Comic Book / Doctor Who (Titan)

In 2014, it was announced that, following the expiry of IDW Publishing's contract to publish licensed Doctor Who Expanded Universe comics in the USA, new Doctor Who comics would be published by Titan Publishing Group, previously best known for their collections of 2000 AD strips. Titan promptly announced not just an ongoing title, but a whole range of them that debuted by year's end. The original three, featuring the Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors, ran for three "years" — each year's issues, roughly, are treated as a complete "season" and renumbered from one — before the line was relaunched in late 2018 to coincide with the TV debut of the Thirteenth Doctor, with only a single ongoing featuring her.

For further details of the ongoing titles, see their individual pages linked at the bottom.

The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor was a three-part 2018 miniseries written by James Peaty that serves as a prelude to the ongoing, with the first part featuring the Tenth Doctor, the second the Eleventh, and the third the Twelfth; each part also has a serialised short story from the Thirteenth Doctor creative team. After that came The Thirteenth Doctor Issue 0, "The Many Lives of Doctor Who" by Richard Dinnick, which features very short stories featuring every earlier Doctor before leading into the ongoing proper.

In addition to the main Doctors, Titan regularly releases miniseries focusing on other Doctors:

Other Doctors

• Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor, a 2015 5-issue miniseries by George Mann and Emma Vieceli, and collected as "A Matter of Life and Death". According to the companions mentioned in the introductory paragraph, this shares a continuity with the Big Finish Eighth Doctor dramas. It pairs Eight with original companion Josie.
• Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor ("Gaze of the Medusa"), a Hinchcliffe-era tribute by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson featuring the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith (2016).
• Doctor Who: The Third Doctor ("The Heralds of Destruction"), a Third Doctor story by Paul Cornell and Christopher Jones, featuring Jo Grant and UNIT, and set between the Doctor's release from his confinement to Earth in "The Three Doctors" and Jo's departure in "The Green Death" (2016-17).
• Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor ("Operation Volcano"), by the era's script editor Andrew Cartmel and one of its subsequently most successful writers, Ben Aaronovitch, with art by Christopher Jones. Features the Seventh Doctor and Ace at a vague point in their timeline, but after "Remembrance of the Daleks" (Gilmore and his team from that story reappear and are familiar with the Doctor and Ace, there is also what may be an allusion to a post-TV-show Seven-Ace Doctor Who Magazine strip story). (2018)
• Doctor Who: Missy ("The Master Plan"), a Villain Protagonist miniseries featuring the Michelle Gomez incarnation of the Master, encountering various incarnations of both themselves and the Doctor. Planned as a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first TV appearance of the Master in "Terror of the Autons". (2021)
• Doctor Who: Origins, a miniseries by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata featuring the Fugitive Doctor, dealing with one of her missions for Division. (2022)

Additionally, the ongoing series also have annual crossover miniseries that bring their Doctors together:

Crossover miniseries

• Four Doctors (2015): Written by Paul Cornell and featuring the Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, and War Doctors alongside the Titan companions in a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the twenty-first century TV series. Set within Year One.
• Supremacy of the Cybermen (2016): A sequel to certain events in the Series 9 finale "Hell Bent" in which Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Twelve confront the cyborgs Four Lines, All Waiting style when they gain the ability to time travel and Make Wrong What Once Went Right; a Milestone Celebration of the 50th anniversary of the villains' first televised appearance, written by George Mann and Cavan Scott. Set within Year Two for Ten, Eleven, and Twelve.
• The Lost Dimension (2017): The Doctors and their companions are challenged when The Void, a sentient dimension, begins to consume their universe. Unlike previous miniseries, this 8-issue, 3-month storyline is a Crisis Crossover of the monthly Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctor titles featuring their regular writer/artist teams; it starts and ends with standalone "Alpha" and "Omega" issues, and also includes three more "Special" one-shots respectively featuring the Ninth Doctor, Rose and Jack; the Fourth Doctor and Romana II; and River Song.
• Time Lord Victorious (2020): The Titan comics part of the multi-media Doctor Who megacrossover event Time Lord Victorious, this miniseries featured mainly the Tenth Doctor with an additional appearance towards the end from the Thirteenth.
• Empire of the Wolf (2021): A miniseries featuring the Eighth and Eleventh Doctors, and two different potential versions of Rose Tyler.
• Doom's Day (2023): The Titan comics part of the multi-media megacrossover event Doom's Day, featuring Missy in her persona as "Doctor Who" from the earlier Missy miniseries, titled internally "A Doctor in the House?". For trope examples, see the main Missy section.

Finally, the Ninth Doctor proved a special case of a miniseries that was extended into a short-lived monthly title.

