The Creature from the Pit - Episode 3

One thing that I should be thankful for about this story is that it is only four episodes long. Now that I am three episodes in I know that there isn’t much left for me to endure. The episode starts off with the reprise of the less than convincing CSO but does show the Doctor being squashed by the blob and his reaction is not as comedic as when the Wolfweed’s were on him. The Doctor was never going to be killed so the idea of pretending the Doctor is dead is a narrative tool that is somewhat pointless.

Romana’s interaction with Adastra is interesting one because there is a thing called the Blechdal test which sees whether films or television are fair to women and female characters and for most of this story these characters pass this test but for the moments when  the Doctor is mentioned it obviously doesn’t pass the test. When the Doctor has scene with Adastra I think that this is the first time for a while that the Doctor has been serious. I know you may be sick and tired about me mentioning this but the humour is a major issue for me and it just ruins what could have been a decent story. It makes all the serious moments special.

There is a period where I cant make my mind up about the humour and whether the Doctor is being humorous or not and it comes when he is talking to the creature. At least during this period we start to understand a bit more about the creature. Sadly its slightly undermined by the actual design which at certain angles look sillier than usual. According to the production notes, nobody was really happy with the design of the creature and so its impossible to be too hard on anybody because if they had said that it was ok then I would think that they deserved all the critiscm but as they all admit that the creature was rubbish then that’s the end of that.

This episode was better than the previous one but that’s not very difficult. I thought that like the previous episode the cliffhanger was the best part but in this episode there were more interesting moments in this episode and I think that I feel more positive about this episode than yesterday’s episode but I still think that this is a disappointing episode. The only question is whether its more or less disappointing than ‘Destiny of the Daleks’. At the moment I really don’t know.