Frontier in Space - Episode 4

The story starts off with the rather intriguing cliffhanger of the Doctor and the Professor running out of oxygen and I suppose if I am being positive then I would say that it would be intriguing to see how the Doctor would be saved. The way that he was saved was probably not necessarily the way that most people would have expected. Imagine being saved by your nemesis. It must be a horrible feeling for the Doctor and the smugness that the Master must be feeling is clear to see. There is a moment when the Master is reading a list of bogus crimes that the Doctor is supposed to have committed and its funny because its clear that the Master has put some thought into his plan. There is a nice moment when the Master talks about the roles being reversed, this is because obviously the Doctor and Jo visited the Master in ‘The Sea Devils’. One of my favourite scenes in this episode comes when the Doctor goes for a spacewalk. Ok so you can see the strings in some shots but it’s a good attempt on a very miniscule budget. It would have looked in a movie but on the BBC it looked rather good.

For most of the episode it’s just the Doctor, Jo and the Master. It’s only briefly at the beginning and the last couple of minutes that there are other people and it’s one of the things that I liked about this episode because it showed how close these three had gotten over the last couple of years. It’s quite fitting that with this being Delgado’s last story that we should see and perhaps be quite sad about what we are going to miss.

The supporting characters don’t really have much impact in the episode. I suppose they aren’t totally redundant because it makes sense that we have to move from one setting to another and introduce elements for the next episode but really this episode belongs to Delgado, Manning and Pertwee and I cant help but think that Delgado just edges but that’s because he oozes charisma and even though he’s a baddie I still find mself almost wanting him to win and that probably isn’t what Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks were aiming at when they introduced the character of the Master but it is what it is.

The cliffhanger isn’t very good because all that we get is an ogron looking at a computer screen after the Master setting off a homing beacon. If I could change one thing about this episode then it would be this. I think that this episode continues the good work that the previous three episodes had achieved. With two more episodes to go, I still think that there is plenty of mileage left. This is a rare story where six episodes actually work. The writing was good and the directing was equally sound.