The Ninth Doctor

• The original Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor miniseries was writen by Cavan Scott; set between "The Doctor Dances" and "Bad Wolf", it followed the Ninth Doctor, Rose Tyler and Captain Jack Harkness dealing with a war between two alien races, the Unon and the Lect. This was collected as the first volume of the Ninth Doctor's ongoing title (as "Weapons of Past Destruction").
• Following the Ninth Doctor's miniseries, Titan gave him an ongoing series of the same name in April 2016, with Cavan Scott returning as writer. In addition to Rose and Jack, the series added an original companion, 1970s (or '80s?) UNIT agent Tara Mishra.
• Though the ongoing series ended with Issue 15, a one-shot "Ninth Doctor Special" tied in to The Lost Dimension miniseries (see above), featuring Madame Vastra and the Silurians.

These comics were initially published in the UK to newsagents as two Anthology Comics called Doctor Who Comic (originally featuring all three ongoing titles, later reduced to the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor comics and Four Doctors) and Tales from the TARDIS (featuring the later Tenth Doctor comics and other miniseries). As of 2022, only Doctor Who Comic remains, publishing the current comic the same week as the US.

Third Doctor comics tropes

The Third Doctor comics include the following tropes:

• Battle in the Center of the Mind:
  • The Doctor and Jo battle the mind of the nanomachines in Jo's unconscious when they try to Grey Goo her.
  • Later, in a double-page spread, a mental struggle between the Doctor and the Master is represented by them having a kung-fu fight.
• Bluff the Imposter: The Brigadier catches the Master impersonating a superior officer by asking after the man's wife with a false name.
• Bondage Is Bad: Salamander creates an unnecessarily kinky-looking ball gag from nanotech when he wants to silence someone.
• Brick Joke: There's a joke about the only people who have access to the Doctor's lab at UNIT HQ being himself and the tea lady. It's later revealed that the Master impersonated the tea lady and bugged it.
• Call-Forward:
  • There are multiple hints at the directionlessness and green impulses that will drive Yates to join the villains in "Invasion of the Dinosaurs".
  • Jo is implied to have first coined the phrase "timey-wimey".
  • Corporal Osgood is seen using an asthma inhaler, confirming his status as a relative of the Osgood from the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors' era.
  • When the Master tries to take over the nanotech, he begins a speech similar to his big speech from the climax of "Logopolis".
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Doctor's first appearance has him suggesting that he is a familiar friend of infamous Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, a joke referring to the controversial line in "The Mind of Evil" when he talks positively about Mao Zedong.
  • Benton mentions Zoe and how, from his perspective, she got into the TARDIS and was never seen again.
• Criminal Doppelgänger: The real villain of the story is Ramón Salamander, the Second Doctor's human Mad Scientist evil double from the 1960s story "The Enemy of the World", who first appears impersonating the Second Doctor.
• Enemy Mine: The Doctor and the Master are forced to team up as usual.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: Salamander intends, as his first move on achieving time travel, to take his nanotechnology to Victorian England and use it to rise to power.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: The Doctor is surprised to discover that Jo's unconscious contains no hidden "dark side" whatsoever.
• Latex Perfection: The Master's masks appear prominently, and are given additional powers as well as an explanation.
• Muggle Power: Salamander is driven by the desire to become the first human to take on the power of the Time Lords.
• Nanomachines: The villain of the story's main tool is a flock of them.
• No One Should Survive That!: Salamander turns out to have survived his brief exposure to the Vortex and to have been pulled out of it along with the TARDIS when it materialised at the start of "The Web of Fear".
• No-Sell: The Brigadier can now No Sell the Master's attempts to control him.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  The Brigadier: The Master got away, using his face as a parachute, and yes, I'm aware how absurd that...
• Perception Filter: The Master applies one to a UNIT helicopter to avoid causing problems in the nineteenth century.
• Reading Your Rights: The Brigadier's No-Sell to the Master is performed while reading him, not the usual UK police arrest formalities, but the Queen's Regulations on the rights of a prisoner of the British Army.
• Running Gag: Salamander is confused about whether he arrived on Earth (during the events of "The Web of Fear") in the 1960s or a later decade.
• Shout-Out:
  • The sky in Jo's unconscious bears the message "IT'S MY PARTY IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS AND IT FREAKS ME OUT", a reference to the famous "It's my happening and it freaks me out!" line from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (and also notably quoted in the original Austin Powers International Man Of Mystery).
  • Salamander's nanotech Power Armour at the end bears a strong resemblance to the battlesuits occasionally assumed by Lex Luthor in Superman comics.
  • The Master's dialogue exchange with the UNIT characters at the start of the fight in the time machine's control room is taken from the spoken-word opening to "Ballroom Blitz" by The Sweet.
  • The illustration of the Vortex includes Kronos from "The Time Monster", a Reaper from "Father's Day", and a Vortisaur from the Big Finish Doctor Who drama Storm Warning.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: The nanomachines respond to the Doctor's speech of welcome to Earth by shooting at him.
• Slave Liberation: The Doctor finally takes control of the nanomachines and releases them on an uninhabited planet to develop on their own.
• Smart People Play Chess: The Doctor and a disguised Master are playing chess at the Doctor's club at the beginning of the story.
• Unexpected Character: At the end of the first issue, the Second Doctor, of all people, shows up. And then, at the end of the third issue, he turns out to be Ramón Salamander in disguise!
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: The final panels show Salamander escaping from his cell with the aid of a few remaining nanomachines, in a Sequel Hook.

