As the first - and last - two-part Doctor Who story for some considerable time, 'The Sontaran Experiment' works well. Despite one or two tenuous plot points, the story generally holds together well, and with its themes of torture and sadism it continues in the adult theme established by 'The Ark in Space'. 

Firstly, I'll just address the aforementioned tenuous plot points. The only real one is the ease with which the Sontarans back down when the Doctor tells the General that humanity is ready for their invasion fleet and will destroy it; this is undoubtedly due to time constraints however, and the script does address it by noting that the Sontarans are extremely methodical (and they're undoubtedly fighting the Rutans on another front, so perhaps it does make sense that they dare not risk it). The other weak plot point isn't actually an issue in my opinion, but is mentioned in The Discontinuity Guide, so I thought I'd address it. This point is simply that if Earth is abandoned, then there is no need for Styre to test humans anyway. In fact, I disagree; the script informs us that human colonies control "half the galaxy" and the Sontarans are planning a widespread invasion of the entire galaxy, not just Earth. Since this would obviously bring them into conflict with humanity, it makes sense of Styre's ghastly project and since Earth is abandoned it is makes a sensibly secluded location for his experiments.

These debatable issues aside, 'The Sontaran Experiment' is a well-plotted, well-placed and effective little story. The return of the Sontarans is more than welcome and Styre is an excellent villain, Kevin Lindsay once more donning a Sontaran costume to great effect. Whilst I prefer Linx's more closely fitting mask, Styre's is nonetheless impressive and Lindsay is superb as the Field-Major in every aspect. Although he is another Sontaran, Styre is a very different character from Linx; whereas Linx was ruthless and callous, he was an angel compared with the utterly sadistic Styre, whose pleasure in his work seems to extend beyond mere professionalism (from his point of view, he should probably have killed Sarah immediately, but decides to torture her to death instead). Lindsay very well conveys Styre's casual cruelty and also his brutality; the fight scene between Styre and the Doctor is rather good, despite Terry Walsh standing in for the injured Baker, with Styre lashing out with a machete with vicious rage. 

The regulars are up to their usual standards, with highpoints including Harry's utter Fury at Styre's cruelty towards both the dehydrated Galsec colonist and the seemingly dead Sarah; until the Doctor stops him he is determined to go after Styre regardless of the danger. Another great moment is the first meeting between Styre and the Doctor, when Tom Baker delivers the line "you unspeakable abomination" with such conviction that he seems to genuinely loathe his opponent. It is perhaps not the easiest of insults to make sound convincing, but he manages it with ease. 

Completing the ensemble, we have the Galsec colonists, and there isn't a bad performance amongst them. The decision to play them with South African accents is a good one, making a nice change from humans of the future speaking with an English accent. Their costumes are impressive as well, since they look convincingly worn and tatty, as they should do after days spent rough in the wilderness. Pete Rutherford is convincingly tormented as Roth, and Glyn Jones' performance is almost good enough to compensate the fact that he penned the dire 'The Space Museum'! Peter Walshe is impressively twitchy as the nervous Erak, and Donald Douglas completes the group as the treacherous Vural, playing the character like a natural. 

Basically 'The Sontaran Experiment' is a brief but enjoyable story, and benefits from superb location work and solid direction (even Styre's robot, whilst suspiciously flimsy-looking, works adequately). It maintains the high quality of 'The Ark in Space' and nicely bridges the gap between that 

All things considered, I am not a fan of Terrance Dicks. Before the advent of video, when my only knowledge of old Doctor Who stories came from Target novelisations, I always preferred those written by Malcolm Hulke or (especially) Ian Marter, finding Dicks' to be overly simplistic and lacking in depth. His television stories are variable, the better ones being those on which he collaborated with another writer ('The War Games') or was heavily script edited ('The Brain of Morbius'). 'Robot' in some ways demonstrates his shortcomings as a writer, but on the other hand it succeeds rather well in introducing both a new Doctor and a new companion. 

