(555) Castrovalva - Part 2

So this episode doesn’t air a week after the previous episode but the very next day. I suppose in this day and age where series are aired daily (mainly on channels like CBS Drama) so I suppose watching in 1982 was a weird kind of feeling. Anyway back to the story and after not being sure of how I was suppose to be feeling, it seems like the story was back on familiar grounds in today episode. The episode starts off with the TARDIS about to reach event one but the way that the Doctor and the others stop this from happening is quite a simple way that isn’t done in a straight forward way and I like that. The Doctor who ends up in a wheelchair manages to stay himself long enough to tell Tegan how to jettison 25% of the TARDIS.

The build up to the moment where the jettison happens is quite good and the idea that this scene doesn’t actually involve the Doctor is something that would have seemed totally out of place in previous regeneration opening stories but somehow this new style allows this to work. The Doctor doesn’t really have much of an impact in this episode really because he’s either rolling around in his wheelchair or holed up in his Zero Cabinet. It seems quite odd that they went to the decision to keep the Doctor so much out of the action. The upside to this is that it means that Nyssa and Tegan get a fair amount of the action which I like.

The location footage looks rather good and reminds me of the filming for ‘The Android Invasion” where the weather looked marvellous and the location itself was lovely to watch and where they filmed todays location is equally good. The only problem with this portion of the episode is the model shot of Castrovalva looks rather poor. That said that is the only thing that I didn’t like in the episode.

The episode ends with the Zero Cabinet being empty after Nyssa and Tegan found some blood which is an ok way to end an episode but I think that the cliffhanger didn’t really work as well as the rest of the episode which I thought was very good from start to finish. The episode never seemed to be slowing down or waiting for something to happen. As soon as it changed direction it did and did it in a seamless way. Two episodes in and the story is working well and I think that things are starting to settle down and the show is managing to survive without Tom Baker.