Terror of the Zygons - Episode 2

The first Zygon adventure continues with as much intrigue and darkness as the first. After the very good cliffhanger the story continues very quickly and before there is time to brief and settle down the Doctor is stood by the Sister. Sarah has disappeared and Sister Lamont is fantastically cold when she is talking to the Doctor. The bit where the Doctor and Sarah have been trapped in the decompression chamber is great because the Doctor puts Sarah into a hypnosis and does the same to himself.

I still don’t think that Tom Baker’s Doctor is suited to dealing with UNIT. In his brief scene with Benton it just doesn’t quite work and I think that it worked much better when it was Jon Pertwee. It’s perhaps the wisest thing that they have decided to pretty much do away with the UNIT stories because with a new Doctor should come a new direction for the show and UNIT was very much a product of the Pertwee era and worked for him but definitely doesn’t work for Baker.

Most of the Zygon mask/headgear does look quite good but it’s the mouth area that it looks a bit ropey. I think that it suffers from the same problem that the Vogans had in the previous story but that’s the only problem with the Zygon costume. From head to toe they look gruesome and they look rather effective. There is a nice shot where we see the real Sister Lamont and the real ‘caber’ and it leads to a good CSO where a Zygon.

I like this episode beause we get to see evil Harry. Of course its not the real Harry but a Zygon duplicate. When he comes in it turns into a nice little action sequence which seemed very much out of the Pertwee era. There’s a great shot of Harry’s eyes starring at the screen which is very similar to Capaldi’s stare in the 50^th Anniversary special. It’s quite a shocking moment when Zygon Harry goes for Sarah with a pitchfork, misses and then gets impaled on it. There is another big sequence which comes when the Doctor is trying to hide from the big creature. Whilst Tom Baker is good and some of the shots of the creature are good, its not a particularly great cliffhanger compared to the previous one. It’s still a solid episode with some great moments but it’s the ending that lets it down. It’s a shame but the opening story to the thirteenth season is one that has lots to enjoy and very little to knock.