one major problem with 4-Dimensional Vistas, it’s that the story is not immense enough. This story is the pay off for years of set-up, stretching back to Tom Baker’s final story, the Neutron Knights. It ties up The Stockbridge Horror and Tides of Time. It reveals why the Doctor was hiding in Stockbridge. And the reason is that the Ice Warriors have teamed up with the Meddling Monk to make a big gun!

It’s certainly a dangerous threat but compared with Melanicus plunging the whole Universe into chaos, it seems small fry. The Meddling Monk was never a criminal mastermind, more of a foolish annoyance. Similarly the Ice Warriors have never come across as a Galactic menace. In their stories they’re usually fighting for survival. Even teamed up, these two don’t carry the weight and mythos of Daleks or Cybermen.

Despite the disappointing scale of the story it’s still thoroughly good fun. The Ice Warriors look superb and menacing and the SAG-3 assault on the Ice Warrior base is fantastic, very in keeping with the kind of violent stories on the TV show at the time. The human military is portrayed as a mysterious threat to begin with, which is also effective in building up their presence.

What makes the Meddling Monk worth including is the fabulous sequence at the end where the Doctor chases him in his TARDIS. To see them whizzing through the weird and wonderful vortex is a delight. And the final confrontation between the Doctor and the Monk is fun as well.

Overall, 4-Dimensional Vistas is an entertaining and rewarding story in it’s own right. It’s only the resolution of the ongoing plotlines that is disappointing.
 

Follow That TARDIS!

This story wraps up events stretching as far back as The Tides of Time. It follows directly on from Lunar Lagoon.

Doctor Who’s only previous foray into alternative Earths on TV was in the story ‘Inferno’. An alternative Earth is seen in the comic strip in ‘The Iron Legion’.

The mysterious comment of the SAG-3 clairvoyant is explored in the next comic strip, The Moderator.

The Ice Warriors turn up again in ‘A Cold Day In Hell’, the first comic strip featuring the seventh Doctor. The Meddling Monk meets also meets the seventh Doctor, in the story ‘Follow That TARDIS!’

Gus’s full name is Angus Goodman.

SAG-3’s psychic team were introduced at the end of The Stockbridge Horror.

A Doctor Who Monthly reader named ‘Jethrik’ gave the story glowing praise: ‘4-Dimensional Vistas – fantastic! I’ve often wondered why the Doctor never has any companions in Marvel-land and this tough-talking Yank seems to have the charm of Turlough, the disrespect of Romana and the humour of Sarah-Jane Smith. Keep him!’

The TARDIS chase at the end of this story is a favourite moment of Si Hart’s.