Conceptually, 'Robot' makes a great deal of sense, in that it introduces the new Doctor by surrounding him with the trappings of the old; UNIT plays a significant role in 'Robot' and this highlights the differences between the performances of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. There is a tendency amongst Doctor Who fans to favour the Doctor they grew up with, which in my case is Peter Davison, but from the moment I started buying Doctor Who videos Tom Baker became, and remains, my favourite. He makes an immediate impression. Although I dislike things about the Pertwee era, Jon Pertwee's performance isn't one of them; after his dignified, almost establishment figure, Baker needed to establish himself as a distinct character, and he does so magnificently; he's incredibly eccentric from the start, with his brick-chopping, running on the spot, and ludicrous costumes, but he's also commanding and fiercely intelligent. Recovering from his regeneration far more quickly than his predecessor he is able to establish his character by the end of Episode One and the scene in which he examines the pulverized dandelion showcases his intellectual prowess. He deduces far more quickly than anybody else the nature of the threat facing them from only a handful of clues (the Brigadier suspects foreign powers or alien invaders) and is quick to realize Kettlewell's involvement. His clowning, rather like Troughton's, hides a lightening fast mind, but unlike Troughton he is possessed by a manic energy, as demonstrated by his entry into the Scientific Reform Society meeting (he creates the impression that he is a buffoon, only to quickly overcome the off-guard, erm, guard) and his brief clowning on stage during the meeting even wins over members of the audience despite the fact that he threatens their plans. His line "There's no point in being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes?" perhaps best sums up this new Doctor, and of course his offering of a jelly baby to the distraught Sarah. 

The other new regular is Harry Sullivan, also making an immediate impression. Initially, he demonstrates his usefulness as a comic foil to Baker's Doctor, most notably during the scene in which the Doctor presses Harry's stethoscope to his chest and he hears two heartbeats; the expression on his face speaks volumes. Despite his initial buffoonery however, he also proves to be more than just an imbecile; he quickly accepts that the Doctor's eccentricity is going to leave him baffled, as he wry smile as he later presses the stethoscope to both sides of his own chest indicates. By the end of the story, he gets a great moment as he and the Doctor drive towards the robot in Bessie, and they joke about the fact that their problem seems to have grown. It suggests an easy friendship and establishes Harry and the Doctor almost as a double act. In general, Harry is hugely likeable; he's old fashioned almost to the point of chauvinism, but big-hearted and well meaning with it, and Ian Marter plays the part to perfection. He also gets to play James Bond, which he clearly relishes, even if he does get caught. 

The other regular also gets plenty to do in a story, which exploits her investigative skills very well. She infiltrates Think Tank and quickly deduces the significance of the patch of oil on the floor, and she stands up bravely to the icy Hilda Winters when Winters nastily offers a further demonstration of K1; Sarah is clearly terrified by the idea but accepts the invitation nonetheless. Most significantly of course, Sarah's compassion brings the robot to trust her, which allows her to save the Doctor's life at the start of Episode Three. Sladen quickly establishes a rapport with both Baker and Marter, establishing the dynamic of the new team. 

UNIT, returning for one of its final appearances, also does rather well out of the story. Although not back to the heights he reached during Season Seven, the Brigadier is nevertheless back on form to a degree, regaining some of the authority of his early appearances. As in his later appearances with Pertwee, the script makes him look slightly dim in order to allow the Doctor to explain the plot, but he's impressively commanding when in action in Episodes Three and Four, especially when dealing with Miss Winters; Courtney seems genuinely horrified by the situation in Episode Four as he pulls a gun on Winters whilst the countdown to nuclear war ticks away. And the newly promoted Mr. Benton also gets some great moments, most notably when he gives the Doctor the idea to use Kettlewell's metal virus and thus finally destroy the robot. 

Then we have the robot itself. The actual costume is very effective, ingeniously designed so that it manages to avoid looking like a man in a costume. The actual characterisation of the robot also works, largely due to its interaction with Sarah and its tortured persona. Artificial intelligences have become rather clichйd, and in Doctor Who we have already had a least two, in the megalomaniac forms of WOTAN and BOSS, but the emphasis here is rather different. Unfortunately, it is also here that the story starts to fall down; firstly after Kettlewell's death, the robot becomes just another ranting madman, albeit a rather novel one, and the final episode degenerates into a typical runaround after Hilda Winters is arrested by UNIT. Secondly, and most annoyingly, it astonishes that Terrance Dicks, a man who was part of the Doctor Who for the previous several years, would be so stupid as to incorporate into his script the Attack of the Fifty-Foot Robot, an idea that could only realistically be achieved by the dreaded CSO. This immediately results in an effects nightmare, as first parts of the CSO robot vanish as it grows larger, and then we are presented with a rag-doll Sarah. The toy tank at the end of Episode Three is bad enough, but the toy companion is unforgivable. I don't usually judge Doctor Who by its special effects, but the whole concept is unnecessary here, adding little to the plot since the robot is already virtually indestructible. Since Christopher Barry's direction elsewhere in the story is rather good (especially the scene in Episode One as the camera moves through the security system as the Brigadier describes it in voice-over), this hamstringing of the production is especially disappointing. 