Fourth Doctor comics tropes

The Fourth Doctor comics include the following tropes:

• Ancient Astronauts: The Greek legend of the Medusa and possibly those of the Olympian gods turn out to be influenced by the crash of an alien spacecraft which kept the Medusa as prisoner.
• Call-Forward: The Doctor compares the Medusa's petrification powers to those of the Weeping Angels, which he (not having encountered them yet) considers to be possibly a legend.
• Cruel and Unusual Death
  • Professor Odysseus James ends up mocking an approaching Scryclop (which is the size of a giant) with an ancient Homer quote. Unfortunately for Odysseus, since he has been partially turned to stone by the Medusa, the Scryclop obliterates him with one punch alone.
  ""Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans!" What do you blackguards think of that, eh?"
  • For Lady Carstairs, the antagonist, and loyal servant of the Medusa, she ends up being used as a vessel by the Medusa for consciousness transference, resulting in the original Medusa and Lady Carstairs turning to stone, and the newly replenished Medusa to burst out of Lady Carstairs's stone body, destroying it.
• Cyclops: The Medusa's Scryclops servants are one-eyed giants.
• Grand Theft Me: The Medusa finally tries to escape her prison by taking over Lady Carstairs's body.
• I Lied: The Medusa's response when Lady Carstairs reminds her that it promised to solve her partial petrification and prevent her children's deaths.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Medusa is an alien criminal still kept imprisoned by a crashed spacecraft's force field.
• The Slow Path: The Doctor finding Sarah Jane petrified in the nineteenth century renders her petrification a fixed point, so she has to spend two thousand years as a statue.
• Stable Time Loop: The Lamp of Chronos turns out to be a time-looped artifact with no actual origin.
• Taken for Granite: The Medusa turns people to stone to render them immortal and trapped so she can feed on their life force.

Seventh Doctor comic tropes

The Seventh Doctor comics include the following tropes:

• Ancient Conspiracy: The villainous Markarian faction turn out to be yet another group of aliens in the Who universe who have infiltrated and manipulated human society since ancient times.
• Beauty Is Bad: The evil Markarians have genetically-engineered themselves into human beings — particularly good-looking ones, to help them influence human society.
• Call-Back: "Operation Volcano" features the return of the proto-UNIT characters from "Remembrance of the Daleks": Group Captain Gilmore, Professor Jensen, and Allison.
• Call-Forward: Ace's interchange with Allison about the gas during the attack on the Markarian base refers to the notorious "gas" dialogue when the Master massacres the cabinet in "The Sound of Drums".
• Continuity Nod:
  • Ace tells the good Markarian leader that this isn't her first experience with alien mind-melds, a probable reference to her interaction with the Cyberman group mind in Cartmel's Doctor Who Magazine comic story "The Good Soldier", which also took place in a desert on Earth in the third quarter of the twentieth century.
  • "Hill of Beans" has Grotzits as a currency, as referred to by Glitz in "The Mysterious Planet".
  • The Doctor introduces himself to the Vulpanans as "Special Examiner McCrimmon".
• Due to the Dead: The Doctor buries the Markarian that was attached to Pendry in a sacred Aboriginal spot, to ingratiate himself with the good Markarians.
• Gilligan Cut: When Gilmore and Colonel Palmer suspect the Cold War peace movement of being Soviet pawns, the Doctor accuses them of "see[ing] Soviet spies everywhere". Cut to an actual Soviet spy.
• Human Popsicle: Gilmore spends sixty-two years in suspended animation after being accidentally launched into orbit in the Markarian starship.
• Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Daku Darana is an Aboriginal activist with a Cambridge law degree.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Vulpanans copy every Nazi characteristic imaginable.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: In-universe in the First Doctor back-up short, in which we discover that Susan has come up with "Barbarian". Ian doesn't get it and thinks she's insulting human backwardness.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The Markarian natural form is a snake-like creature which is capable of joining with humans by attaching to their spinal cords, and sharing their minds. However, they're the good guys.
• Real Event, Fictional Cause: The UK nuclear test at Maralinga was an attempt by the good Markarian faction to destroy one of the evil faction's starships, which was buried on the site.
• Shout-Out: The Doctor has a knock-out gas gun built into his umbrella.
• Trumplica: The Vulpanan fascist leader is a "President Karde", who has a Donald Trump-esque hairstyle and uses a lot of Trump catchphrases.
• Volcano Lair: The evil Markarians have one on an island off Mexico.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "Hill of Beans" has multiple references to Casablanca, such as the name of the planet, "Domusalba" (Latin for Casablanca), analogies to the Nazi occupation of France, and the final scene being a straight copy of the film's ending with Mags, Loz and Adele as Rick, Ilsa and Victor.

