The Grief

Doctor Who Magazine came to The Grief from issues #185-187, from April to June of 1992. The Grief has never been reprinted.

Story – Dan Abnett

Pencils – Vincent Danks

Inks – Adolfo Buylla / Robin Riggs

Letters – Caroline Steeden

Editor – John Freeman

The planet Sorsha holds many horrors for Ace, the Seventh Doctor’s companion. She’s a growing girl and develops attachments easily. She is very strong and able to use heavy weapons of the future. She also has the eye of a magpie when it comes to collecting funky-looking items from derelict alien spaceships. However, events on Sorsha start to make her wonder if she can trust the Doctor or even understand his motives.

Assisting the Doctor and Ace in the fight against evil is Skrane, a member of the CHEX (Cartographical Historical Exploratory Service). He’s a translator first class from the Starship Rosetta, he’s good looking, friendly and heroic.

The CHEX is headed up by Captain Strauss, although she prefers to be called Enid.

The Doctor and Ace arrive on the ruined world of Sorsha, apparently so that the Doctor can pay his last respects to the dead. Three millennia ago the Sorshans wiped themselves out to defeat the Lom, a race of such horrific evil that the Sorshans were prepared to sacrifice themselves to rid the galaxy of them.

Exploring, the Doctor runs into a group of Marines carrying out an archaeological dig. They take the Doctor prisoner suspecting him of being an alien spy, while Ace escapes unnoticed. She explores one of the ruined buildings and finds a strange looking alien object that she picks up. Then she hears someone singing.

The Doctor is being taken back to the ship, the Rosetta, on board an armoured transport. He explains to Lieutenant Frethil that the Sorshans let the Lom land, then destroyed their own world with a biological toxin. The Doctor peeks under a blanket and finds a Lom weapon that the Marines are taking back to their ship. The words on its side translate to ‘The Grief’.

Ace finds the singing person and introduces herself. He is called Skrane and is a first class translator. He has been working out the Lom and Sorshan languages.

On board the transport, Frethil has worked out how to power up the weapon. As she does, tentacles reach out from it and grab her, pulling her inside. The Grief turns her into a Lom warrior, a vicious creature with long tail, built in gun and armoured exo-skeleton!

No Doctor, Aliens VS Predator is the worst thing humanity can imagine

The Lom warrior kills everyone on the transport, but the Doctor is able to escape by jumping out of the back.

Skrane is worried because Lieutenant Frethil hasn’t responded to his comms. He asks Ace to explain what she is doing here, but Ace remains enigmatic, claiming to be a traveller or a ghost. Captain Strauss arrives with a Marine and tells them that the armoured transport arrived at the Rosetta with some sort of monster on board. They call the Rosetta but the crew are being massacred by the Lom. The Doctor meets up with Skrane, Ace, Strauss and the Marine. He explains that The Grief is designed to take organic matter of any kind and turn it into a Lom Warrior. Skrane admires their ingenuity. The Doctor again explains that the Sorshans committed suicide to stop the Lom.

The Lom attack the Marines at the ruins, but Ace repels them with an enormous gun. The Doctor and Skrane have almost found the toxin shield and the Doctor explains that the Sorshans killed themselves to stop the Lom. Ace realises that the bio-toxin shield no longer works as they are all still alive. The Doctor tells her that they are looking for a programming insert that must have worked itself loose. They start searching, but Ace has already found it, she picked it up earlier. Skrane offers to sacrifice himself to stop the Lom. Captain Strauss orders the Doctor and Ace to tell the galaxy about this place, as she holds off the Lom to give Skrane time.

The Doctor and Ace make it back to the TARDIS just as Skrane activates the toxin shield, killing everything on the planet.

Ace berates the Doctor for his lack of compassion, allowing Skrane to die. It was as though it was part of his plan all along. She is worried that he is too concerned about the bigger picture and doesn’t care about who gets hurt any more.

They mostly come at night. Mostly.

