Dr. Who's Time Tales (DWM 32 comic story)
The third story in the Dr. Who's Time Tales series was printed in Doctor Who Weekly #32.
It followed the format of the series: short tales depicting strange events in the Doctor Who universe, narrated by the Fourth Doctor himself, similar to DWM backup comic stories, created by adding the Fourth Doctor framing device to a preexisting Marvel comic story, in this case Those Who Change, first published in 1962 in Tales to Astonish #33.
In addition to the addition of the framing device, this retelling of the 1962 story made multiple changes to elements of the narrative. Principally, the main character's was brought forwards from 1962 to 1980, changing the cause of his anxiety about the world from the Cold War to tensions with Iran. This led not only to changes in the narration but to alterations to the art on page 1 to change the headlines of the bus riders' newspapers. There were a few other minor alterations whose motivation was more obscure, such as changing Bentley's description from "frightened" to "worried" in the second panel of Page 2.
Plot
The Fourth Doctor reflects on a time tale about John Bentley, a man who wanted to escape from the worries and fears of his home time (the "Atomic Age" of the late 20th century). The story begins with Bentley, a scientist eaten over with anxiety about the fate of the planet in the face of looming nuclear war with Iran. Distracted by these worries, he makes a mistake while experimenting with an X-ray machine, and accidentally discovers the secret of time travel.
Forming a plan to scale up his discovery into a machine big enough for a human passenger, and to use it to escape back in time to an era "before missiles and H-bombs", Bentley walks for several weeks until he has built a true time machine. He decides to send himself to the 18th century, comfortably before the invention of modern warfare, only to find himself in the middle of the French Revolution. Taken for an aristocrat because of his strange clothing, he narrowly escapes a mob by hopping back in the time machine.
He ends up on "an afternoon in 1588", where the materialisation of his time cabinet is witnessed by several armed men who assume it to be witchcraft. They capture him and the time machine and drag him before the Inquisition. He tricks them into letting him enter the "magic cabinet" by promising to give them the names of many other "sorcerers" and escapes further back in time to the 14th century. Walking out into a village, he finds it strangely empty and is told by a passerby that he is in the middle of the great black plague. He flees back into the machine and takes an even longer leap back, but the ship materialises in the arena of the Colosseum in Rome, in "the most barbaric days of the Roman Empire" as gladiators and lions fight.
Having had enough, Bentley returns to his home century, having learned his lesson that every era of human history had its own horrors to inspire just as much fear to their contemporaries that the threat of atomic war does in 1980 — and that there is nothing to do but to face these problems and solve them, as all previous generations did.
Characters
References
- A newspaper headline in 198Ø claims that a new "neutron super-bomb" is being tested. Another notes that the failure of "oil price talks" is part of the crisis in Iran.
- Seeing John Bentley's time machine vanish, one of the gladiators in the Colosseum exclaims "by the beard of Zeus".
Notes
- Although it was implicit in the story's original printing, and Bentley's style of dress remains consistent with this notion, nothing in the story actually confirms that Bentley lives in the United States of America.
Continuity
- The Fourth Doctor relates how John Bentley found himself in the French Revolution, the Black Death of the 14th century, and the "barbaric" games of the Colosseum, all dangers which the Doctor also faced during his own travels in time. (TV: The Reign of Terror, The Romans, PROSE: Asylum)