Eighth Doctor comic tropes

The Eighth Doctor comics include the following tropes:

• Actual Pacifist: The Eighth Doctor is strongly characterised as this, and usually manages to find peaceful resolutions.
• Art Initiates Life: The first issue has paintings painted by Josephine Day come to life and terrorise a small town.
• Body Horror: The Silversmith's mooks, which are horrific partial humans or combinations of them created by partial reflections of people.
• Call-Forward: The Eighth Doctor's introduction in the first issue is similar to his introduction in "The Night of the Doctor".
• The Cameo: The Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald have one at the end of Part Five.
  Clara: You're a big softie, really, aren't you?
  The Twelfth Doctor: Me? No. Never. Whatever gave you that idea?
  Clara: Oh, I dunno? Maybe the hint of a tear in your eye. Remembering happy days?
  The Twelfth Doctor: Pfft. It's just cold out here, is all. No one should have to come to Wales in February. Remind me of that next time I'm stupid enough to suggest it.
• Continuity Cavalcade: As well as the original Witherkin, the monsters in Josie's paintings that come to life include Krotons, Ice Warriors, and a Cyberman.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Doctor says that he's always worried by empty theatres because of the chance of being attacked by a homunculus or a giant rat.
  • The Doctor's house where Josie squats is the same cottage the Third Doctor used as a home on Earth in the comic strips published in TV Action in the early 1970s, hence the Eighth Doctor's references to "white hair and frills" having lived there (Compare this image from TV Action◊ with this one from the Eighth Doctor comic◊). Josie refers to it as having been "falling down" when she moved in and thinking it had been abandoned. Presumably it had been empty since the Third Doctor regenerated into the Fourth Doctor and left Earth. It's one of the Doctor's collection of houses, including Smithwood Manor (the house in late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century England that the Doctor owns in the Doctor Who New Adventures and Eighth Doctor Adventures prose continuities) and Nest Cottage (from the Fourth Doctor BBC Audio plays).
• The Corpse Stops Here: The Doctor and Josie find a murdered Bakri, and are immediately accused of killing him.
• Covers Always Lie: The cover of #3 suggests that the Doctor and Josie will end up fighting evil duplicates of themselves, which never actually happens.
• The Fair Folk: The Nixi show all the characteristics of this, but are actually aliens.
• Immortality Immorality: The new bodies created by the Bakri to give rich people extra lifetimes are actually sentient and have their own minds suppressed.
• Magicians Are Wizards: The Silversmith uses a conjuring act as an excuse to use real evil mystical powers to replace audience members with evil duplicates.
• Mirror Universe: An evil parallel of the main universe which is literally behind a mirror.
• Missing Reflection: Evil mirror universe duplicates have no reflection.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Josie's paintings turn out to be animated by a TARDIS spare part in the Doctor's house that he accidentally activated
• Obliviously Evil: The Spherions are desperate to reproduce after their normal hosts were wiped out, and initially don't realise that the Calaxi are sentient lifeforms who shouldn't be used as parasitoid hosts.
• Plant Aliens: The Nixi, who are also capable of animating Earth plants to attack.
• Stable Time Loop: Turns out that the Twelfth Doctor purchased Josie at an auction and brought her into contact with Eight, because he remembered their adventures.
• The Virus: People being hit by the weapons of the Spherions get turned into Spherions.