The biomechanical Lom resemble the Dragon in the McCoy story, Dragonfire. Only they move a lot quicker and have sharper teeth.

Get away from her you *BITCH*!

The Doctor is carrying on with his dark and mysterious thing from his last televised series and Ace is still finding it disturbing, as in stories like Curse of Fenric and Ghost Light.

In Dragonfire, the BBC managed one lumbering monster and lots of cheap looking sets. So the chances of them being able to pull off the fast-moving Lom on the ruined world of Sorsha with any panache would have been slim. This is a story that could only work in comic book form, or as a big-budget movie.

A lot of love has been put into the Lom, even though they’re quite similar to a certain Xenomorphic film star of the 80’s. They look dynamic and deadly. The action sequences where the Marines battle the Lom are pretty good, with an unusually high level of violence and gore for Doctor Who. There are marines getting gutted, Lom with their heads being shot off and people being speared, with blood everywhere.

Elsewhere the art is variable. The ruins of Sorsha are fairly generic, but they’re dotted with interestingly shaped organic objects. The object that Ace finds is a good example, even if it does look like a hip-replacement. It’s covered in swirly detail and looks spot-on in every frame.

Archaeology (n): Work performed by bearded professors in fields with small brushes. Except in sci-fi, where it’s carried out by enormous Space Marines with gigantic guns, because on a planet where everything has been dead for 3,000 years you’ve got to know where your gun is. If it isn’t extending for a meter and a half from your body, you’re a corpse and archaeologists of the future will be tutting over your remains.

Enough sarcasm – The Grief. They should have called it Doctor Who VS Aliens, which would have been an exciting crossover. Aliens was an enormously popular movie of the 80’s and spawned many sequels and imitators. This manages to copy not only the design of the alien monsters, but also the tone of the film.

It sets out to be a fast-paced thriller, but I think there were too many short cuts taken. The resolution of the story relies on the Doctor’s foreknowledge about the Sorshans and the enormous coincidence of Ace finding the plot device that they need to wipe out the Lom – it all feels very unsatisfying. In the end, Skrane’s self-sacrifice is decided on so quickly that it feels like there’s a page missing. Then Ace has to berate the Doctor for being heartless.

It’s also quite annoying that the CHEX team are exactly the same as the FHD who have been used in previous seventh Doctor stories. They’re simply another team of Space Marines with a funky acronym.

Ace uses an enormous gun to blast the alien scum, with the Doctor’s blessing, which feels very wrong. For some reason it feels a lot more gratuitous than the use of a bazooka to blow up a Dalek in the TV story, Remembrance of The Daleks.

Hey Ace, have you ever been mistaken for a man?

The Grief isn’t an awful story, it’s fast paced and exciting, but it doesn’t seem right for a Doctor Who story.

What’s with all this Archaeology? It’s almost as if they were paving the way for the Doctor to get a full time archaeologist as a companion. Professor Bernice Summerfield would turn up in The New Adventure novels later in the year.

This story develops the threads of Ace feeling uncomfortable about travelling with the Doctor, a theme that ties in with the New Adventure novels. The Timewyrm from the four book ‘Timewyrm’ sequence also gets mentioned.

Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor wears a waistcoat in this story, rather than his distinctive question-mark pullover.

The CHEX have a well-stocked armoury somewhere. In part one of the story, the Marines carry small handguns. In part two, these suddenly become large automatic guns. In part three, everyone is carrying enormous, shoulder-slung field weapons.

In DWM issue #190, Simon Moore of Jarrow in Tyne & Wear said: ‘The recent comic strip adventure The Grief was promising but it finished badly. Skrane’s self-sacrifice (shades of Nemesis of The Daleks) was a little too obvious. Nice, however, to see the chronology with Virgin’s The New Adventures being tied together. I see Ravens will finish one month before Bernice is introduced in Love and War, but does this mean we shall never see the rest of the most promising comic strip of all time, Evening’s Empire?’ The editor reassured Simon that Evening’s Empire was on it’s way as a special in 1993.