Review: ‘The Next Doctor’ on DVD

Robert Greenberger

Robert Greenberger is best known to comics fans as the editor of Who's Who In The DC Universe, Suicide Squad, and Doom Patrol. He's written and edited several Star Trek novels and is the author of The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. He's known for his work as an editor for Comics Scene, Starlog, and Weekly World News, as well as holding executive positions at both Marvel Comics and DC Comics.

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2 Responses

  1. mike weber says:

    I didn't make it more than about a third of the way through when it first ran.Definitely the weakest of the Christmas stories so far.

  2. Allyn Gibson says:

    I think you have it right; the first half is really good, the last half is really weak. In fact, you can tell the point where the story goes wrong — it's the point where the Next Doctor discovers that he's not the Doctor at all, that he's actually a man named Jackson Lake. Everything before that point is interesting — there's a mystery the tenth Doctor has to solve and there's another Doctor running around. Everything after that point is a bog-standard Cybermen runaround, and the most captivating character of the first half — the other Doctor — is gone, replaced with a character who simpers a lot. The energy that Morrissey brought evaporates, and it's unfortunate because it could so easily have been fixed at the scripting stage. Imagine how much better it would have been if Jackson Lake had realized that he could be the hero he believed he was? What if Jackson Lake played a role in the climax rather than "Bravo, Doctor!" The pieces were there, and you can see them, but they're left on the table, and that's unfortunate.