The villains are rather mixed. Patricia Maynard's icy Miss Winters is very good, but her assistant Jellicoe is utterly forgettable. Moreover, the motives of the Scientific Reform Society are rather dubious; given that they want to make a better world, their obvious willingness to plunge it into nuclear holocaust beggars belief. In addition, that food store in the bunker must be well stocked; a global nuclear catastrophe would render the planet largely uninhabitable for decades at least. Kettlewell's motivation is even more ill conceived; leaving aside Edward Burnham's performance of a ludicrously stereotypical mad Professor, his attitude to the robot doesn't make much sense. Even when he is alone with the robot, he frets over the treatment inflicted by Winters and seems genuinely horrified by it, despite having provided the necessary technical know-how required to reprogram it and being party to his allies' actions. His eventually revelation as a villain seems to have crow-barred into the story simply to provide a plot twist, and most unbelievably of all, despite his apparently long association with Hilda Winters and his full knowledge of their intentions, he seems not to have considered the potential consequences of helping her to obtain the nuclear launch codes. The plot also falls down in regards to the disintegrator gun; as The Discontinuity Guide points out, the Scientific Reform Society goes to great lengths to obtain the gun, just to use it to open a safe. Whilst the script tries to compensate for this with the unlikely revelation that the safe is otherwise indestructible, the plot would have been better served had they simply had the robot force it open. 

Despite these drawbacks, 'Robot' succeeds as a introduction for Tom Baker and at four action-packed episodes is rather refreshing after Pertwee's last two bloated stories. More to the point, 'Robot' establishes the new TARDIS team and paves the way for arguable Season Twelve's finest story, as Doctor Who's greatest script-writer makes a welcome return…

Allow me to quickly dispel any doubts about the tone of this review: I would sooner eat my own spleen than watch 'Revenge of the Cybermen' again any time soon. After a largely excellent first season (for all its faults, 'Robot' works reasonably well as an introductory vehicle), it is painful to see Baker saddled with such drivel as this, and on top of that I find myself trying hard to forget that my favourite Doctor Who writer had a fairly large hand in scripting it, since Gerry Davis' scripts apparently needed considerably reworking. 

There are two good things about 'Revenge of the Cybermen' (three, if you include the regulars); firstly, if you are a continuity obsessed fanboy you can amuse yourself by thinking up imaginative theories for why the Seal of Rassilon decorates Voga that amount to more than just "Roger Murray-Leach was the designer on 'The Deadly Assassin' as well". The second is that the Nerva Beacon sets are pretty good, but since I said that about them when they were used in 'The Ark in Space', this is hardly news. I should also mention the regulars; Harry and Sarah get comparatively little to do, but the Doctor is generally on form, and I do like the scene when he bellows "Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!" He gets some other good moments too, such as when Sarah tells him that it is good to see him and he looks her wide eyed and asks "Is it?"

Regrettably however, everything else is utter shite. The plot is mind-bogglingly unoriginal, consisting in large parts of a sort reprise of Gerry Davis' greatest hits. Or to be more accurate, 'The Moonbase' and 'The Wheel in Space'. Thus, we have Cybermats infiltrating a space station and killing people with a virus that produces a network of lines beneath the skin, before the Cybermen turn up half-way through. Despite their own flaws, both of those stories managed to be memorably creepy, due to decent direction and the fact that they didn't have the phrase "the Cybermen" in their titles. Having thus eliminated any sense of surprise whatsoever, the writers seem to decide not to bother with suspense (it would still have been possible - a Cyberman puts in an appearance in Episode One of 'The Moonbase', for example). Despite a promising early sequence of the corpse-strewn Beacon, the plot becomes mind-numbingly banal after five minutes, the Doctor explaining that the threat facing them is the Cybermen in a manner that suggests he's breaking the news of impending light drizzle. Kellman's villainy is so obvious from the very beginning, that the viewer might be forgiven for expecting a twist to reveal that he is actually entirely blameless and a really nice chap. Even the fact that Kellman is a double agent, secretly working for the Vogans, is signposted early on. Jeremy Wilkin is almost reasonable as Kellman, but seems to have got bored with the script, and decided to abandon subtlety, smirking in a naughty way throughout, just in case we haven't worked out that he's a villain. Absurdly, even his costume is villainous, prominently featuring a trim polo neck that creates the impression of a feeble attempt to impersonate a James Bond villain. And just to make certain that the viewer won't be traumatized by the shock of any interesting developments, we get a tepid cameo of the Cybermen on board their ship in Episode One, with the Cyberleader amusingly giving hand signals to two Cybermen who are looking in entirely the opposite direction. 

