Colony in Space - Episode 1

The penultimate story of this season is one that I have never really had a positive attitude to this story for reasons that will become apparent in future episodes. Unusually the story starts off on Gallifrey with three Timelords talking about the Master taking the Doomsday Weapon. This must have been a quite a shock for viewers in 1971 after having a year and a half of purely earth based stories. This story marks the first time since ‘The War Games’ and the first time during the Pertwee era that a story takes place on another planet.

The Brigadier plays a minimal part in this story due to the fact that it doesn’t take place on earth and he spends the brief scene that he’s in talking about trying to locate the Master and looking into sightings. It’s going to be weird to note have the Brigadier or Benton or Yates hovering around.

Jo’s reaction to finding herself on another planet is quite unusual and what’s good is that at first she thinks that the Doctor has been making things up and her sceptiscm isn’t dented at first when she goes inside the TARDIS and comments that it’s bigger on the inside than the outside.

Mary Ashe is played by Helen Worth who has been playing Gail Platt in Coronation Street for about 800 years. I cant look at her now without wondering what lump of misery is going to surround her now. As a result the character is somewhat redundant and that’s a shame really because something that I wasn’t expecting was to find the characters to be rather interesting. Ok some of them have got rather 1970 hairstyles but that aside the group of characters that are forming a colony do feel like they have been through a lot in the twelve months or so that they have been failing in trying to get a crop started.

I like the shot where the Leesons are standing in front of a giant lizard a nice bit of CSO. It’s probably the best that the CSO is going to be. It’s helped by the fact that its dark and so as a result it doesn’t look too much like a bloke standing infront of a blue/green/yellow sceen.

The cliffhanger isn’t bad but its helped by the fact that it seems to have been sped up. After seeing the Leeson’s scarred of something that clearly wasn’t the lizard before they died it is good that we see what it must have been about to squash the Doctor. Of course we know he’s not going to be squashed but compared to some cliffhangers that we have had recently its not too bad.

I’m still not convinced that I’m going to enjoy this story but I am hoping that this will change once Roger Delgado makes an appearance. It’s a perfectly fine opening episode and its probably the novelty of it being on another planet that lifts this episode above other opening episodes.