The final episode of this story
which hasn’t been one of the greatest in Doctor Who. It starts with the sword
fight with Ian. Sadly that’s where the excitement ends because the rest of the
story continues to be a precession of scenes where we are suppose to find
things funny but it doesn’t work. The next time that the story picks up a bit
is when the Doctor is looking over a map of Rome and accidentally sets fire to the
map which Nero is horrified by at first but soon cheers up when he realises
that he could burn Rome to the ground so the senate would back his plans to
rebuild Rome.
The problem with this episode is
that I have lost patience with the story and just think that its neither funny
nor dramatic. The performances are fine but its what they have to do that is
poor. Even William Russell cant save this story and what started off as an
interesting journey at the early start of the story now descends into
nothingness. The moment the fire starts on the map it is when the story is
getting wrapped up and the regulars start to make their way out of Rome and
back to the villa. The shot of Rome up in flames might seem cheap and a bit of
a let down but I think that whilst it might have been good to see something
better but its rather effective and I liked it.
The last shot of Nero is of him
playing his lyre whilst Rome burns which has spawned the phrase. Nero has been
a massive disappointment because unlike Marco Polo, I thought that they could
have done something different with the character and made him a threat in the
story instead of the clown that he was portrayed.
I like it when the regulars are
reunited after narrowly missing each other for the previous episodes. It might
have been a far stretch to believe that they could all have missed each other
whilst almost tripping over each other but that’s the least of the stories
problems and it’s a massive relief that it was only four episodes long. The final scene of the episode is in the
TARDIS and the Doctor says the TARDIS is being dragged down by some force. It’s
a nice way to ensure that people turned in for the next episode as it’s a nice
mystery about what could be powerful enough to do this. I cant deny that Im sad
that this episode is over. It was fun a bit at the beginning but soon became
tiresome and not really what I think Doctor Who should be doing. Historicals
are hard enough to get right without adding the
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