Once the Cybermen actually appear, the first time viewer might be expecting things to improve. Think again, novices; Christopher Robbie has other ideas! There have been lapses in the portrayal of the Cybermen as emotionless creatures before (witness the sarcastic Cyberman in 'The Moonbase'), but Robbie just takes the piss. His posing Cyberleader with his hands on his hips struts arrogantly about, displaying almost every emotion known to humanity and delivering dodgy lines in a strange (but crap) accent. Any sense of intimidation that the Cybermen once had goes out of the window as the Cyberleader talks of impressive spectacles in a booming and extravagant tone of voice and playful tickles the Doctor's collar-bones in Episode Four (perhaps Tom hadn't fully recovered from the broken collar-bone he received during the filming of 'The Sontaran Experiment' and asked Christopher if he knew anything about physiotherapy. Or perhaps not). The other Cybermen are almost as unimpressive, the Director foolishly having elected to let the actors themselves provide the voices, which are the most awful of any Cybermen voices from the entire series. The Cybermats also suffer; once visually effective (albeit not very scary) radio-controlled props, they have been replaced by CSOed sock-puppets that hump actors' chests like overexcited dogs. 

Having recycled large chunks of plots already, Davis decides to give the Cybermen a weakness just like in 'The Tenth Planet' and 'The Moonbase'. The explanation for why gold is lethal to Cybermen (it plates their breathing apparatus) is a bit silly, but just about passable; unfortunately, Davis then seems to ignore it and gold quickly becomes to Cybermen what garlic is to a vampire. Suddenly, gold affects their radar, and small pieces of gold thrown in the general direction of a Cybermat will quickly disable the little fella. Luckily for the Cybermen, although the Vogans remember that their planet was blown up because gold is fatal to Cybermen, they are too stupid to actually exploit this fact when Cybermen visit Voga, and just get themselves shot instead. The Cybermen shouldn't get smug though; they're stupid enough to let the Doctor tie Sarah up in Episode Four without checking the knots themselves

The Vogans are not a particularly impressive race, except for the fact that despite having fairly limited technology they can maintain atmosphere and gravity in small lump of rock, and the masks provided don't help matters. Vorus and Tyrum don't look too bad, but the actors playing the other Vogans are given static and tacky masks that give a look of perpetual surprise. Amusingly, the city militia Vogans also wear dressing gowns and have unkempt hair, diverting attention away from the plot by allowing one to ponder exactly what surprised them. They are such a dull race that it is very difficult to care whether they get blown up or not (bit like the Dulcians in fact). To add insult to injury, the two most prominent Vogans, Vorus and Tyrum, are played by a pair of highly accomplished actors, in the shape of David Collings and Kevin Stoney (who, like the Cybermen, last appeared in 'The Invasion', where he was far more impressive), who seem to be half asleep throughout. This seems to be a recurring theme here, since William Marlowe, who was very impressive as Mailer in 'The Mind of Evil', also seems bored as Lester, as does Ronald Leigh-Hunt, who last appeared in 'The Seeds of Death' as Commander Radnor, as Stevenson. 

In short, 'Revenge of the Cybermen' is crap. And I haven't even mentioned the massive plot hole of the transmat's miracle cure, which as The Discontinuity Guide points out should, if it can expel poison from people, leave them stark-bollock naked and mangle Cybermen. And remove the millions of beneficial gut bacteria present in humans. And, just possibly, remove the plot.

