The Everlasting Summer (comic story)

The Everlasting Summer was a comic story published in Doctor Who Magazine starring the Thirteenth Doctor, Yasmin Khan and Dan Lewis. It was the final strip of the Thirteenth Doctor's tenure, with the concluding chapter being printed a week-and-a-half before her final television story.
== Summary ==
=== Part one ===
Inside the Doctor's TARDIS, Dan picks up a brochure from Alien Getaways, advertising the Gardens of Everlasting Summer with the caption, "Aged over 660? Time to take things easy". Dan jokingly asks the Thirteenth Doctor if she is planning to retire, but she has no interest in peaceful getaways. However, when he and Yaz point out the two-headed crocodiles pictured in the brochure, the Doctor investigates. Concerned by something she sees, she decides that maybe it is time to settle down after all.
Arriving at the manor house where the gardens are located, Yaz greets its owner: a short, blue-grey-skinned humanoid with dark blue striped markings named Custodian Jinpar. He welcomes the trio inside for a tour, complete with the Doctor pretending to be Yaz and Dan's grandmother by being pushed by Dan in a wheelchair while placing covers over her head and knees. Jinpar happily shows them first the recreation room, then the dining area, but the Doctor demands to see the gardens. Despite Jinpar's protests, he lets them see their "perfect" gardens, but the Doctor is highly sceptical.
As Yaz and Dan look around at the many and varied types of beautiful flora, a honeygold flower that Yaz smells suddenly sheds a single petal and Jinpar panics, ordering the travellers back to the house immediately without explanation. As they run down the path, the Doctor leaps out of her wheelchair and sheds her disguise in a push for answers, but Jinpar insists they have no time, so she reluctantly follows. However, Dan is distracted by a rustling from a bush, where a large helpless bee-like creature, acting like and sized similarly to a human baby, makes itself known. Falling for it instantly, Dan offers it his help and promises to take it to the Doctor.
Back in the house, the Doctor, Yaz, and Jinpar are safe behind the doors, although Jinpar refuses to open them back up to Dan's terrified knocking until sunrise due to the danger that is held on the other side. Although the Doctor attempts to sonic her way past, she is interrupted by an elderly man and woman called Gebra and Hurum who recognise the Doctor on sight and declare that "at last we will have our revenge" as they shed their clothes and transform into purple-feathered bird-like creatures with vicious beaks. Meanwhile, Dan continues to call for the Doctor from behind the door, still holding the bee creature as a massive swarm of winged insects close in on him.
=== Part two ===
Dan continues to call for help, but with no answer and the swarm approaching, he decides to head for shelter and runs for the TARDIS outside the manor, letting himself in with his spare key. Inside safely, he nicknames the bee creature Stripe and lets it eat from his picnic basket, but as Dan goes to shut the TARDIS doors, he is terrified to see that his right hand has turned bizarrely withered.
Meanwhile, the Doctor, Yaz, and Jinpar continue to face off with Gebra and Hurum's true forms, who claim to have been stranded for a hundred years thanks to the Doctor's actions. However, she does not recognise them. They remind her that they are Dindrinines, the last survivors of the Fourth Fleet of Dindrinous Beta, and the Doctor tricked them into pretending they were getting help from their people, but she can only say "it sort of rings a bell". This infuriates them further, but the Doctor, losing patience, grabs her spare ball of knitting from her grandmother disguise and ties up their beaks. With them dealt with, the Doctor and Yaz search for another way to find Dan, noting that Jinpar has escaped in the melee. The Doctor promises to find an exit while Yaz uses her police training to get some answers from the residents.
In the dining room, Yaz sits down with some of the aliens and discovers that the events in the garden are passed off as regular maintenance that happens overnight every few decades to a century. Curious, Yaz asks how long they have lived there, but they cannot say, as nothing ever changes inside or out and almost nobody leaves because they are so happy - nobody even gets ill. Remembering the panic when a single petal fell off a flower, Yaz wonders what is going on.
The Doctor continues scrabbling around for an exit that is not already locked and eventually finds a high flap to escape out of. As she does, Gebra and Hurum, back in their elderly human forms, try to grab her to start enacting their revenge, but they can only take her boots as she slips out into the garden in search of Dan. Inside the TARDIS, Dan begins to collapse, wondering what has become of him and wishing that Stripe could understand him, as outside, the Doctor finds her ship completely encased in vines, roots, and plant life.
=== Part three ===
The Doctor surveys the TARDIS, noting that Dan is already inside, and calls to him, but he continues to get weaker. Gebra and Hurum quickly catch up, proudly presenting the Doctor's boots as if they are trophies, and the Doctor pretends to be defeated by this for just long enough to convince them to use their sharp beaks to free the TARDIS. Immediately tricked into believing this would somehow hinder the Doctor, they transform into their real forms and quickly do so.
Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor checks out Dan, noting from his hand that something is wrong with time in the local area, which she suspected when she saw that the plants were identical in every photo of the brochure. She determines to find Jinpar for answers, but encounters a strong wind that forces her, Gebra, and Hurum back inside. The Doctor solemnly notes that time storms are not to be messed with.
Meanwhile, Yaz sneaks around the manor and stumbles upon Jinpar leaving his office unlocked, so she enters to discover a room filled with CCTV camera images. One of them shows a resident, Wrijis Bippy, that Jinpar arranged to meet desperately trying to get back into the house, and Yaz wonders what the nearby "daily reset" lever is for just as Jinpar returns and smashes a vase over her head.
