Corpse Marker

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Leela to Kaldor City at the heart of a society they visited before: this is where the human population is surrounded by servant robots, and the Company controls all the wealth. Almost everyone in Kaldor City works for the company, and among those people now live Uvanov, Toos and Poul, the survivors of a classified incident on board a sandminer years ago. Just as they are trying to get on with their lives, and have been for years, the Doctor and Leela return just as more robot killings begin, although this time the robots have evolved beyond the Dum, Voc, and SuperVoc designations; they have been made to resemble humans, which will make a killer robot that much more difficult to detect...

YES yes yes! This is what I wanted to see for years. Chris Boucher himself has returned to one of his best stories to flesh out the backstory and give us a bit more on Kaldor City, it's robots, and the Founding Families that bankrupted themselves starting the whole thing, and it's just brilliant. I remember when this one came out my friend Jamie was in the UK and I begged and threatened him to bring me a copy back. The development of the relationship between the Doctor and Leela is put into thebackground for this one as the story demands us to focus on the survivors of Robots of Death and see how the return of the Doctor affects them. Uvanov sees Leela first and almost goes into a fit of hysterics, believing that someone is setting him up and trying to drive him mad, and when he encounters the Doctor he is outright hostile and suspicious... which one really can't blame him for. Poul's relapse into his brokendown state is triggered perfectly, and Toos... well she'd rather just be left to her new successes as a storm mine captain.

Boucher's Kaldor City echoes the setup of Coruscant from the latest three Star Wars films, complete with soaring towers, metal walkways and even a run-down unused old section where you just know bad things are happening. The people who live there are for the most part easygoing where robots are concerned, treating them like the tools they are, but some of the younger set have developed some odd fashion sense exhibited by some who dress like robots, and even a young girl who imitates a robot's walk. Beyond the trappings of the killer robots there are probably other things going on there as well, an entire world that would be fascinating to explore, but this really is the last time Doctor Who goes here, at least for now.

But where Doctor Who doesn't go, others do, and the people at Magic Bullet Productions do just that with their own series of tales set in Kaldor City, called, surprise, Kaldor City. I haven't been able to get my hands on any of these yet so I have no idea what they're about aside from the blurbs on the website. I hear some people say they're crap simply because they didn't like the hat that Fiona was wearing at a DWIN meeting almost a hundred years ago (okay it did look like a bird but I digress), but I'm still curious myself. The joy of them being not linked to the continuing Doctor Who continuity means I can get them anytime I want and enjoy them later, if they're good.



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