Ninth Doctor comics tropes

The Ninth Doctor comics include the following tropes:

• Amazon Brigade: The Unon in "Weapons of Past Destruction" are mostly-female temporal warriors.
• Arm Cannon: In "The Bidding War", Addison gets one after being Cyber-converted.
• Auction of Evil: Addison tries to set one up for the Doctor's memories in "The Bidding War". Unfortunately, the Cybermen launch an attack by force before any bidding can occur.
• Bad Habits: During his missing years, Jack spent some time impersonating a priest in seventeenth-century Brazil.
• Beware the Superman: Subverted in "The Transformed" - it's hinted that the empowered people may be being fundamentally morally corrupted but the problem is actually different.
• Beast Man: The Harrigain in "The Bidding War" are hippo people.
• Black Market: The Fluren Temporal Bazaar in "Weapons of Past Destruction" is the Bazaar of the Bizarre version.
• Call-Back:
  • In "The Bidding War", Rose discovers Jack's presence on Nomicae when an Experience Sphere puts her in one of his memories from "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances".
  • Addison was inspired to sell off the Doctor's memories by his offer to do so in "Weapons of Past Destruction".
• Call-Forward:
  • In "Weapons of Past Destruction", Rose believes that the Unon have disintegrated the Doctor when actually it was a violent-looking teleportation. Just as would happen with their places interchanged in "Bad Wolf". Jack has exactly the same experience in "Secret Agent Man"/"The Bidding War".
  • Evja forsees Jack's death, his becoming immortal, and his killing of his own grandson in "Children of Earth".
  • In "Doctormania", Rose creates the phrase "timey wimey".
  • In "Sin Eaters" the Hesguard facility is said to have previously been a Stormcage - possibly the one River Song spent some time locked up in?
  • In "The Bidding War", the Cybermen have the same instant-Cyber-conversion-via-nanotech ability displayed in "Nightmare In Silver".
  • The Shreekers from the Tenth Doctor Titan story "Echo" turn up in "The Bidding War".
• Bond One-Liner: Discussed when Mickey beats up Glom's bee-like minions:
  The Doctor: OK, you know I can't condone that.
  Mickey: The violence, or the fact that I didn't tell them to "buzz off"?
• Church Militant: The Unon think of themselves as such.
• Cliffhanger:
  • There's an inter-story one between "The Transformed" and "Official Secrets" in which Dean the Gargoyle comes out of the punchway in Britain in "Sometime in the 1970s. Or maybe 80s", and his appearance is reported by two UNIT agents to Dr. Harry Sullivan and Sergeant Benton.
  • "The Slaver's Song" ends with an In Medias Res one with the Doctor being arrested for murdering Tara.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The sequence at the Fluren Temporal Bazaar is filled with in-jokes referring to various Doctor Who continuities.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Doctor mentions the Rani and the Corsair when the Unon put him in the Void.
  • In "Hacked", the Doctor takes Rose and Jack to the Eye of Orion and notes that it looks "like Wales".
  • Taggani is said to have been formerly employed by the Braxiatel Collection.
  • The fake "Doctor Who" in "Doctormania" has robot enemies called "Chumbleys", a misspelling of the "Chumblies" from "Galaxy 4", and a flying car that looks like the Third Doctor's "Whomobile" and has the same registration plate.
  • One of the panels in "The Transformed" recapping what Mickey's been up to since "Journeys' End" shows him fighting a Weevil from Torchwood.
  • Mickey says that he and Martha initially thought the Gargoyles were Krillitanes from "School Reunion".
  • The Doctor says that the particularly bad effects from the "punchway" in San Francisco are due to reality weaknesses from the city's history, probably a reference to the events of Doctor Who: The Movie.
  • In the opening sequence of "Official Secrets", Tara's T-shirt appears to say "Bad Wolf", although it isn't shown in full.
  • The Doctor refers to The Astonishing Karkus as a fictional superhero comic in the Who universe.
  • In "Sin Eaters", the rehabilitation system is known as the "Bad Wolf" process.
  • A flashback to the Time War in "The Bidding War" features the Great Vampires from "State of Decay".
  • Rose gets a brief flash of an alternate timeline memory of herself being Cyber-converted in "Supremacy of the Cybermen".
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Addison Delamar, the ruthless social media billionaire in "The Bidding War".
• Defector from Decadence: Lpupiara and Yiara in "The Slaver's Song" left their imperialistic and violent culture in disgust.
• Die or Fly: In "The Transformed", Rose's superpowers kick in when she accidentally falls off a roof.
• Does Not Like Guns: "Weapons of Past Destruction" is set directly after "The Doctor Dances", leading to several arguments between the Doctor and Jack over firearms.
• Electronic Telepathy: The Experience Spheres in "The Bidding War" are a far-future form of social media that allow this.
• Enemy Without: The Hesguard process accidentally creates a superpowered entity with the intelligence and emotions of all the Doctor's dark side.
• Engineered Public Confession: Done to Jasper Corrigan, the Albion Defense leader, in "Official Secrets", with a little re-editing to avoid breaking The Masquerade.
• Explosive Leash: Slist plants a subcutaneous bomb on Rose.
• Fake Defector: In "Official Secrets", Tara appears to be about to break The Masquerade and humiliate UNIT, but actually makes up a convincing story that explains away the monsters and blames Albion Defense for faking them.
• Fangirl: Yani is a parody of the stereotypical 21st-century Doctor Who fangirl.
• Fish People: The Sereia in "The Slaver's Song".
• Fun with Homophones: In "Rhyme or Reason", the Doctor and Rose have to discuss how to defeat the Terileptils in front of them, without the TARDIS translator letting them know what they're up to. They get around it by talking to each other in homophones, which the Terileptils can't understand because their own language doesn't share the same homophones.
  Jest dew watt aye dew!
• Generation Xerox: In "Weapons of Past Destruction", the Unon and the Lect are directly paralleled with the Time Lords and the Daleks respectively.
• Get into Jail Free: The Doctor gets sent to Hesguard by altering police records to show himself as wanted for murdering Tara.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Rose becomes jealous when Tara joins the TARDIS crew and the Doctor seems to get on well with her.
• Have We Met Yet?: The Ninth Doctor accidentally answers a distress signal from a post-"The End of Time" Mickey, and has to prevent him and Rose from meeting.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Rose and Slist end up being the targets of one by the Raxas Alliance.
