Polly the Glot

Polly the Glot is the second story in Collected Comics, and the picture on the cover shows characters from it.

It starts on board a great big space station where Dr Ivan Asimoff, a friendly green alien with four arms and his nose above his eyes, meets his old friend the Doctor and asks for his help with "the 'Save the Zyglot' trust."

In space we see two other aliens (not so friendly ones) in their spaceship capturing a Zyglot, an enormous pink alien, using a "gravity net." They sell it to "the Ringway Carnival."

The manny in the top left panel there is a reference to Rolf Harris and his 'Jake the Peg' routine, which fortunately hasn't dated as badly as some of his material.

Strictly speaking, Polly was a Glot... a subspecies of the Zyglot.

I see what they did there. Dr Asimoff sees Polly, "the only Zyglot in captivity," at the Ringway Carnival.

"Oh, Polly... you're so... beautiful."

he says.

When next he sees the Doctor, Dr Asimoff gets kidnapped by Frobisher at gunpoint. This leads to space headlines in the space newspapers:

"Read all about it! Famous scientist disappears read all about it!"

The Doctor's plan is to demand a ransom from the Zyglot Trust. Dr Asimoff points out

"The Zyglot Trust is broke!"

But the Doctor is one step ahead:

"I suspected that. And as soon as the public find out, they'll be sending in donations from far and wide."

Kidnapping Dr Asimoff is probably a safer plan than releasing a charity single - the Doctor doesn't have a good track record with those.

The plan starts to go wrong when the Dr tells the Doctor the name of the president of the Zyglot Trust:

"His name is Labus. Professor Astro Labus."

Yes, even though we only saw him in the previous story, Astrolabus is back already! What is this, Season Eight or something? The Doctor hallucinates being nomed by Astrolabus's giant mouth and faints (although he claims this was caused by a "post-hypnotic suggestion").

We now cut to "the ninth general meeting of the Save the Zyglot Trust" where Astrolabus is in charge. When he hears that Dr Asimoff has been kidnapped he says

"Stone the flamin' crows! Vous ne dites pas!
I smell a rat here, gentlemen. I smell a big, fat, furry rat... And throw in a penguin for good measure!"

Ooh... a big, fat, furry rat... cat noms! No, wait... he's talking about the Doctor, isn't he? That's a bit harsh... although about as curiously prescient as that remark about "BBC Producers" in The Shape Shifter. (Look, I'm a cat. You have to expect a catty remark from time to time.)

The Doctor takes the TARDIS to the spaceship of the Akkers, the aliens who captured Polly earlier in the story. He, Frobisher and Dr Asimoff go investigating, and soon Frobisher is separated from the other two. He meets two Akkers, Baz and Gordon, and asks them where they keep the Zyglots.

"Ignore him... he's a figment of the imagination."
"But I haven't got an imagination!"
"You're right! Therefore... he must be real!"

They raise the alarm.

There is a very funny scene where the Doctor and Dr Asimoff are confronted by a shape-shifting robot who claims to be "the Defender" of the ship and can transform into a variety of alternative shapes that seem mainly concerned with cleaning, like a sort of proto-Kryten from Red Dwarf. He hits the Doctor with his mop, but then when Dr Asimoff threatens to shoot him with the pewpewpew gun he picked up, the robot surrenders and admits to being the janitor and not "the Defender" after all.

The Doctor and Dr Asimoff go to the ship's bridge and force the Akker captain to release their Zyglot prisoner. The captain threatens to use the gravity net to crush the Zyglot, but the distraction provided by the arrival of the real Defender (who makes a speech about how he is "the real Defender, mind you... not some dumb service robot who thinks he's a whiz with a mop...") allows the two doctors to free the Zyglot.

The Akker captain then confesses the Ringway Carnival is run by somebody called "Astral Arbus"... honestly, he's making the Master's aliases look good here, mew.

Back at the Carnival, Astrolabus says

"Do I hear a vworp? Do I hear two vworps? What? Are they on to me so soon?"

Dr Asimoff and Frobisher come in to his tent to try to capture him...

But Astrolabus captures Frobisher instead, grabbing him and then they both disappear into his magic cabinet.

The Doctor was not there because he was busy freeing Polly, who escapes into space. The Doctor then departs in the TARDIS, leaving Dr Asimoff behind, along with a suitcase full of moneys (the ransom that the Doctor and Frobisher acquired at the end of The Shape Shifter) as a gift for the Zyglot Trust. It may be the proceeds of theft, but it is going to a good cause... we are left to assume that the currency is legal tender where Dr Asimoff is, or is that perhaps another Time Lord gift the Doctor allows him to share in?

Polly the Glot is a lovely little story. The comedic parts work better than the serious parts, perhaps because it is too fast-paced to build up much dramatic tension, but it is still a lot of fun. The art is well-suited to the material, and the alien character designs look better in the colour version of Collected Comics - especially the final 'splash' panel of Polly's escape.