By Rob McCow

Echoes of The Mogor!

The Collector

The Echoes of The Mogor! rang out through issues #143-144 of Doctor Who Magazine, chilling the bones of readers in December 1987 and January 1988.

The World Shapers

Script – Dan Abnett

Art – John Ridgway

Lettering – Annie Halfacree

Editor – Richard Starkings

Fellow Travellers

Aiding the Doctor in this story are the men and women of FHD – Foreign Hazard Duty. Far from being the kind of bland duty officials you'd find in airports, FHD are a butch, highly organised team of experienced soldiers. In fact, everyone is so rugged that it's hard to tell the men apart from the women. They all have close-cropped haircuts and their uniforms resemble modern-day riot police without the helmets. A woman (I think it's a woman) named Hurd is in charge; we also meet O'Bannon, Stratton and Cameron.

The Deal

Mekrom is a storm-battered world on the edge of known space and is home to a small colony of humans. Dean Stanton, executive officer of the colony, records his journal into a crystal. Stanton is the last person left alive in the colony. There's been no sign of the FHD Team they requested. As he records his journal, he hears something and realises the Mogor have come for him.

Dean Stanton had been looking forward to this review for some time

As Stanton's dying screams echo through the base, the TARDIS materialises. The Doctor is heading for Maruthea, but decides to stop and take his bearings. Exploring the abandoned base, he eventually finds Stanton's body. The man seems to have died of fear. When the Doctor picks up the crystal that is lying beside his body, it starts playing back Stanton's journal.

A life-size image of Stanton appears, holding an image of the crystal. It tells the Doctor that the colonists had uncovered the ruins of an ancient war-like race, the Mogor, that had once inhabited Mekrom.

Before the Doctor can find out more, he is interrupted by the arrival of two members of the Foreign Hazard Duty Team, O'Bannon and Cameron. Assuming the Doctor is part of the base's medical team they call for Hurd, their commander. When she arrives, the Doctor demonstrates the recording powers of the crystal.

The FHD arrive to find The Doctor looking guilty

Meanwhile, O'Bannon and Scott head to the Archive Terminal to look at what the colonists found out about the geology of the planet. When they reach the Terminal however, they are attacked by a huge alien creature with an enormous mouth.

The Doctor and the FHD team hear assault gun fire and run to investigate, but they are too late – O'Bannon and Scott are dead. The Doctor examines them and discovers they died of hypovolemic shock. He accesses the Archive and finds where the crystals were discovered. The Doctor and the FHD team head into the mines to investigate.

Inside the mines, they find a huge crystal formation. The Doctor demonstrates how the 'empathic absorbency of the lattice' records images of people. The Mogor are phantoms recorded by the crystals over generations. The colonists have been killed by their fear of the unknown.

Muhgrrr! It's a major Mogor mischief

An enormous Mogor appears in the cavern and the FHD team open fire. The Doctor tries to tell them it isn't real but panic takes hold. They run up into the base, pursued by the Mogor. The creature corners them and the Doctor declares that he doesn't believe in it. Suddenly the creature vanishes. The Doctor explains that the creature was just an echo.

Look! It's an all-too-rare appearance of Sylvester McCoy in the comic strip!

The FHD team leave – there is nothing more for them to do. The Doctor stays behind and prepares to head off for Maruthea.

TV Action

The FHD team resemble some of the space troopers seen in Eric Saward's stories for the fifth and sixth Doctors, most notably the space troopers from Earthshock, the troopers in space from Resurrection of The Daleks and the lone surviving space trooper from Revelation of The Daleks.

In the new series, a space colony was being wiped out by forces from below the ground in The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit.

A creature that killed people by scaring them to death was previously seen in the third Doctor story, The Mind of Evil, while phantoms and illusions bothered the Doctor in The Five Doctors and The Talons of Weng Chiang, amongst others.

4-Dimensional Vistas

Ridgway is back, (back!) but there's nothing outstanding in Echoes of The Mogor. His McCoy is on and off, but generally recognisable. What marks this story out from some of the previous ones though is the attention to detail in the backgrounds and the characters. The colonists have a believable (if ridiculously creepy) working base with machinery and computer equipment everywhere. The FHD uniforms are simple but convincing, with a nice little FHD insignia on the arm and communication headsets.

The Mogor themselves are an excellent design, if a bit unwieldy with their enormous mouths and arms spread wide open.

End of The Line

Echoes of the Mogor is an atmospheric and creepy tale. The abandoned base makes for a great setting and the opening of the story is very promising, especially during the scenes where the Doctor explores the deserted corridors. The harsh surface of the planet helps give the story a sense of confinement and claustrophobia.

In retrospect, the main point of interest in this story is the introduction of Foreign Hazard Duty. The FHD team in this story come across as a stock bunch of soldiers but Dan Abnett fleshes out their background a bit to make them a bit more interesting. Unfortunately, the individual characters in the team are indistinct in appearance and behaviour, so it soon becomes easy to forget who is who.

The Mogor are a scary foe, but perhaps not quite enough to convincingly scare the battle-hardened FHD team members to death. It would be interesting to have found out more about the Mogor; it's implied in the text that they were war-like, so they may have been more than simple-minded monsters. The resolution is a bit quick and easy. The FHD find it very hard to disbelieve the monsters one moment, but then suddenly they do and it’s all over. It might have been good to have seen a crisis of confidence in these soldiers, who are supposed to be afraid of nothing.

Follow That TARDIS!

The Doctor starts his long journey to Maruthea.

After leaving the strip because he thought Doctor Who Magazine was going to be cancelled, John Ridgway returned to draw this story.

Absent from this story is the Doctor’s distinctive question-mark umbrella, which takes no part in the proceedings.

Foreign Hazard Duty would return in Hunger From The Ends Of Time and other stories. The origins of their organisation are revealed in the epic Mark of Mandragora.

The names of the FHD team are swiped from the production crew of the Aliens movies. Ridley Scott wrote the screenplay for the first movie; James Cameron was the director of Aliens; Dan O’Bannon has contributed to all the Alien-related movies up to and including AvP2:Requiem; Gale Anne Hurd was the producer of Aliens.

This is Dan Abnett’s first story for Doctor Who. Working at Marvel, he had written for Transformers and Action Force comics prior to Echoes of The Mogor! Since then, he’s gone on to write for comic strips for 2000AD, DC Comics and Wildstorm. He’s penned numerous hugely popular books for Games Workshop set in their Warhammer Universe. He returned to Doctor Who in 2004, writing Harvest and Nocturne for the Big Finish range of audio adventures. He’s so damned prolific he’s even written a very good Torchwood book called Border Princes. Read his blog - and why not.