The Stones of Blood - Episode 3

As this is the 100^th story of Doctor Who I thought that I would look at some stats. Currently, this story has a rating (based on episode one and two) of 7.65 which puts it in joint 5^th place in the chart of Tom Baker stories. The top five stories are Inside the Spaceship (1964), The Deadly Assassin (1976), Mission to the Unknown (1965), An Unearthly Child (1963) & Terror of the Autons (1971). The bottom five are The Space Pirates (1969), The Highlanders (1966), The Myth Makers (1965), The Smugglers (1966) & The Web Planet (1965). The lowest rated story from the 1970’s is The Pirate Planet (1978) which is currently in 82^nd place. Patrick Troughton’s highest rated story is ‘The Invasion’ (1968) which is in 6^th place. The first Dalek story is currently in 49^th place, the first Cyberman story is in 11^th place. In the top 20 stories, Tom Baker currently has 7 stories, Jon Pertwee and William Hartnell have 5 and Patrick Troughton has 3. In the bottom 20, William Hartnell has 10 stories, Patrick Troughton has 8 and Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker both have just one story. Death to the Daleks (1974) and The Pirate Planet (1978) respectively.

Now back to business and I have been enjoying this story a lot and my enjoyment continues. The Doctor and Professor Rumford partnership is a lot of fun to watch and its not difficult to enjoy Rumford’s enthusiasm for what’s going on. With Romana gone (for now), the Doctor and Rumford get to work to try and find Romana and Miss Fey. Sadly K9 has been fixed and appears in the story more than I like.

The action moves to a spaceship in hyperspace and this is where Miss Fey and Romana are. The model of the Hypership is rather impressive. This episode sees the introduction of the Megaera. They are a visual effect and it looks quite good and Tom Baker and Mary Tamm work well to try and keep eye levels just right. They turn up and put the Doctor and Romana on trial. There is a bit of a puzzle here because if Miss Fey had been on Earth for 4000 years then how can she be a prisoner on the ship and living happily on earth? Hopefully this small query will be answered in the next episode but it’s one thing that doesn’t quite make sense. Miss Fey is hovering around the story and doesn’t really do much until the very end when her laugh ends the episode.

There is a death that is shown where a couple camping find two of the Ogri stones outside their tent and when the woman touches it he starts to groan and the screen turns red. This is quite a grim death but this is down to the fact that there is no blood and the death doesn’t happen on screen. It’s a short scene that does seem out of context for the rest of the episode

There is an awful lot of BBC Computer graphics which shows that the 1980’s aren’t too far away. Sadly this is a problem when they use current technology because nearly 40 years later it would look extremely old fashioned. That could be aimed at the stuff we see in today’s Who. This is a good episode and I am still enjoying the story but I don’t think that this episode was as much fun as the previous two. I think that as the story has progressed, the darker tones have disappeared and have been replaced with the bright white hyperspace studio. If memory serves me correctly I have found the stuff with the Megaera to be a bit boring but maybe that will change tomorrow.