Enlightenment (comic story)

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Enlightenment was a full-page comic story by Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett included in DWM 105. Unrelated to the TV story of the same name, it instead focused on the inner workings of the Doctor's TARDIS and, in the process, inadvertently foreshadowed a recurring element of the later revived series.

Summary

While the Doctor waits outside, Peri climbs a staircase in the TARDIS lined with portraits of the Doctor's incarnations to change the outer plasmic shell's light bulb, which, it turns out, must actually be done from the inside, through a hatch in the roof.

Characters

Worldbuilding

Notes

  • As the portraits of the First Doctor and Second Doctor are labelled "No. 1" and "No. 2", the clear implication is that the other numbered portraits adorning the TARDIS staircases are of other, unknown incarnations of the Doctor; No. 33 and No. 13 would respectively be the Thirty-Third and Thirteenth Doctors, while the "minus"-numbered Doctors would, logically, be incarnations predating the commonly-understood "First Doctor", William Hartnell. However, none of the pictured individuals are explicitly identified as the Doctor, and indeed, even if they are purported, in-universe, to depict the Doctor, there is no certainty that the portraits are accurate; the eventual Thirteenth Doctor introduced on television, of course, bore no resemblance to "No. 13" in Enlightenment.
  • If taken at face value, the TARDIS containing portraits of alleged future incarnations of the Doctor during the Sixth Doctor's era may hint at time within the TARDIS being flexible, an idea later explored at greater length in The Doctor's Wife.
  • For unknown reasons, this story was one of the few Doctor Who works by Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett that were not reprinted in It's Even Bigger on the Inside.
  • This was the only original Quinn and Howett story present in DWM 105 because the Doctor Who? instalment was reprinted from DWM 103.

Continuity