The Star Beast (Part 2)

STORYLINE

Desperately, the Doctor searches his surroundings until he finds some lead sheeting along a roof edge. Wrapping the lead around himself, he is able to stop the Wrarth signal from getting through. With the immediate danger passed, the Doctor is able to get the Meep's story. The Meep claims the Wrarth warriors came to his planet and destroyed everyone on the planet. The Meep was the only one who was able to escape, and when he fled, the Wrarth pursued him to where he crashed landed on Earth. The Meep's thoughts, however, betray a more sinister story than his cuddly appearance would imply. As the Wrarth decide to make a frontal assault on the home where the Meep is hiding, the Doctor creates a device that stuns their attackers. While they are stunned, the Meep pulls a weapon from his pocket and destroys the warriors. The Doctor is stunned by the unnecessary death, but the evil Meep feigns innocence; he claims fear made him do it.

The Doctor, Sharon, Fudge and Fudge's mom take the Meep out the back door as more Wrarth show up. The Doctor, Sharon and the Meep are able to elude their pursuit by jumping on a bus. Fudge and his mom, however, are not so lucky and get caught by the warriors. Realizing he has left his friends behind, the Doctor decides he must return to help them. He sends Sharon and the Meep on their own to return to the Meep's ship. The Doctor backtracks and finds Fudge and his mom about to be killed by the alien warriors. He interrupts the execution and elicits the Wrarth's side of the story. It seems they are actually a police force created to stop the death and destruction caused by the Meep race throughout the universe. Seems a shift in their planet's orbit toward a black sun has turned an otherwise peaceful race into an unreasoning killing machine. The Wrarth had managed to stop the Meep, but their sadistic leader had managed to escape and make it to Earth. The Doctor has gotten the whole story wrong, and now Sharon is alone with an evil killer.

As the Doctor makes friends with the Wrarth, Sharon and the Meep have made their way back to the Meep's ship, but not before the Meep kills a few innocent soldiers. By the time the Doctor arrives with the Wrarth warriors at the crash site, the Meep has used a black sun device on his ship to mentally influence the humans in the area. He is using them as slave labor to restore his damaged ship. The Doctor sees Sharon at the Meep's side and is able to lure her away to where he and the warriors are hiding. Unfortunately, Sharon has also been influenced by the clack sun and she viciously attacks the Doctor.

Moments later, Sharon comes to her senses, but she doesn't believe the Doctor when he tells her what an evil criminal the Meep actually is. The Meep rewards her by nearly shooting her. The Doctor pulls her away again just in time, leaving her with no more illusions of the Meep's evil intentions. The Meep brags to the Doctor that he plans to jump his ship into hyperspace directly from the planet's surface. Such a move will have a catastrophic effect on Earth. The Doctor tries to do something to stop ship's launch, but he is too late, the black sun drive is activated, and Blackcastle is pulled into the vortex created…

Throwback: The Soul of the Cybermen (Part 1)

STORYLINE

The story opens with a Cyberman — yes, a full silver “delete-delete-please-stop-shooting-us” model — drifting helplessly through the vacuum of space. This is our hero. No, really. The comic demands that you take this very seriously, even though the visual reads like someone chucked a shop mannequin out an airlock.

This Cyberman, who later becomes known as Krail, has survived the destruction of his ship. He is physically intact, which is impressive considering Cyberman engineering is essentially “a filing cabinet held together with despair.” But Krail is… different. Something’s wrong. Something human. The worst possible diagnosis for a Cyberman.

You see, Krail has developed — brace yourself — emotion.
Marvel 1984 really said, “Let’s make a Cyberman sensitive.” And they did.

Krail drifts toward a nearby planet, crash-landing in the desert with all the grace of a dropped toaster. There he is discovered by a local prospector who more or less decides that this giant metal corpse is probably worth money. This man is the story’s designated “morally questionable scavenger,” a classic role in Doctor Who fiction traditionally reserved for someone who will certainly be vaporised before issue #4.

But when the scavenger approaches, Krail awakens — not with the usual “You will be like us” Cyberman charm, but with disorientation, panic, and what appears to be a full-blown identity crisis. The scavenger, being a professional opportunist, decides this is still fine and attempts to drag Krail home anyway.

Krail, however, has flashbacks — and in true comic-book fashion, flashbacks materialize as dramatic montage panels of Cyber-conversion, screaming faces, and general educational reasons why you should avoid Mondas. He begins to realise that he was human once, which is frankly the kind of revelation most Cybermen would treat with a quick round of emotional inhibitor tuning.

But Krail doesn’t have an emotional inhibitor anymore. That’s the whole problem.
This Cyberman is living the nightmare equivalent of waking up without your phone — but instead of fretting about notifications, he’s developing empathy.

The scavenger carts him back to town, where the locals have the reaction you’d expect when someone drags a two-meter-tall murder-fridge into the market. People panic. People scream. People run for their lives. It’s all very validating for Krail’s rapidly developing anxiety disorder.

Meanwhile, Krail is trying to understand who he is, what he was, and whether he should feel bad about stomping on all those humans during various Cyberman invasions. (The answer: probably yes.) The locals decide they’ve had enough and open fire because that’s what locals always do in classic Doctor Who comics when confronted with something unfamiliar, shiny, or vaguely threatening.

And then — cliffhanger time — Krail, emotional turmoil at maximum capacity, flees into the wilderness, pursued by townsfolk who believe that a Cyberman capable of feeling things is significantly more dangerous than the version that isn’t.

Which… fair point, honestly.