What should or could have been a promising story was let down by a combination of things. After the okayish Destiny of the Daleks and the brilliant City of Death, I felt let down somewhat by the revelation that the Creature in Of The Pit was actually a good-natured monster - I like monsters to be monsters. And then there was the Nightmare of Eden.

What most let it down was the downright comic way the mandrels were dealt with in part 4, reduced to shaggy dogs following a tin whistle. The humour in the show had by now really reached a ridiculous level, and I felt that sending up the mandrels was really sending up the show itself. The mandrels themselves looked quite cool, I thought. Okay, they had flares but also wonderful green glowing eyes and corrugated shells for mouths, and at least their claws looked quite fierce. The problem was making the audience laugh at what had been up till that point a serious sci-fi show, by demeaning not only the monsters but the Doctor himself. 'My arms my legs, my everything,' indeed! Tom Baker's character had sunk to previously un plummeted depths with the sheer over the topness of his performance in the cet machine and his hamming it up was cringe-inducing. Oh, Doctor! I like a little humour and odd quip, sure, but this pudding was so over -egged it was more egg then pudding. In fact, I once heard that Tom Baker once wanted the cybermen to do Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers type dancing and to use that idea in a show. Is it possible to even imagine anyone taking dr who seriously after that, and I wonder how much of the mandrel's swan song was his idea.

The two customs men, Fisk and Costa, were made a bit more ludicrous than they should have been. Captain Rigg was excellent throughout but after he was shot down like a dog in part 3, crazed on vraxoin, nobody seemed to care about him afterwards. He was a good man who met a thoroughly undeserved end and all Romana felt was relief once he'd been shot. I dunno. Someone should have cared!

The Doctor's famous contempt scene towards Trist at the end didn't work - okay he was a drug dealer but he thought he was a goody, protecting endangered animals and suchlike, and he didn't even shoot anyone! Well, apart from Stott and can anyone blame him for that? I just felt that other foes that the fourth doctor had dealt with were far more deserving of the rough edge of his tongue, and as for his gall in using such (for the doctor) shocking contempt so soon after his clowning around scene, just beggared belief.These two very different aspects of the doctor should not even have been in the same story, let alone the same episode. I know drugs are evil, man, and the doctor is a role model, but still.

So basically, what started out as a very promising story in my opinion fell a little flat. Take out a little contempt, and a great deal of Michael Barrymore-type showing off from the Doctor and do something else with the mandrels and it would all have been better. But it would not have been the Nightmare of Eden.

This was undoubtedly the most portentous DW story I had ever seen (pretentious even? Surely not!), featuring mathematics, physics, entropy and Aldous Huxley - all things I knew nothing about. So much of this story went over my head, but even then I thought it was good. The Doctor had changed from a clown to a sombre, craggy faced figure in a wonderful burgundy costume - was this the same person who had had such dire adventures as the Invasion of Time and Underworld, who had hammed it up shamelessly in stories like the Horns of Nimon. Now he is a dignified time traveller once again, but a little too late....

The background music sets a nice sombre tone, especially when Logopolis starts to fall down around the main cast, and the sets look superb. The real attraction of the story, however, is the Master. I love having old baddies come back on the show and who better, really, to cause the fourth Doctor's downfall - though I did think the Black Guardian might have made an appearance. Actually he does but, well, you know what I mean.

After taking over Tremas in the shock ending to Traken, we don't actually see the Master in the first two episodes here. He kills people, chuckles quite a bit, but is not seen. This is good, brings out the tension. But his eventual appearance in part three - dear oh dear! Okay, he looked the part - beard, gloves, dressed in black, etc, I even liked the penguin suit and his voice was chilling in a toneless sort of way. Not unlike the War Lord's voice, another excellent baddie. But the Master just keeps laughing and chuckling, when the Tardis is shrunk and when he is controlling the CVE - it is way over the top and you just want someone to jab him with a sharp stick. But, that aside, he is a true villain and I loved his TCE gun - he shrunk people, humans and Logopolitans alike, with cheerful indifference although his motives were a tad baffling at first. I didn't know about the Numbers, or suchlike.

So, a wonderful swan song for a Doctor I had grown up with for so long I couldn't remember the last one. And thank heavens the Tardis interiors looked like the console room - no more YMCA type sports centres!

