(556) Castrovalva - Part 3

The third episode is where the story really gets going. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the first two episodes weren’t any good but they were more about the Doctor’s instability and running around the TARDIS whereas todays episode is more about the place of Castrovalva itself. The episode starts of with the Doctor not being in the place where Tegan and Nyssa left him. The tension as to just where he is doesn’t last a great amount of time but I suppose that it’s a bit silly to put him in too much danger at this early stage of his run. Anyway whilst I still liked the forest location that was shot, I still have reservations about the model shot that is used. Thankfully the quality improves once we get inside Castrovalva and I like the set which has multiple levels and seems quite large compared to usual sets which seem quite closed in .

The Master doesn’t really feature in this episode until quite close to the end but that doesn’t mean that Anthony Ainley was left doing a crossword or watching cricket but he was doning and white beard and wig to play Portreeve who is the elderly leader of this group and this is where I have to pick up on the weaknesses of the story because I can tell that its clearly Ainley. I don’t know whether it wasn’t so obvious in 1982 but I cant imagine that they were fooled for long. Anyway I like the characters that we meet in Castrovalva. I wasn’t wild about the masks that they were wearing at the beginning of the episode but the buckets that some of them seem to be wearing in later scenes are even worse. I work in a stationary shop and the buckets could easily be sold as bins.

I am surprised at how long Adric and the Master are kept out of this story. It was good in the previous episode because it gave Nyssa and Tegan some screen time because they were newer characters whereas Adric had been in the story for about 12-15 episodes before ‘The Keeper of Traken’. When Adric does make an appearance he does so in what was quite an atmosphericly shot moment because Adric appears in darkness and a solitary light shows his outline. Another shot is when he appears to Nyssa in a mirror which is clearly a CSO shot but I thought it was well done.

This was a more lesuirly paced episode than the previous two, although there is a fair amount of running around in the final few minutes. The cliffhanger is another CSO effect which has a sort of shattered glass effect of different aspects of Castrovalva and shows that its not quite the place that they thought it was. There are a few moments which highlight this and it was clever of Fiona Cumming to do this quite subtltly. Some might say this was an error on her part but it could easily be passed off as a good piece of directing. With one more episode left of Davison’s opening story and I have to say that I am enjoying Castrovalva more than I thought I would.