Seems to be the whole point of Donna is that she's good without being an academic. She knows Ood slavery is wrong instinctively, not because she read a book once.

The more I think about this comic, the more frustrating I find it.

Donna's a gift of a character. Passionate, incapable of accepting injustice, reckless.

Here, she delivers soundbites of child-friendly feminism along the lines of "ahhh but Draconian, your MAM was a woman".

A new one! Maximum chaos!

I like this a lot. We've already had plenty of silly adventures, so we've learned the rules by example. Learning the mechanics NOW is far more interesting than it would've been at the start, since I'm more invested.

[Disclaimer: it's possible some of this stuff was mentioned earlier and I forgot]

Also, after 10 hours of short, breezy fiction - prose lets us slow down and learn more about the mechanics.

We learn HOW Doom uses her vortex manipulator to find the Doctor. It's designed to avoid other time travellers - and she's reversed it.

Which is why she keeps meeting companions/Missy.

Isn't that brilliant? This book is the only part of the story where counting up or down will result in the same four numbers.

We start with hour 11, which Doom considers Fourteen Hours Left. And we'll end with hour 14, or Eleven Hours Left.

The first striking thing is that the numbers are in reverse order. 14, 13, 12, 11. Is this some kind of Memento numbering? We'll see these events backwards, will we?

No. That's not what's happening.

The novel is from Doom's point of view. She's not counting UP. She's counting DOWN.

These hours are usually explicitly numbered. The DWM comics note that these stories cover hours 2 - 5, for instance.

As of the end of the Lost In Time mobile game event, Doom has used up 10 hours.

The novel Extraction Point covers the next four hours.

She will choose the jobs most likely to bring her back into contact with the Doctor.

She spends the next four hours in Doctor Who Magazine comics.

Her next four jobs take her into Titan comics.

She spends her next hour in the Lost In Time mobile phone game.

The story so far.

During a mission, assassin Doom is told she has exactly 24 hours left to live - by the Doctor, who disappears.

Doom comes up with a plan. Whenever she accepts a job, she has an hour to complete it - and she can choose her own jobs. She can take up to 23 more jobs before she dies.

Good point, actually, yes! I never really understood what was best to upgrade.

This is true - but that's also true of the entire genre of incremental game. I really like Adventure Capitalist, say, and that's an equally "no real gameplay" game.

Not sure what the difference is, but I slid right off the Dr Who one.

Not wild about the ending being a version of The Curse of Fatal Death without the irony.

I'm sure I enjoyed Tony Lee's The Forgotten. As an anniversary story, I didn't mind the density of references so much.

But ... e.g., this story really didn't need to reference Timelash.

You're already bringing in Victorian Torchwood, you need to avoid getting any further into the weeds of fan service.

Some references are fine - I don't mind name-checking Perivale and Krakatoa.

But every reference to Talons was extremely unwelcome.

(Although I liked the artist's 4th Doctor/Leela)

If anyone on the planet liked BOTH this game AND the Doom's Day project, this would be very funny.

Unfortunately, since hardly anyone likes either, I'm not sure there's anybody in the middle of that Venn diagram.

I come closest. And I just looked up the cutscenes on YouTube.

It's a shame, because there's a fun idea at the heart of its Doom's Day tie-in.

So far, Doom has been having her own adventures as she seeks the Doctor.

Here, she crashes into the middle of utter chaos that only exists to serve the gameplay of a mobile phone game.

I'm a sucker for incremental games, but Lost in Time just doesn't have enough depth for me. Its only pleasures are in seeing arbitrary numbers get arbitrarily higher, and in seeing lots of Dr Who iconography in one place.

I'm not opposed to either, but they're not enough by themselves.

That said - I do like the final story. Doom presenting Missy with a challenge - solve a problem the way the Doctor would. Missy's hilarious in this sequence.

Fun final page too. Feels like a missing scene from the 2017 series.

The Doom's Day project faces many challenges.

It's biggest strength so far is its ability to skip from one extremely short story to the next.

So it's a real shame this comic doesn't feel especially fresh. Just some more Doom/Missy stories, not so different from last issue.