Pyramdis of Mars - Episode 4

The final shot of the previous episode wasn’t mentioned in my review and it’s a good shot of Sutekh with his flashing green eyes. It was a good cliffhanger and it’s a good start to the episode. The first scene between the Doctor and Sutekh is a great scene and its been worth waiting until this moment to see him. It’s not a short scene and instead sometime has been given to set Sutekh up as the villain that he was made out to be in the previous episodes. I was surprised that this scene was so long because I would have expected them to just get on with the action in the final episode. There is one shot of Sutekh which saw him stand up and a hand can be seen sliding out and going behind the chair. This is perhaps one of the most famous scenes in the story and even the show. I can only imagine that it was to prompt Gabriel Woolf to stand up. It’s a funny obvious goof and does slightly undermine the good work that was being done on screen.

What happens in the middle of this episode is that the story moves to Mars and there comes a sequence which seems to be borrowed from ‘Death to the Daleks’ where the scenes move through a series of puzzles and tests. This even gets acknowledged by Sarah at one point. There is a nice logic puzzle that the Doctor has to figure out when he has to try and figure which mummy is telling the truth and decide which button will free Sarah and which would kill her.

There is a fair amount of CSO that is used in this episode and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. One moment where it didn’t work was when Scarman was in the final room and the moving background seemed to blend in with his shirt. It’s been a while since I commented on CSO and so its nice to get back to familiar territory in this review and I think that it worked well on the whole.

I quite liked the idea that there is a time delay which allows the Doctor and Sarah to get back to earth before Sutekh gets there. It means we get one final scene between the Doctor and Sutekh which was just as good as the first. This episode didn’t disappoint and it ended with the house going up in flames which is what was mentioned at the beginning of the story. This is the best story of the season so far and everything about it was great to watch and its not hard to see why this is one of the most popular stories in the classic era of Doctor Who. At this moment this story is the second best story that I have rated on with ‘The Ark in Space’ being in the number one spot.