• It May Help You on Your Quest: In "Weapons of Past Destruction", Rose puts on a bracelet which turns out to be a "tachyon inhibitor" that saves her life when she falls into the Vortex without a TARDIS.
• Just One Second Out of Sync: The Fluren Temporal Bazaar exists in a moment of recycling time before the planet it is on gets destroyed by a supernova.
• Kaiju: "Official Secrets" has them terrorising the West Country.
• Knight Templar: The Unon have good intentions to replace the Time Lords as guardians of the timeline, but like them rapidly become unduly ruthless and arrogant.
• Legendary Impostor: In "Doctormania", the Doctor arrives on a planet to discover that a "Doctor Who" who looks very like him is already a celebrity there. The imposter is a Slitheen.
• Letter Bomb: The Cybermen launch their attack on Addison's auction in "The Bidding War" by arranging to have a "sealed bid" sent in that is actually a package containing a Cybermat.
• Making a Splash: Lpupiara in "The Slaver's Song" can control water.
• Master of Illusion: Yaxley in "Official Secrets" developed this power through a secret military experiment.
• Mistaken for Own Murderer: The superteens in "The Transformed" assume that the Gargoyles have been murdering their fellows - in fact the superpowers lead to mutation and the Gargoyles are the same people.
• The Mole: Tara goes undercover as a Hesguard guard in "Sin Eaters".
• Monumental Damage: In "Official Secrets", Clifton Suspension Bridge gets destroyed by a giant monster.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Jack fights a four-armed mook in "Secret Agent Man".
• Noodle Incident: In "The Bidding War", Tara mentions UNIT once fought off a Cyberman invasion of Halifax without the Doctor.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: The superpowers and mutations in "The Transformed" are due to an irresponsibly-created "punchway", a type of crude artificial wormhole.
• Peace Conference: Slist and Gleda both plan to sabotage one among the members of the Raxas Alliance.
• Pensieve Flashback: This is one power of the Experience Spheres in "The Bidding War".
• Perspective Reversal: Yani fangirls all over the Doctor in the same way that he did all over Charles Dickens in "The Unquiet Dead". He doesn't take it well.
• Pig Latin: In "Rhyme or Reason", Rose attempts to fool the Terileptils by talking to the Doctor about her plan in Pig Latin. Unfortunately the TARDIS translates it for them.
• Private Military Contractors: Albion Defense, the villains of "Official Secrets".
• Proud Warrior Race: Although we don't see a great deal of them, the Harrigain in "The Bidding War" are implied to be one.
• Reality Warping: Josh's power in "Official Secrets", as his father's ability was amplified in him.
• Ret-Gone: The Time Agency has "Eradicator" weapons capable of this.
• The Reveal: The Lect are actually the cyborg survivors of the Excrothians, after the Unon massacred them.
• The Right of a Superior Species: In "The Slaver's Song", Portuguese slavers in early-modern Brazil are very unhappy when alien invaders try to enslave them.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: In "The Slaver's Song", Jack used holographic fake ghosts to keep the neighbours away from his secrets.
• Shout-Out:
  • In "Weapons of Past Destruction", Rose calls her cephalopod temporary employer "Squidward".
  • The Lect's speech patterns are taken from Zen's in Blake's 7.
  • The Doctor says that a gun-toting Jack is "barely even Moore".
  • Yani is said to be a member of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, which is the oldest-established real-world Doctor Who fan organisation.
  • In the same conversation, it's revealed that the "Prohibited Sphere" bookshop referenced in other Titan Doctor Who comics (a reference to Forbidden Planet, a famous real-world comic and SF/fantasy book shop in London) has interstellar branches as well.
  • In "Official Secrets", Rose calls Benton "Sergeant Bilko".
  • In "Sin Eaters", Highsmith, the director of the Hesguard facility for criminal rehabilitation, may be named after the crime writer Patricia Highsmith.
  • Rose compares Hesguard to Arkham Asylum from the Batman franchise.
  • Rose tells Highsmith to "make like Zebedee".
• Sin Eater: The Sin-Eaters focuses the Hesguard Institute's attempt to cure criminals by transferring their negative emotions into inert artificial bodies called sin eaters. Not only does the process fail (the patients inevitably suffer psychotic breaks and commit even worse crimes), when they use it on the Doctor his sin eater comes to life, wakes up all the other sin eaters, and tries to kill everyone on the station.
• Stable Time Loop: In "Weapons of Past Destruction", Jack cues his past self to use his vortex manipulator to jump into the TARDIS and a few seconds back in time, to let Rose into it.
• Superior Successor: In "Official Secrets", Josh Yaxley has much more effective powers than his father.
• Take That!: The operator of the environmentally-destructive and badly-designed "punchway" in "The Transformed", which is set in San Francisco, is the Celestial Hyperloop Corporation. In the real world, "Hyperloop" is a proposed form of maglev vacuum-tube transportation conceived by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and operating from San Francisco to LA, which is mocked by its detractors as an Awesome, but Impractical distraction from a more practical conventional high-speed rail project.
• Talk to the Fist: Harry to the Minister in "Official Secrets", which gets him arrested.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: The Doctor persuades the non-Cyber bidders for his memories in "The Bidding War" to leave by giving them enough of a taste of his memories of the Time War to show them how truly disturbing they are.
• Vampiric Draining: The sin-eaters in "Sin Eaters" are granted this ability through the Doctor sin-eater's intelligence.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: At the end of "The Bidding War", Addison escapes, no longer mentally under the control of the Cybermen but still in a partially-converted state.
• Was Once a Man: The gargoyles in "The Transformed" are mutated humans.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Taggani claims to be teaching the over-confident a lesson about over-estimating how powerful they are. Unfortunately that includes genocide.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Various characters react this way to the Doctor's apparently uncaring acts in "Official Secrets", some of which are actually part of his plan but others of which are genuinely ruthless.

