The Stones of Blood - Episode 4

This final episode of this story does feel slightly different to the previous three episodes. The Doctor is put on trial. The trial is because the Doctor broke a seal which apparently he shouldn’t have done. The Doctor uses the trial to try and discover who Vivien Fey truly is. Fey says who she is pretending to be without anyone mentioning the fact that she wearing silver body paint. The trial (or retrial) seems to be there to allow Tom Baker to be a bit comedic because he puts on his barrister wig on. The problem that I have is that I don’t really care much about this trial stuff. I am much more interested in the plot with Romana and Rumford.

The way that the megara discover who Fey was is done in quite a clever way because it does seem to come out of nowhere. Here punishment is to spend eternity as one of the stones. This seems to tie the story up nicely. I think that the final ten minutes was the best part of the episode because it was the only part that was of any interest and seemed relevant to the story. The trial stuff seemed like padding. It’s almost like David Fisher has got to the beginning of episode four and knows where the episode is going its just the journey that lets the episode down.

The performances were really good. Tom Baker does seem a bit out performed by Beatrix Lehmann. Her enthusiasm has never waivered at any point during the story and I would argue that her performance was the best out of anyone. Tom Baker’s performance has been largely good though I thought that this episode was a bit indulgent and was a bit disappointment. This story was another strong one for Mary Tamm because she was actually doing stuff and wasn’t relying on the Doctor to help her. Susan Engel was superb as Vivien Fey because she plays it like she’s playing Cruella de Vil. Even K9 wasn’t as bad as usual though that might be that because I wasn’t really paying attention to what he was doing.

Doctor Who’s 100^th story (and 15^th anniversary) is a nice adventure that works well really well and its definelty the best story of the season so far in terms of plot, acting and directing. As a season its working in such a way that you wouldn’t have really missed anything if you had come to the show late but at the half way point its moving along nicely and it shows that you can have a season long story arc that will make sense at the end unlike the new series.