Frontier in Space - Episode 5

It could be argued that the previous episode was a interlude in this story but it didn’t feel like one. If you think about it not much really happened because we were suppose to be more focused on what was going on between the Doctor, Jo and the Master, that it didn’t matter what was going on elsewhere because the performances were suppose to distract us. In this penultimate episode the action moves to Draconia where the Doctor, Jo and the Master meet the Emperor. It’s a scene which shows that the Doctor has been here before and this helps to convince the Emperor that the humans aren’t a threat really. It’s a nice scenes which is ended with the Ogrons attacking the Emperor’s chamber but the Doctor manages to convince the Emperor that they have been seeing things. This means that there is no way of the Master pretending that the two sides are fighting each other and he has to rely upon destroying the evidence.

It’s good that we get the President and General Williams back in the story where the Doctor and the Emperor’s son tries to convince them that they should go to the Ogrons world. I like how we get a bit of backstory about General Williams and learn that his attitude was down to a misunderstanding. This is an important moment and a major shift in attitude for the Williams character. It seems that as the Doctor is always drawn to Earth, the show is drawn to a quarry and this is case in this episode buts it’s a brief shot which sees the Master and Jo arrive at the Masters base on the Ogron world.

I think that it’s a great moment when Jo manages to get over the Master trying to hypnotise her like he did in their first adventure. It shows how far the character has developed since her first story and shows how she’s not the weak feeble individual that seemed to only be there because she had relatives in high places. Katy Manning has had a good run of episodes recently. I don’t think that anything special has happened but it just feels that the writing is allowing her character to be more than it use to be. Jon Pertwee’s performance is also very good and his best scene comes in the Emperor’s chamber where he gets to act just as noble as the Draconians.

It feels during this episode that we are building up to something which is a critiscm that I have had of stories over the last season and a half. The episode does that thing that six parters have which is to go off in a different tangent and Malcolm Hulke does that without realising it. It’s a better cliffhanger than the previous one part of me doesn’t want to watch the next episode because of the importance of it.