Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-188432-20130310185635/@comment-188432-20130805191756

My point is not whether you've read it or I've read it or anyone has read it. Rather, I'm curious at this stage whether we've read it closely enough. It's not a "Paul is Dead" search for the obscure, but rather a call for us to be interested in the first, second and last parts — not the bits in the middle that contain the main Za appearance. Indeed, that's not even an apt metaphor, OS25, because "Paul is Dead" was something that you really had to look for by playing the record backward. I'm talking only about using normal comic book reading skills, as explained in Understanding Comics. These aren't terribly advanced skills, but they do require you to do more than go on word balloons.

I found the entire story somewhat confusing, to be honest. There are a lot of panels where substantial doubt is thrown into the mix as to whether what we're seeing is real. After all, Coal Hill School does not actually appear in this comic, despite the fact that several pages in part two appear to be set there. Indeed, we see when the trio step out of the "prison" back onto the Sontaran ship that they pass through the golden effect associated with the psychic metal. Equally, in the same part, psychic metal is described as being "powered by emotion — they use people, turn them into psychic transmitters". That's enough doubt to make me think that when we see Za all a-goldened that we're not really seeing Za at all. Rather, a valid interpretation of events is that we're seeing things drawn from Barbara and Ian's collective memories. I think that the whole psychedelic nature of part four kinda lends itself to that interpretation: they're just traipsing from place to place as if on an LSD trip.

I only rejoined this conversation because someone had spoken for me. I just wanted to say that, in fact, I'm still not on board with the very denotative interpretation that principally you have been driving, OS25, from the very start. Just because people show up and call themselves the Tribe of Gum, I'm really not prepared to believe them — especially because of the reality-bending nature of the central MacGuffin of this plot. If the story weren't based on the chase for psi-metal, I'd be much less on the fence.

But the truth is that I am, based on my disjointed initial read of the story, still scratching my head over this one. Until the trade comes out and I can really study the thing as a singular story, that's probably where my mind will stay.

But there's no barrier on the articles being edited now, and I'm not closely monitoring them. In the earlier stages of this conversation, I had an administrative interest in locking the articles down until the story was completely released. Now that it has been, people can begin the process of examining the whole story and writing articles based on that.

As in the case of every article though, I caution all editors to simply be careful. Write from your best, most objective understanding of the story. Don't write what you think is there, or what other people have told you is there. And, as is always, always, always the case in Doctor Who fiction – never assume that a cliffhanger contains narrative truth.