Whenever the Doctor travels with a non-regular “gang,” there’s always a sense that several of them, if not all of them, are going to die before we get to the end of the story. In recent decades, the Classic-era doctrine that if you stand by the Doctor, you’re in the safest place in the universe has rather been shattered in the name of adding realistic consequence to the Time Lord’s adventures.

As we open Issue 3 of The Prison Paradox, the latest Fifteenth Doctor comic book from Titan Comics, there’s an unsentimental run-down of the “score so far” of the Doctor’s plan to take a bunch of would-be convicts from their cells in an unbreakable prison to somewhere near the heart of the complex to have words with the oddly unsinister Warden, who currently holds Belinda Chandra a very casual kind of prisoner.

Two Down…

Two issues in, and the Doctor’s newly-found Slitheen ally counts off the fact that they’ve lost two of their number on this quest to rescue a member of a species which if you remember your Season 2 canon, nobody remembers or has heard of. Humanity having ceased to exist back in 2025. Tensions are rising the further into the complex they go, and there’s a storytelling style developing that points increasingly to the featured team-member of any issue having to selflessly sacrifice themselves by the time the final pages roll along.

Welcome to Annie the Adipose.

Annie, like all junior Adipose, is adorably cute, with a single fang to mitigate against her squidgy snuggliness.

This, it turns out, is the bane of her existence, because the nature of the Adipose life cycle is to act parasitically and mutate the flesh (and frequently the bone and the organs) of other species into more Adipose, so they go through their lives as a journey from “Aww, how cute!” to “Ick, get away from me, you parasitical monster!”

There’s at least one big storytelling trick missed in this issue, in that Annie is portrayed as a baby Adipose, as seen in Partners In Crime, despite having the experience of many rides along the journey from cute to monstrous. That means we still never get to see what a fully-grown Adipose looks like – unless we’re inferring that they remain at about the same size and cuteness throughout the whole of their lives. 

The Cutie-Pie Killer

That seems to be what writer Dan Watters is getting at, because in fairness to him, he does his best to turn on-screen realisation into an emotional backstory for the species as a whole – this ongoing ennui about the journey they go through, from cuteness to horror – and a particular if slightly vague explanation of how Annie the Adipose comes to find herself in both bad company and the most impregnable prison in the galaxy. 

Do You Smell Gas?

The main threat this issue is a new zone of the prison where a couple of entirely gaseous life-forms have been imprisoned. There’s some fairly glorious riffing on Ninth and Tenth Doctor eras here, both in terms the cast – one Slitheen, one Adipose – and in terms of the visuals and themes. There are a pair of venomous gas-creatures out to possess some more technically useful material bodies, Gelth-style, and there’s a big spinny air conditioning fan thing gone wrong, making the whole zone hotter than hell, instead of nicely chilled.

Two villains, three heroes – you do the math…

We learn of Annie’s backstory, her determination, and the ways in which not all parasites are the same, because even though her life cycle may depend on using the body fat of others to reproduce, the necessary parasitism isn’t something of which Annie is particularly proud. 

And when the Doctor and the Slitheen are relatively easily possessed by the gas-creatures, clearly, Annie realises than an Adipose has to do what an Adipose has to do.

Ooh, The Pretties…

The resolution to the issue’s story arc is actually fairly clever, and the art from Sami Kivela and colourwork by Valentina Bianconi give a coherence throughout the story, with the heat of the environment washing almost everything in an urgent red, with pretty attractive purple swirlwork for the transfer of the gaseous creatures between body-forms. In particular, the big red-and-black threatening fan of heat and potentially doom is extremely well-rendered, adding to the environmental threat of the issue, beyond the existential “gas-creatures have taken over our bodies” threat that actually drives the action.

It would be spoilerific to tell you how the issue ends, but suffice it to say that it maintains the story’s ongoing theme. And just as with Issue #2, we pop in to see the Warden and Belinda only the once, in this case to add a little ticking-clock pressure to the adventure – the Warden has scheduled Belinda’s execution for the same afternoon, and her attempt to escape in the meantime is utterly pitiful. 

Her reason for trying to escape though feels like something that would only occur to her post-Interstellar Song Contest, in that she knows the Doctor will make it to her, and she’s trying to avoid his being overly angry when he gets there, because of what the Doctor’s anger might mean for the Warden’s survival prospects.

She might well be right about that, especially as the Doctor has already lost a couple of new, fast-made friends along the way. 

A Doctor-Lite Episode

But in a sense, there’s something antithetical about the story as it’s developing – yes, the Doctor is all about moving forward and mourning (or indeed avenging) the fallen when there’s time. But whereas in Issue #2, he tried his utmost to save the life of his new aquatic friend, in Issue #3, the focus is all about a lone Adipose in a cruel universe, and the Doctor, far from being the hero of the piece, is as prone to events as anyone else, and has to be rescued by his companion-of-the-day. 

What happens when the Doctor meets the Warden?

It’s almost anyone’s guess – we’d like to imagine it’s more complicated than any of the issues to date have been, to make sense of the “paradox” element of the story’s title. The point being that by the time you get to the end of Annie the Adipose’s “episode,” you’ll be fully locked in and have to stick with it to the end to find out. Tony Fyler

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