| abstract | - Although the Seventh Doctor had previously featured in one full-colour DWM strip before, this was the character's first appearance in the pages of DWM after the magazine permanently moved to a colour strip. As a result it is also the only Seventh Doctor DWM comic to be digitally produced. To those fans who had only begun following the comic strip recently and had not read the New Adventures, the story would likely have made little sense. Coming as it did over seven years since Benny's last appearance in a DWM comic story, and in the middle of the Eighth Doctor's run, the story was surprising for its lack of narrative introductions. The Timewyrm, Puterspace, Benny, and Smithwood Manor all appeared without any narrative explanation. The sudden reappearance of the older Ace in DWM also meant a return to the continuity of even earlier strips, as her very last appearance in the magazine some five years before featured her unambiguous death as a teenager. Readers steeped in the lore of the New Adventures would have understood the strip easily, and as a result cited Ace's re-emergence in DWM as a repudiation of her "blasphemous" death in Ground Zero. The story celebrated the range by reuniting the Seventh Doctor with his first New Adventures foe, the Timewyrm, and included fan-servicing meta-textual elements such as the idea that the Doctor himself wrote all of the New Adventures novels and a panel in featuring a conveniently-placed chessboard in the foreground with the Doctor, out-of-focus, standing behind. Similarly, both Ace and Benny angrily questioned why adventures with with the Doctor "always [had] to be so bloody complicated" — a common criticism of the New Adventures themselves.
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