The Doctor is threated on all sides, but by whom is what the
information text tells us the Radio Times said for this weeks episode but
presumably it wouldn’t be by the woolly mammoth monster that appeared at the
end of the previous episode. I will be honest and admit that for the first
several minutes of this episode I didn’t really know what was going on. Apart
from splitting the two ships up there isn’t a great deal going on. It does
eventually find its feet and then the story continues and by this point I was
quite bowled over with certain aspects of the story.
I was knocking the models in the previous episode but I
think that the special effects are quite good in this episode and whilst they
might look dated compared to todays Doctor Who but I still think that they look
pretty good. The effect of the Doctor chasing the person who knocked him out in
the previous episode looks good even by today’s standards.
Tryst is quite a pantomime character and if you don’t see
that he is the villain then you are just not trying. Normally I am quite slow
in picking up on this fact and I haven’t seen this story for many years but
even if I hadn’t seen this story before I would have easily guessed that Tryst
was up to no good. Sadly the monsters are still disappointing to look at I
think the more interesting part of the story comes when the monster isn’t on
screen. That is the only aspect really of the episode that doesn’t work for me.
The story shifts tone in this episode when it goes into the CET and that forms
the cliffhanger which I have to say is quite a good one because its like the
Doctor and Romana are going into the unknown.
I thought that the sets were also quite good in this episode
because two simple things were done to make the area that this story is taking
place on seem grander. The first is the Doctor running down several flights of stairs
even though its just the one set. The second instance is when the Doctor is
chasing after someone and running through room after room of passengers even
though it’s the same room and probably the same passengers.
Daker’s character has been drugged at the beginning of the
episode but spends the rest of the episode suffering the side effects and this
is the first instance in Doctor Who where someone is treated in this way. Daker
does give a good performance. The performances in general were quite good and I
have to admit that Alan Bromly has done a good job in these two episodes of
directing it well. It’s not the most ground breaking story ever but I think
considering how badly he handled certain aspects of his previous story that he
has managed (so far) not to mess things up although according to the
information text he didn’t exactly get on with the cast and crew in the way
that a director should.
I think that providing the monsters don’t have as much of an
involvement as they have had in previous episodes then the final two episodes
should be quite good and I think that this story wont be as bad as I have
thought of it in recent years. I think at the moment that this story is better
than ‘The Creature from the Pit’ for reasons that might seem odd to many as
they both feature monsters that don’t work in the way that they were suppose to
but I just think that there are more strong characters compared to the creature
story and that is why I still have high hopes.
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