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Ground Zero was a comic story featuring the Seventh Doctor and Ace. Notable for featuring a fate for the character Ace not supported by any other sources, it was one of the most controversial Doctor Who Magazine strips.
Summary
The Threshold have kidnapped three of the Doctor's former companions, along with his current one, using them for their employer's benefit: the Lobri — a creation of the human unconsciousness, feeding on fear. They intend to destroy the unconscious link between humans. The Doctor must stop them, but at what cost?
Plot
to be added
Characters
Worldbuilding
Energy and radiation
- Ace, Sarah, and Peri are sent to a place of pure psionic energy.
Individuals
- The Threshold neuro-lock Susan.
- Peri is tortured in order to harvest the greatest amount of fear from her.
Species
- The Threshold's clients are called the Lobri.
TARDIS
- The Doctor links the Threshold's ring to the TARDIS's trans-reality navi-systems.
- As the TARDIS breaks through the collective unconsciousness, it starts to break apart, the cloister bell begins to ring, the Doctor tells Susan to refocus the force-field prisms.
- After the TARDIS's journey into the collective unconsciousness, the Doctor tells Susan to re-establish the tertiary navi-links.
- The Doctor lands the TARDIS inside the Lobri, claiming that the safety interlocks would have prevented this had they been functioning.
Weapons
- Nitro-9 is powerful enough to dispatch several of the Lobri.
Notes
- The first part of this comic starts with three inset panels from the last part of this comic.
- This marks the final appearance of the Seventh Doctor in regular comic strip format. His final lines in his comic book tenure are; "Isaac... Do you seriously believe there is anywhere in existence you people can hide from me now?"
- This comic features the apparent death of Ace in an account not supported by any other media. The story itself does not confirm her age, and she wears her teenage bomber jacket over an obviously more mature outfit, but her characterization is closer to that of her younger self from the TV series.
- Then Doctor Who Magazine Editor Gary Gillatt explained this choice in DWM 240, citing the resurrections of Abslom Daak in Emperor of the Daleks! not being known of by the Doctor in Deceit and the similar and conflicting Silurian stories COMIC: Final Genesis and PROSE: Blood Heat as instances where the continuities had diverged in the past. He stated, "...as a result, we concluded things would be much simpler if the Marvel strip followed its own path". Following this, in DWM 242, Gillatt stated, "The bottom line is that Marvel's Doctor Who comic strip has been going strong since 1979. With seventeen years of our own continuity to draw upon we see no need (or feel any obligation) to try and shoehorn another publishing company's characters and concepts into our own."
- Part four was published in the same issue dedicated to the recent death of Third Doctor actor Jon Pertwee.
- The Seventh Doctor is wearing the same outfit he is wearing in Doctor Who, and the console room and the rest of the TARDIS, resembling the design last seen in Battlefield, is heavily damaged during this story, seemingly setting up for the changes seen in the TV movie.
- This story subtly references the Eighth Doctor's claim to be half-human from the TV movie. The Doctor tells Isaac he might be "more human" than he looks. Later, both the Doctor and Susan, grandfather and granddaughter, are able to enter the collected human unconsciousness unharmed after multiple assertions that anything alien would be rejected or destroyed.
Continuity
- The Doctor recalls that he used to smoke. (TV: An Unearthly Child)
- Isaac took Peri from Hollywood on 14 May 1938, (COMIC: The Curse of the Scarab) Susan from London on 22 October 1963, (COMIC: Operation Proteus) and Sarah from Takhail, Russia on 25 April 2086. (COMIC: Black Destiny)
- Ace remembers the Doctor criticising her Nitro-9 for having poor timers. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)
- As she dies, Ace once again asks the Doctor is they "did good". (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)