The Creature from the Pit - Episode 2

As I get into this story I wonder whether something is going to make me change my opinion and make me say something positive about this serial. Sadly on the basis of these two episodes, that isn’t going to happen. The Wolfweeds which caused the Doctor no harm in the previous episode seem to have incapacitated K9 which I always thought was slightly odd. When the Doctor is hanging onto a rock in the shaft he decided to teach himself Tibetan which I think was a bit of a mistake. Whereas the humour in ‘City of Death’ was spot on in this story its just misplaced.

We get to see the creature in this episode and its….erm….well a bit silly. There’s no getting away from it, it just looks like a part of the male anatomy. It’s a bit difficult to take an alien menace seriously when that’s the only or first thing that comes to mind when it appears on screen. When we see the bigger version of the creature it doesn’t look to bad, sadly its mainly the smaller version that we see

Cast in the story is Geoffrey Bayldon who has appeared in a couple of Big Finish audios including playing the Doctor in the Unbound series. I think that his performance is quite good and seems to work well with the Doctor in his current mood. This is why the Doctor and Organon spend so much time together and I think that despite my misgivings about the humour I think that this is by far the more interesting.

The cliffhanger isn’t quite as good as the previous one but its still a good ending. It’s another instance where the cliffhanger is the best thing about the episode. I still don’t like this story very much and despite this being written by David Fisher and being the last story to be directed by Christopher Barry, I think that this story doesn’t work because it cant quite make up its mind what it wants to be. I don’t really care much about the characters or the story. Despite the visuals and the fact that it doesn’t feel like padding, this is definelty the weakest story of the season so far. The effort that Tom Baker is putting into the story is getting weaker and weaker with every episode.