God help me, and please don't run in the other direction when I tell you this, I'm the world's biggest fan of Nightmare of Eden. Unabashedly, unapologetically so. It's my favorite Doctor Who story, and when I say that to people who know me, even the ones who have known this fact for a long time, they usually turn their noses and scoff and shake their heads. How on earth could I love such a story that features monsters with flairs? One with such a hammy acting job with a terrible accent? Or, here's the big one, a story that features the immortal line, "Oh, my arms, my legs, my everything!"

It's rather difficult to explain, until you look at the facts. Nightmare of Eden is a quintessential science fiction story -- high concept (the CET machine), a morality play (the dangers of drug abuse), set in familiar trappings (in this case, on a space cruise liner), with plenty of action and adventure and subterfuge, not to mention comedy and drama in equal measures. There is some wonderful work by Tom Baker and Lalla Ward here, perhaps some of the best work they ever offered in Doctor Who. Case in point: the Doctor's justification to Captain Rigg (the delightful David Daker), in which he argues that he does indeed work for Galactic Salvage and Casualty despite their going out of business many years before -- "I wondered why I hadn't been paid." Compare that to the wonderful sequence at the end where the Doctor tells Tryst (Lewis Fiander, and yes, I agree his accent's more than a bit over the top) to get out of his sight; you can tell how truly pissed off the Doctor is at that moment, how sad and angry and bitter and furious and despondent the whole thing has made him feel. Lalla Ward equally exercises her acting chops with some terrific one liners -- I absolutely adore the "I'll need a screwdriver" line... contrary to some opinions that it's simply bad writing, I feel it's a tremendous send-up of Doctor Who writers who so often used the deus ex machina (the sonic screwdriver, K-9, the Time Lords) to get our heroes out of trouble. But far more often, Romana looks like she feels equally interested and bored, sometimes at the same time. "Oh, don't mind him, he just likes to irritate people"; has there ever been a more fundamentally truthful word out of the mouth of a Doctor Who companion? I think not.

The plot, if you haven't ever seen the story (in which case, you're really missing a treat) is quite complex for a Doctor Who story: a luxury cruise liner is sidelined when it collides with a cargo vessel. While the Doctor and Romana help to separate the ships, the Doctor uncovers a sinister link between a possible drug smuggling ring and a brilliant professor's newest project: the Continuous Event Transmuter, a device that studies and catalogues alien life by storing hologrammatic images on crystal recordings. However, it appears that the C.E.T. does far more than that, and may be responsible when hideous monsters start attacking the passengers and crew. Can the Doctor and Romana stop the bloodshed, find the man who keeps peering out at them from the projection, and stop the drug trade all at the same time? It's a lovely story about morality -- not only the dangers of drug addiction but also the rights of life, however savage and misunderstood, to continue its own existence. Even if they evolve into hideous bug-eyed beasts with flairs. Oh, my arms, my legs, my trousers...

Sure, there are lots of corridors -- all of them yellow. Yes, the passengers of the Empress seem to be wearing coveralls and goggles for no apparent reason, and all seem to be confined to one cramped room. (Maybe they're steerage, and the first class passengers are all having a brandy? Who knows?) Yes, it does seem that the Doctor embarks on his mission to separate the ships... four... different... times. It ultimately doesn't matter, because if you can get past some of the more dodgy aspects of its production (and let's face it, if you care about cheap yellow corridors, what the hell are you doing being a Doctor Who fan?), you can see this story for what it is: high adventure, filled with twists and turns. Even after you think you've got everything sorted, along comes this guy looking out at you through the C.E.T. projection. And we think he's bad, until we find out he's not. And his girlfriend's aboard. And... well, the bad guys turn out to be the good guys, and the good guy we like at the beginning isn't so good anymore. What is amazing is that at the end of the story, we honestly feel that while Tryst is a bad guy, HE doesn't feel he's done anything wrong. And so we're presented with a final morality issue, Tryst sacrificing human scruples (in this case, addiction to vraxoin) for the sake of preserving the Mandrels. 

Nightmare of Eden has just the right amount of comedy and pathos to make it a winner. I don't know why it's so misunderstood; maybe it's the flair monsters, the yellow walls, or the over-the-top Tryst performance. It does, however, boast a superb screenplay, some nifty acting on the part of regulars and guest actors alike, and holds up after repeated viewings. And I love it to pieces.