Dr. Who's Time Tales (DWM 35 comic story)
The sixth story in the Dr. Who's Time Tales series was printed in Doctor Who Weekly #35.
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 Put Another Nickel In!!!, first published in 1970 in Chamber of Darkness #6.
Plot
The Fourth Doctor tells the story of Jimmy Deparis, a "man of little conscience" foiled via time travel. The story sees Deparis, industrial spy and assassin, running away after pulling a heist at the patent office. He hides out in a penny arcade, where, after getting an ominous prediction from the mechanical fortune teller, he decides to try a "nickelodeon". To his surprise, the film he sees inside depicts events from his own life: his hold-up at the patent office trying to get the plans for the bacterial spray, the caper's interruption by inventor Mat Wyatt, and Deparis's cold-blooded murder of Wyatt as he made his escape. As he catches up to the present, the machine tells him to "put another nickel in" if he wants to see more. Complying, Deparis is given images of the police officers chasing him as they decide to investigate the penny arcade. Accepting the machine is somehow giving him glimpses of true events, Deparis panics and makes a desperate escape, leaping out of a window, forgetting he was on one of the higher floors of the building. The detective who led the police to the arcade, Elliot, explains that he knew to look here thanks to having looked into the very same "nickelodeon" as Deparis — because that device was not an ordinary peep-show-machine at all, but Mat Wyatt's own tempiscope, a machine for seeing the past and the future.
Characters
References
- Deparis wonders if the movie in the machine will be "one o'those Charlie Chaplin gems".
Notes
- Dialogue in the story repeatedly refers to the book as "Merlin's Diary", in quotation marks, making it clear that it is the actual title of the book, not a descriptor. However, the art itself shows it as simply bearing the word Merlin on the cover, and a decorative "M" on the spine.
Continuity
- The story involves a human inventor building a machine capable of looking at past, present and future events, in the shame of a kinetoscope. The Doctor once had access to a Time-Space Visualiser, (TV: The Chase) and Iris Wildthyme owned a time-space kinetograph. (PROSE: Beguine)
