Carnival of Monsters: Episode 4

The final episode sees the two plot strands finally meet with the Doctor escaping the scope and then growing. The main point of this episode is to try and get Jo out of the scope before it goes caput. This is a relatively straight forward part but it’s stretched out but it’s done well and the whole episode moves along at a good pace and Barry Letts has done a good job.

I haven’t mentioned Shirna at all in these episode reviews so far and that largely because the character hasn’t been aprticuarly interesting. All she has done in these four episodes is stand behind Vorg and whine. I think that Vorg would have been better off on his own. I like how Vorg goes from just a harmless entertainer to a terrible human being with just one speech by the Master. I know that he was always like this but it took the Doctor to make it clear on screen. Though this is slightly devalued when we learn that Vorg won it. The Drashig escaping from the scope should have been an epic moment in the story sadly, it was ruined by the CSO. It’s a shame that they Drashig’s wont feature in any more Doctor Who stories as apart from a few shots, they were a simple and well realised creation.

I have found the relationship between Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning to be on par with Frazer Hines and Patrick Troughton. Whenever I think of the third Doctor, I always think of Jo Grant and there’s a good reason for that. There have been several moments when the best thing in the episode has been there dialogue. At times I have felt that their friendship wasn’t acting and that they were delighted to be in each others company.

Carnival of Monsters is one of those stories that is better than I have thought. Yes the grey peoples make up is rather bad and the CSO is largely a bad thing for the story but the rest of it works well and I think that for the Doctor’s first adventure without the Timelords’ involvement is a promising start to this era of Doctor Who and the best thing about reaching the end of this story is that the next twelve episodes are going to be great.

If you had asked me before I started to watch the Pertwee stories, I would have rated Carnival of Monsters as one of the weakest stories however these four episodes gets an average rating of 7.48 with The Mind of Evil (7.47), The Curse of Peladon & The Claws of Axos (both 7.45), The Time Monster (7.44), Colony in Space (7.41), The Mutants (7.39) and Day of the Daleks (7.33) rated worse. Also the Cybermen have been missing for 109 episodes, The Daleks have been busy exterminating for 29 episodes now, the Ice Warriors have been absent for 25 episodes and the Master has been away putting together convoluted plans for 25 episodes.