The Macra Terror - Episode 2

Another day, another Patrick Troughton adventure and another episode where I have to load up iTunes and see whether enough happens in this story to maintain my interest and whether there would be enough to write down here. My track record with audio only episodes doesn’t suggest this but here we go. I think that we should start off with the rather odd cliffhanger resolvement because I was expecting something more than what we got. Also I must have missed something whilst listening to the previous episode because I was surprised when it was made evident that the existence of the Macra is something that is up for debate.

The true nature of the colony is made abundantly clear when they are trying to brainwash them. Only Ben seems to have been affected by it. It’s great seeing Ben like this as its not something that we would expect his character to do. In fact either Ben or Jamie would have worked because Polly wasn’t quite as convincing way back in ‘The War Machines’. In fact it was only now that I realise that the whole companion under the influence of some other force is similar to War Machines which was written by Ian Stuart Black and so he thought that as it worked there so it would work here.

After the light hearted tone of the previous episode we now have the somewhat more dramatic tone of potential brainwashing and a totalitarian style attitude. The main energy of the episode comes from the fact that Ben seems to be working against the Doctor, Polly and Jamie which isn’t something that would happen normally so something is working against them and that is always fun to watch (or in this case listen to). Normally the fact that this doesn’t exist on video would be a source of great frustration however the thing that I have to bear in mind is that there is a good chance the Macra that appears in this episode (and the other two) would look inferior to the CGI one that we would see in the 2007 episode ‘Gridock’. Sometimes less is more and this is definitely one of those cases. I did like this episode and thought that everyone worked really well in it and Michael Craze got to do something substantial during this 25 minutes and it seems that this story is shaping up nicely which isn’t something that I thought I would be saying but there are still two more episodes to go and a lot can happen in 25 minutes.  

On a side note its another short review.