YMMV / Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A multi-Doctor adventure that features Nine, Ten, Eleven and Twelve, which addresses the fallout of the Doctor exiling Rassilon and features alternate universe scenarios with Cybermen sounds exciting — especially given that the TV series didn't air a regular season in 2016. Unfortunately, this premise is mishandled in several ways:
  • The Doctors never interact with each other; instead it's Four Lines, All Waiting. Not only does Nine continue to be the odd Doctor out in Titan's annual multi-Doctor stories (he only had a cameo in Four Doctors and did not interact with any of the others), this wastes the dramatic potential of the earlier Doctors temporarily finding out 1) Gallifrey stands and 2) what was subsequently done to Twelve — and what he did in response — by his own people.
  • The Twelfth Doctor's decision to exile Rassilon sets up the plot, but there is no discussion or consideration of whether he might have made a better choice given the horrible circumstances of "Hell Bent". And given that one of those better choices might have been, given what the character subsequently does, Twelve executing him, this is a waste of a fascinating ethical dilemma.
  • In a related issue, the death of Clara Oswald and her subsequent living on borrowed time is not mentioned at all in-story, even though all of the characters in Twelve's timeline should have this on their minds.
  • The script is Writing for the Trade action, with no time for anything but basic, established characterization for any of the characters.
  • The ending can't be anything but a Foregone Conclusion of a Reset Button getting pushed, since this is the Doctor Who Expanded Universe. The story still could have examined how the characters are emotionally challenged by the alternate timelines as Four Doctors did, but there are far more characters in this one; there just isn't space or time to give everyone a chance to shine.
  • And thanks to a Schedule Slip many, if not most, readers had to wait a month or longer between issues and were rewarded with a few minutes' worth of plot development for each "line" each time.