Evening’s Empire

Evening’s Empire first started to appear in Doctor Who Magazine #180, published in November 1991. However, after the first part the serial was lost. The whole story was printed (with some alterations) in Doctor Who Classic Comics Autumn Holiday Special from 1993.

Script – Andrew Cartmel

Art – Richard Piers Rayner

Colours – Paul Vyse

Inking Assistance – Vincent Danks

Letters – Caroline Steeden & Annie Parkhouse

Strip Editor – John Freeman

Ace is striking on her own as a private investigator. Apart from that, she doesn’t say or do much.

Colonel Muriel Frost is back. She is caught in a loveless relationship that makes her angry at work. She’s a trained diver in addition to her other skills.

In the depths of space, UNIT soldiers are fighting through a city full of beautiful architecture on a planet lit with three suns. Hammond, Ives and Colonel Muriel Frost are defending themselves from barbarian warriors who are armed with bows and arrows. Hammond takes an arrow to the chest and Frost calls for a medic. Suddenly the ground drops away and they fall into space…

A Barbarian Warlord, ruler of the alien world, is pouring a libation.

At the Surveyor’s Office, Alex is pouring coffee. Ace comes in and asks to look at the property records dating back to World War Two.

Meanwhile, Colonel Muriel Frost is assisting the Doctor by searching a river in Middlesbrough for a crashed World War Two fighter plane. Frost dives to the bottom of the canal and finds the dead body of the pilot.

Ace drinks Alex’s coffee, which he is dosed with Chlormezanone. She falls unconscious.

Another jolly frame of fun and goodness from Evening's Empire!

Frost comes back out of the river and the plane is brought to the surface. She feels sorry for the pilot, who would have been nineteen years old when he crashed. The Doctor corrects her. The pilot has been waiting in the cold water for fifty years.

At his home, Alex locks his shed as his Mother calls him in to watch the Hymns on TV.

Ace wakes up in a strange environment. She looks out of a window to see that she is in a fantastic Byzantine world with several moons and strange aircraft overhead.

Colonel Frost is preparing to interrogate the dead body they pulled out of the river, despite the concerns of Corporal Ives. The Doctor has built a machine to allow Frost to communicate with the dead pilot, using various bits including the Cyberman machine-interface unit*. The Doctor activates the machine and Frost finds herself in a strange mindscape. She encounters the rotting body of the pilot, who shows her how he crashed. He was flying over Middlesbrough when he hit a strange aircraft and plunged into the river. The pilot wants Frost to stay, but he knows that Frost is in love with another. He tells her that though love is painful, it’s easy when compared with being dead.

On the alien world, Ace is given a gold-plated bikini (!!) to wear by the Centurion-like guards and an old man. She kicks one of the guards and tries to escape, but as she runs the ground disappears from underneath her and she finds herself high above the city, holding on to a brass ring in a door. The old man tells her that slaves should be respectful.

The Doctor visits the County Surveyors, trying to find Ace. He shows Alex Evening a photo of Ace, but he says he doesn’t recognise her.

Ace talks to the other slave girls as they watch the barbarian combat in the arena. They are horrified when one of the barbarians is beheaded by another. Ace notes that there is the smell of model glue everywhere in this world.

It is Friday in Middlesbrough and raining. Alex’s mum always lets him relax in the shed until Sunday morning. As he lies in the shed, he enters a trance. Outside, the Doctor is watching.

Alex arrives in his Empire and is greeted as Emperor.

Corporal Ives, meanwhile, is remembering her troubled schooldays. Ives was bullied at school. She is jealous of Colonel Frost, who is thin and good-looking.

Frost, however is fed up with her partner, Nick who is a scientist. They have an argument and Frost nearly shoots Nick with her service gun. The phone rings and Frost picks it up. Ives tells her that the Doctor has found the spacecraft.

They arrive at Alex’s shed and Frost berates the Doctor for leading her on a wild goose chase. The Doctor merely points out the tiny alien ship hanging amidst Alex’s model airplanes.

In the beautiful alien world, Ace is wishing that either herself or Alex were dead. Alex explains that he was always fond of model airplanes. One day he found a special ‘model’ by the river. He tried to get the model open all night, but when he fell asleep it did something to his mind. It allowed him to create his own fantasy world. However, the Imperial Warriors and Slave Girls he created soon bored him. To make it more real, he drugged girls and brought them into his dreamscape.

The Doctor explains that the tiny spaceship is a Q’Dhite Mind Treader. It is creating a new reality in the boy’s mind. The Doctor tells Frost that they can enter Alex’s reality using the TARDIS.

The story flashes forward. In the dreamscape, the UNIT troops are losing the battle against Evening’s Empire. Alex blames Ace for the UNIT troops and is about to kill her when Frost and Ives arrive. Alex sees off Ives with a giant bible that scoops her up and hurls her down from hundreds of feet in the air. As she falls, she remembers the people who have taunted and bullied her all her life.

Seeing Ives’ body, the Doctor works out how to defeat Alex. He returns to the real world in the TARDIS and persuades Alex’s mother, Janice to enter the dreamscape. Seeing his mother shatters Alex’s fantasies and destroys his Empire. The Doctor, the UNIT troops, Ace and Janice Empire leave in the TARDIS. Alex is left lying in his shed, in a coma without his mind. The Doctor prepares to take the Q’Dhite spaceship and deposit it in deep space, where it will do no more harm.

