Frontier in Space - Episode 2

After the interesting set up of the previous episode, this is where things start to get more intriguing. The guards that appear in this episode are quite amusing. It’s hard to find anything menacing about them so quite why the Doctor and Jo obey what they say is questionable. However the thing about the Doctor and Jo is that all they do in this episode is get moved from one cell to another. The supporting characters also just bicker about who is wrong and who is right. It’s clear that someone else is causing all this largely due to the noise that occurs and also because neither side seems like they want this war and so would be reluctant to start it. We all know who’s behind it all but at the time it must have been racing through people’s mind about who it could be.

One of the earlier scenes in this story shows the strong relationship between the Doctor and Jo. There are a couple of cell scenes which show this well and if there is one advantage of these cell scenes is that it gives us more time for these two to talk to each other. When the mind probe is mentioned, I must admit that I am reminded on the moment in ‘The Five Doctors’ where it is mentioned in one of worst delivered lines in TV history.

As I mentioned before, the Draconians are a honourable yet stubborn race. They are rational beings and have their own point of view. I like how it’s the Doctor that gets to interact with them. The Doctor does have a knack of convincing the people he’s talking to that he’s making sense. The scenes at their embassy are memorable to me for no particuarl reason. My best guess is that it doesn’t really seem like they’ve been there very long because it’s just like a normal room that has some mildly intriguing furniture.

There is some erm…interesting location filming as the Doctor and Jo walk along what at the time must have seemed like futuristic buildings but sadly look like the sort of place that they would film Shameless or Benefits Street on. That said the action itself is quite good. The final bit of location filming where the Ogrons are attacking the president’s office (??). The Ogrons somehow manage to find the Doctor and Jo in their cell surprisingly quickly. I think that this shows that the story has moved on and is developing nicely.