Missy comic tropes

The Missy miniseries includes the following tropes:

• Apologetic Attacker: Missy apologises while beating Yates unconscious.
• Blatant Lies: Missy (pretending to be the Doctor) says that she cries for "whole minutes" when humans die. Really, just about everything she says while trying to play the role is this.
• Call-Back: Missy and the Delgado Master visit the other incarnations of the Doctor and Master in the TV stories:
  • The Thirteenth Doctor and the Dhawan Master in "Spyfall".
  • The Twelfth Doctor and Missy in "The Magician's Apprentice".
  • The Simm Master eating homeless people in "The End of Time".
  • The War Doctor and the pre-pubescent Time War incarnation of the Master from the Year Two Eleventh Doctor comics.
  • The Roberts Master chasing the Eighth Doctor in "Doctor Who: The Movie".
  • The Pratt-Beevers Master and the Ainley Master in "The Keeper of Traken".
  • The Pratt-Beevers Master and the Fourth Doctor in "The Deadly Assassin".
  • The Delgado Master in "Terror of the Autons", with both Masters reminiscing fondly on that adventure.
• Call-Forward: Missy describes the Doctor as a "cheeky little plagiarist" on discovering that Thirteen is female.
• The Cameo: Jo, Yates and the Brig make cameos during the two Masters' visit to Pertwee-era UNIT HQ.
• Continuity Nod: Other prisoners in Stormcage include a Slitheen, a Silent, a Skithra, a Cyberman, and Krasko from "Rosa".
• Everybody Knew Already: The Delgado Master recognised Missy as his future self right from the start. Not like she was really convincing as the Doctor.
• Future Me Scares Me: The Delgado Master is disturbed to see he ends up turning into a man-eating Humanoid Abomination as Simm, and is further displeased by Missy working with the Doctor.
• Grandfather Paradox: Missy and the Delgado Master realise that the Simm Master eating the Delgado Master would have very bad results.
• It Amused Me: Missy's final claim about why she participated in the whole misadventure in the first place.
• Jumping the Gender Barrier: In her cameo, River is very interested in the idea of a female incarnation of the Doctor.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: As in the opening of "World Enough and Time", Missy can only be trolling the audience by identifying herself as "Doctor Who".
• Masquerading As the Unseen: Missy teams up with the Delgado Master pretending to be a future incarnation of the Doctor.
• Noodle Incident: How at some point the Third Doctor arranged for the Delgado Master to be imprisoned in the Stormcage in the 52nd century. (It's not after "Frontier in Space", as the Third Doctor is implied to still be trapped on Earth with a deactivated TARDIS.)
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: The Delgado Master is outraged to hear that River apparently killed the Doctor.
• Pushed at the Monster: Missy knocks a convenient homeless man down near the hunger-crazed Simm Master so that she and the Delgado Master can get away, although she denies it when the latter points this out.
• The Reveal: The Twelfth Doctor has been hiding in the TARDIS all along and sent Missy on the mission to test her capability for redemption.
• Shout-Out: Missy alludes to the song "A Whole New World" from Aladdin.
• Sword Cane: Missy fights the Delgado Master with a sword umbrella.

