The Curse of Peladon - Episode 2

The second episode starts off quite good with the cliffhanger of the Agador statue about to squash some of the delegates and then Hepesh pipes up about the curse and the thing about Hepesh is that he’s so willing to use Agador as a reason to end the meeting but its not going to happen. Hepesh is starting to grate on me as he just seems like a rather repetitive character that has a dodgy haircut. The King has fallen for Jo and after the initial opening moments, this scene seems like its from another programme when you look at it in the context of the rest of the episode. It’s easy to believe that the king and Jo would be drawn to each other.

The Ice Warriors start their character development in this episode as they go from being the one accused of things going wrong to be the accusers. In this story they aren’t the baddies but its still odd to think of them as anything but the bad guy. The Doctor thinks that the Ice Warriors are the guilty ones purely on past experiences.

The Doctor doesn’t really have much to do in this episode and the only thing of any worth that he gets to do is stop Arcturus from being killed after his life support is compromised. That’s its really and Jo has a slightly better time when she seems to be investigator and after being locked up manages to escape. It’s a times like this that I wish that Roger Delgado would pop up in some convoluted plot.
The problem is that this story just doesn’t seem to grab me in ways that I would have hoped. It’s not a terrible story by any means but it’s a who-dunnit that doesn’t have much mileage in it. It’s a shame that Brian Hayles has written the sort of story that he did during the Troughton era. There are a lot of talkie bits which are fine but I do find myself getting slightly bored with it and just wanting the Ice Warriors to be better than they are. The cliffhanger is rather good with the Doctor being accused of heresy. I think that it’s the best thing in what was a rather mediocre episode. I worry that any goodness that I felt towards this story is rapidly disappearing and any goodness towards this season. After six episodes it feels like the show is starting to go into auto-pilot.