Inferno - Episode 2

The second episode of the story continues the pace of the first one and there is a bit of action from the very beginning. The stuff with Slocum was quite good and the idea that no one should touch him otherwise they would be killed. This episode features what was at the time the biggest stunt fall. One of the things that I liked about this episode is the stuff that happened outside because it felt like it gave some depth to the setting. Whereas in ‘The Silurians’ we just got some corridors and a few rooms, we never got location filming to the extent that we get in this story.

During the course of this episode Stahlman gets more and more agitated and becomes infected during this episode. In the case of Slocum, he gets infected by actually touching the slime whereas Stahlman gets infected by touching the container that is heat resistant. This is either a plot error or this means that the slime is more potent than initially suggested. After Slocum had bitten the dust it was time to get more people infected and this happened and it led to some good moments but the people that were infected weren’t really created with connecting with the audience. It felt like to me just a way of passing the time.

I love the line that Jon Pertwee says about wondering whether the slime would be screaming. It’s a rather philosophical idea. Despite the story not really moving on much during the course of these two episodes, I think that Jon Pertwee does brilliantly with what he’s given and that’s having a verbal battle with Stahlman. Unlike the previous episode, it doesn’t take fifteen minutes for Liz to make an appearance. She is quite good in this episode. Which makes a change from what we have seen of her during the course of the season.

Petra and Greg Sutton were two characters that were introduced in the previous episode but I neglected to mention them. Petra is a more interesting character out of the two because of her position. Greg doesn’t really have much point being there really and even as the story progresses, his purpose still confuses me but more of that later. For me the best character in the entire episode is Stahlman. Olaf Pooley was a brilliant piece of casting and is just as good as John Abineri was in the previous story. In fact I would go so far as to say that he is slightly better. At least the character had some development in this episode.

It’s a better episode than the first but it does feel like there is a fair amount of padding before the main part of the story gets going. I think that its still a good story and I know that the best is still to come but there are things that are worth enjoying at the moment.