"A Doctor in the House?" includes the following tropes:

• Bond One-Liner: Doom has a tendency to make them.
• Book Burning: The "Church of Omitted Yesteryear" is a terrorist group that seeks to destroy past culture so that the future can innovate.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the Delgado Master's cameo at Stormcage, he is once again watching children's TV, in this case Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.
  • Administrator Cire refers to Missy taking the Delgado Master away without proper procedure, in the previous miniseries.
• Deadly Force Field: Doom activates the forcefield barrier of Jaxxo's agent's cell to bisect him.
• Fan Convention: The third section of the story takes place at a parody fan convention for far-future fans of Old Earth.
• Hitman with a Heart: All the people Doom kills in the story are at least fairly nasty. And she destroys the Perpetual Topaz rather than let anybody use it.
• MacGuffin: The Perpetual Topaz, a weapon of mass destruction in the form of a jewel.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The nameless sole survivor of a nameless species, who is planning to randomly kill as many other people in the universe as possible.
• Shout-Out:
  • At one point Missy calls Doom a "monocled murderer", referring to the 1986 BBC historical drama The Monocled Mutineer (which happened to be the first big TV success for former Doctor actor Paul McGann).
  • Missy claims to have "added the gruesome to the Grimms".
• Visual Pun: Lord and Lady Prettypaw are New Earth cats. Who are burglars.
• Whole Costume Reference: Missy is wearing a version of the Mad Hatter's costume from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. And the story ends with a tea party.

"Origins" Tropes

The "Origins" miniseries includes the following tropes:

• Batman Cold Open: Two successive ones, one with the Fugitive Doctor encountering a group of children on Earth (first printed as a stand-alone Free Comic Book Day special) and the second with her rescuing a spider-queen's eggs from their evil aunt.
• The Cameo: The First Doctor and Susan are seen arriving on Earth for the first time, apparently subconsciously guided there by the Doctor's suppressed memories.
• Deceptive Disciple: Taslo is actually a more experienced Division agent than she pretends, sent to make sure that the Doctor didn't go "soft".
• Defector from Decadence: The Doctor goes rogue on discovering that Division tried to commit genocide on a Time Lord counter-cultural minority because they didn't approve of them.
• Doesn't Like Guns: The Doctor's TARDIS jettisons the WMDs provided by Division as soon as they take off.
• Fantastic Racism: The Council considers the Time Lord colonists to be "abominations" because they left Gallifrey and regenerated into new forms more appropriate to their homes.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Taslo finally decides to betray Division and help the Doctor save the colonists.
• How We Got Here: The miniseries ends with Division ordering Gat to hunt the Fugitive Doctor.
• Indy Ploy: The Doctor says that her "plan" is to improvise, because plans make you predictable.
• Killer Rabbit: Monstario and his gang are small, cute and evil.
• Naïve Newcomer: Taslo is introduced as a new Division agent straight out of the Academy.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The human children can tell that someone called "Monstario the Devourer" probably isn't trustworthy.
• Shoot Your Mate: The Councillor orders Taslo to shoot the Doctor to prove her loyalty.
• Space Amish: A faction of Time Lords have left Gallifrey to set up back-to-nature colonies on various planets.
• Tracking Device: The Doctor put one in the "trophy" that she gave to the Division Assistant, to find out who he was reporting to.
• Wham Shot: Taslo stabs the alien leader to death... and they regenerate.

For tropes contained in the ongoing series, see their individual pages:

• Doctor Who (Titan): Tenth Doctor
• Doctor Who (Titan): Eleventh Doctor
• Doctor Who (Titan): Twelfth Doctor
• Doctor Who (Titan): Thirteenth Doctor

For tropes contained in the crossover event stories, see their individual pages:

• Doctor Who: Four Doctors
• Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen
• Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension
• Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious
• Doctor Who: Empire of the Wolf