You spin me right round baby, right round… Creative Staff:
Story: Nick Abadis
Art: Elena Casagrande, Arianna Florean
What They Say:
The Tenth Doctor thought he was done with new companions after Donna’s tragic exit – but that was before he met Gabriella ‘Gabby’ Gonzalez during an incursion of psychic parasites in Brooklyn, New York! Stuck running her father’s Laundromat, Gabby always dreamed of horizons beyond Sunset Park – whether that was going to college, making it as an artist, or just escaping her life for a while. Now she’s traveling the cosmos as the Doctor’s latest companion – and life couldn’t be more exciting! Battling invisible creatures on the Day of the Dead, uncovering a galactic conspiracy in the universe’s most famous art gallery… the only downside is the constant threat of death!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Gabriella is a young high school graduate in New York City who works both in her parents’ restaurant and laundromat, and does accounting for her father on top of night classes from accountancy while her friends go to college. She dream of doing more than working for her family forever, but her father insists on keeping her working for him.
One night while alone in the laundromat with her friend Cindy, the machines go haywire and watery vortexes spin out of them then disappeared. This is witness by Gabriella’s soon to be brother in law, Hector, who dismisses what he saw and tells her father about the incident.
The next day at the restaurant, where a brown-suited man orders huevos rancheros and assures his device on the table isn’t harmful, Gabriella’s swears to her father the incident wasn’t her fault, she sulks off and criticizes Hector in the hallway, but then hears her abuelita screaming and apparently she has seen Juan, her dead husband. Gabriella leads her away to calm down, but for a moment Hector sees the photo of Juan on the table change to something demonic. Later, when Hector is alone a creature grabs his shoulder and calls out his name.
Walking around outside, the Doctor is perplexed. His device is indicating activity but he can’t pin it down.
Back at the restaurant, councilman Ricardo Mendoza stops by to make sure Gabriella’s family will be attending the Day the Dead celebration the following day. Her mother assures they will attend and then her abuelita appears saying there’s a sense of dread in the air, the dead are hungry and will rise. As they escort her off, they find Hector in the back cowering in a corner frightened, he claims he has seen the Devil.
Gabriella, unfazed, goes off to her night class.
On the subway ride back from class, the train suddenly stops and the creature appears, startling Gabriella as it starts to take on a monstrous version of her room. As she runs away she yells for another passenger to run, but instead he tells her to take his hand and hold on tight; it’s the Doctor with the sonic screwdriver ready for action. With some help from Gabriella they escape, and he tells her to chalk the incident as a bad dream and to pretend they never met.
Later, while the neighborhood is deserted and it’s Halloween, Gabriella approaches the TARDIS and knocks, no answer. She returns to the laundromat where something emerges from the shadows and she’s ready to strike with a baseball bat, but it’s just the Doctor in wearing a strange helmet.
He tells her something is going on and he seems to have knack to land where the trouble is, and she tags along as he suggests the monster they saw was a type of ghost. He puts the helmet on Gabriella which shows her spirit-like creatures that feed off positive energy and in return give back good vibes. Then, they run across darker looking spirits trying to hunt, that telepathically magnify a person’s worst fears and then turn their victims into a physical host and feed on dark emotions.
As they flee and Gabriella succumbs to her fear, she beg the Doctor not to let her die there as one of the creatures starts to host in her, but she tries to control and manager her fears and breaks free, running away. They return to the laundromat and the Doctor explains the vortexes Gabriella saw with Cindy are a bridge from the creature’s world to theirs. He asks Gabriella to keep the laundry machines spinning and jumps through the bridge to stop the creatures from inevitably invading.
As Gabriella defends the laundromat from being broken into by a hosted Cindy, the Doctor finds out where the creatures came from, they were engineered from the harmless positive energy-feeding ones and weaponized, but then revolted against their creators. He offers to take the sympathetic scientist back, but she is then possessed by one of the creatures and the Doctor escapes back to the laundromat. Eventually they are able to save the day and the Doctor ends up caving to Gabriella’s request to travel with him.
He takes her to see an “old friend” Zhe, where they’re caught up in the trouble of a minor shapeshifter who seems to consider themselves the true apprentice, and what starts off as a nice trip of introducing Gabriella to the universe of course goes awry in a bizarre, art-driven side adventure as it’s up to Gabriella’s wits as another artist to keep her out of danger, especially when dealing with binary apprentices out of control.
In Summary:
In a way, Gabriella reminds me of new Ms. Marvel, Kamala. Both are a first generation of immigrant parents in America, dealing with the dichotomy of heritage and old ways vs. the new. Gabby wants more than to just spend her life working for her parents, and the Doctor has come into her life at the fork in the road, much like it was for Rose Tyler, the young shopgirl who was shown a better life. She’s smart, no nonsense, street savvy and brave, definitely the sort of companion for the Tenth Doctor.
The thing that does deter me a little with this volume is that this is supposedly set after “Journey’s End”, where the Doctor makes it clear he will not take on a companion after Donna, and part of that loneliness makes a huge resonating impact on why he refused Lady Christina to travel with him, and more so what ends up happening in “Water of Mars”. I feel like introducing a companion into the story in between these canonical points maybe wasn’t the best time for one. As an avid Whovian this story feels like it would have fit more logically between Martha and Donna, but I digress, such is the large and complex expanded Whoniverse, not even accounting for Big Finish.
I think I liked the first story with the spirits better than the latter, the latter felt a bit abrupt and like a filler to finish off the volume and just a blip. I think the first story could have actually been expanded more as the climax did feel a bit quick. I do like the NYC setting, I like Gabby and her backstory, although I suspect from Zhe’s conversation with the Doctor towards the end Gabby might have some sort of Special/Impossible/Etc. Girl thing the writer might be going for, though I sort of hope they don’t. I like the idea of Gabby as a normal human with aspirations and her own skills that are hers.
The Doctor himself felt genuine enough and like the characterization of the Tenth Doctor, but he seems mostly as a secondary to Gabby in a way and more a catalyst for her story.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: All
Released By: Titan Comics
Release Date: April 1st, 2015
MSRP: $19.99
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