Yaz wakes up the next day, which Jinpar also describes as a whole century later. Now bound to his office chair, she is shown Jinpar's footage of a new generation of beelings emerging so everything can "return to normal again", but he is met instead by another swarm of huge angry wasps. He attempts to manipulate time again to fix them, but Yaz shouts at him to stop upon seeing the Doctor, Dan, Stripe, Gebra, and Hurum leaving the TARDIS now that the time storm has ended. Jinpar explains that the process barely affects long-lived species, but knowing that Dan is only human, Yaz bargains with Jinpar to go and warn him.
Yaz leaves the manor to find that the remains of Wrijis have turned to dust and tries to hurry and find Dan. However, before she can get much further, the time storm starts up anyway, and Yaz begins to artificially age rapidly into an old woman as she cries for the Doctor's help.
=== Part four ===
To the severely weakened Yaz's surprise, the Doctor, Dan, and Gebra run through the storm to help her, and the Doctor gives her a special bracelet she had made to stop the effects of the time winds, which she and her allies are already wearing. Hugging the Doctor, the elderly Yaz learns that the bracelet will not reverse the ageing effects, however, as evidenced by Dan hiding his weakened hand. Deciding to find Jinpar, the second stage of the Doctor's plan starts up: Hurum charges the Doctor's wheelchair carrying a tree trunk at the locked manor doors, busting them open.
Back inside, the Doctor hands her sonic screwdriver to Gebra and Hurum to fend off the giant wasps, saying they will get tired soon. Forcing their way into Jinpar's office, the Doctor demands an explanation. Jinpar insists he is helping his residents; as particularly long-lived species, they cannot cope with the traditional passage of time any more and want an everlasting summer - he provides this by meddling with the time flow, making them happy. He rewinds time every day until it cannot go any further and a century flies by in one go - if a resident cannot survive that, then they die quickly in the resulting time storm, like Wrijis Bippy did.
Jinpar initially refuses to help Yaz and Dan's conditions, insisting that he needs to push on time outside from the winter season he was just forced to stop it at, for the sake of the residents and his beelings. However, Yaz refuses his excuses and forces him to use the time energy to fix them, which he reluctantly does, returning the humans to their rightful ages.
Later, the Doctor explains all to the manor's residents, poignantly advising them to accept the privilege of being able to say goodbye, as endless happiness is impossible. She next tells Gebra and Hurum to let her take them home, as their Dindrinine ship likely simply missed them during the time meddling, and they sheepishly admit they may have "very slightly misjudged" her.
Outside in the newfound wintry landscape of the gardens, Yaz remembers that during their incident with the Preventacles, they had a run-in with wasps; it was likely the ones left over around the picnic hamper that caused the giant wasp invaders. On cue, a swarm of them arrives, but they simply pick up Stripe as one of their own, and Dan is happy to leave him in safe hands.
Before entering the TARDIS, the Doctor uses the experience to consider her mortality. Yaz promises to not let her die alone, and she appreciates it, but adds, "We're all alone in the end... but fear of the dark days mustn't stop us living now." Reaching for a lone flower and handing it to Yaz, they agree that "We've still got a lot of living to do".
== Characters ==
* Thirteenth Doctor
* Dan Lewis
* Yasmin Khan
* Jinpar
* Stripe
* Gebra
* Hurum
* Agnes
* Wrijis Bippy
* Residents
* Sara Kingdom (flashback)
== Worldbuilding ==
* Dan reads an Alien Getaways brochure.
* Dan describes to individuals pictured in the brochure as "two-headed crocodile creatures". Each of their heads have different personalities.
* The wheelchair includes a sticker from Sheffield Seaquarium.
* The manor containing the Gardens of Everlasting Summer features table tennis and chess facilities.
* The Thirteenth Doctor mentions how no garden as perfect, as even Eden had a snake.
* The Doctor points out to Jinpar that ambulatory wheelchair-users are "a thing".
* Dan has run out of food in his coat pockets, only carrying a leftover banana skin. He later feeds Stripe an apple from the TARDIS picnic basket.
* Dan owns his own TARDIS key.
* Yaz nicknames the Doctor "sarge" when she gives her instructions.
== Notes ==
* This was the final Doctor Who Magazine comic story to feature the Thirteenth Doctor. The last words spoken by the Thirteenth Doctor in her comic book tenure are; "Thing is - we're all alone in the end... but fear of the dark days mustn't stop us living now. And we've still got a lot of living to do, Yaz. Right?"
=== Original print details ===
: (Publication with page count and closing captions)
* DWM 580 (6 pages): To be continued!
* DWM 581 (6 pages): To be continued...
* DWM 582 (6 pages): To be continued!
* DWM 583 (6 pages): The End
== Continuity ==
* The Everlasting Summer picks up from where left off, with the Doctor having just recently taken Yaz and Dan on a drama-filled seaside picnic, with their picnic basket still present in the TARDIS control room. The wasps around the basket lead to the giant wasp attack that the Preventacles foresaw.
* Yaz mentions her nani, who was last seen in .
* The Doctor recalls the death of Sara Kingdom by accelerated ageing during the events of .
* The Doctor mentions that she has died alone before, as had been seen in such stories as , , and .
Category:2022 comic stories
Category:Thirteenth Doctor DWM comic stories
Category:Four part comics