*From The Good Soldier

This story features a heavily armed UNIT squadron. They were regulars in the early 1970’s Pertwee era of Doctor Who. Their last appearance on TV was in 1989’s Battlefield, where they were under the charge of Brigadier Winifred Bambera.

With it’s strong themes of sexual domination and violence, there is no way this story would have been made as part of the TV series. In practical terms they could have just about achieved it, but the dreamscape sequences would have been very expensive to realise.

Richard Piers Rayner has a fantastic eye for detail, but it’s constantly being thwarted by appalling composition. The style of artwork is superb. But what’s actually being drawn is hideous.

The surreal dreamscape takes form

Faces are twisted and distorted throughout, which is fair enough when it’s loopy Alex Evening, but when the Doctor is gurning like mad it’s too distracting. Yes, McCoy occasionally pulled a funny face on the TV show, but here it looks like he’s running around with a bad case of acidic diarrhoea. There are some really obvious photo references too; and these are used very inappropriately. It’s even possible to pick out the video stills from Battlefield and Fenric.

The story is deliberately stuffed full of ugly and plain-looking characters. This works tremendously in the story’s favour, giving it an unusual sense of happening in the real world. This is backed up by the dreary, drizzly backdrop of Middlesbrough. I know Middlesbrough is a nice place in real life, but in Evening’s Empire it comes across as archetypal post-industrial dump. It’s full of houses with broken windows, dockyards with rusting machinery, crap cars and constant rain. It contrasts well with the crazy Evening’s Empire dreamscape, which is a mish-mash of ostentatious architectural styles, from Ancient Rome to modern Tokyo.

Evening’s Empire is the most morally repugnant Doctor Who story of all time, like a gritty crime drama about a serial rapist crossed with a Gor novel.

At its heart, it’s about a boy whose masturbatory fantasies get out of hand. In the end, the Doctor stops him by bringing his bully of a mother into his private shed. As Alex’s mind collapses, the Doctor even says ‘Even I take some satisfaction from seeing him scream at the night sky, as if he could stop it falling apart.’

Muriel Frost is trapped in a loveless relationship, but even though she is an army Colonel, she is utterly dominated by an uncaring man who only stays with her for the ‘physical’ side of their relationship. She wants to kill him, but lacks the strength.

Muriel Frost threatens her partner

This is nothing compared to the way Ives is treated in the novel. She is a woman who was bullied at school for being fat and ugly. She’s jealous of Frost, who is more attractive than she is. There’s no hope for Ives, no chance of redemption or joy in her life. The story treats her as a piece of human garbage. The point of all this seems to be to show that fat, ugly women are useless. Even the Doctor doesn’t seem repulsed by her death. ‘She can’t see the grief on his face’ says the text – and neither can we.

The Doctor’s companion, Ace, is reduced to a pawn (porn). She is drugged by Alex to become part of his slave girl fantasies and lacks the strength to save herself. Only the Doctor is able to rescue her, she has no chance of escaping as she is forced into a Princess Leia-style metal bikini and forced to take part in Alex’s sordid games.

The other girls that Alex has kidnapped don’t even get their own back-stories, they exist simply as pretty girls in kinky outfits.

And then the women realised that they absolutely LOVED being dominated by men!

Of course, there’s always the chance that the story was written to highlight the horrific treatment of women in men’s fantasies. Unfortunately this is belied by the treatment of Ace, Frost and Ives as powerless sex objects that men can choose or discard at will.

Aside from the sexual politics, this is a weak and disappointing story where the Doctor uses the TARDIS to shortcut the plot and save the day. Plus there must be easier ways to find an alien spacecraft than by dredging up and interrogating a dead World War Two pilot.

The first part as printed in DWM was brilliant and intriguing. It looked like it was going to be one of the most intelligent and striking Doctor Who stories in a long time. As it turned out, some things are best left lost.

Artist Richard Piers Rayner is best known for producing the graphic novel ‘The Road To Perdition’, on which the Tom Hanks movie was based. Although to Middlesbrough FC fans he is their artist-in-residence and the writer of ‘Middlesbrough FC - The Unseen History’.

There are some major differences between the first part of this story from DWM and the version that Classic Comics printed. There is a new intro, consisting of four pages of UNIT fighting the primitives in Evening’s Empire. There are some odd changes too, some very effective sequences of images have extra text added to them, often unnecessarily in my opinion. So the tight and effective: ‘A man, a plan, a canal… Middlesbrough’...

...becomes the much more verbose: ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Except this place is called Middlesbrough. A man, a plan, a canal… Middlesbrough. Hmm. Not much of a palindrome. And I don’t like the plan either.’

John Freeman wrote an afterword for the story in the Classic Comics edition, where he explains that four episodes of the story fell behind in the production schedule ‘For reasons too lengthy to go into here’.

Alex reads a ‘Gore Star’ book at the Surveyor’s office and has a pin-up calendar on the wall. He also reads ‘Slave Star’ by Scott Cochrane and has a Smarties mug.

The aircraft dredged up in part one has Swastikas on its wings, rather than the more usual Iron Cross.

Chlormezanone is a real drug, used as a muscle relaxant until it was banned in 1996. Let’s hope Ace didn’t suffer from toxic epidermal necrolysis.